Carl Lenore: You know the show is called Super Human Radio but the reality is that part of the human experiences are pets—we have had pets by our side.  God knows how long since recorded history and dating back to when we had to get our information off of drawings and walls. One of those pets that has evolved along side of us are dogs. And interestingly enough, it seems like because we love our dogs, we give them all the same diseases that we have. How wonderful!

Cancer is one of those diseases. We are going to be talking about this today because it's really an important discussion and quite frankly just yesterday we did a show were scientists from Scandinavia came on and explain how actual dog breast tumors are aiding in the development of therapies for humans. I learned yesterday that dogs have the BRCA gene. Holy mackerel! Who knew, right? But unfortunately dogs are developing cancer at an amazing rate today.

My guests-- I have two guests today-- one is a returning guest, Dr. Karen Becker.   How are you doing Dr. Becker? 

Karen Becker:  Hey, great Carl!  Thanks for having me back.   

CL: Yes, yes, and of course the next person that needs no real introduction.  He is Rodney Habib.  He runs Planets Paws and he has done a lot to get the word out there about pet problems and pet food.  How are you doing Rodney?  

Rodney Habib: I am doing very well Carl.  And it is exciting to finally hook up, I know we’ve been talking about this for a very long time.

CL: Yeah and this is this is an exciting reason to do it too.

First of all and we are going to talk more about this later, you have a new documentary that is coming out. I first learned about Dr. Becker at the Keto conference and then had the pleasure of seeing her on the movie Pet Fooled and any of you listening to this show and haven't heard Dr. Becker’s interview, find it on our website because Pet Fooled should be a required movie to a documentary to watch before you actually buy a pet in my humble opinion because you can actually have a much healthier pet just by watching that movie first and then taking steps after that.

So yesterday I had a scientist on this show who works within the veterinary community in Scandinavia and they are actually using dog tissue samples to help further research into human cancers.  And I said to her yesterday that I was under the impression that dog of canine cancers were on the rise and she said , “No, I don’t know where you get your information from but that's not true.”  So who wants to take this question first, are dog canine cancers on the rise or have they’ve just always been really high for that pet?

RH: Yeah, you know is that one interesting question Carl and that of course is the question that we maybe-- when Dr. Becker and I traveled the world talking to over 50 PhD's, doctors, researchers, scientists all across the world.  You know this is something that also is an issue in the human world as well when you approach some of these MDs or some of these researchers and say, “Hey, is cancer on the rise in the human world as well?

It seems to be a sort of a controversial question depending on who exactly you’re asking.  I will tell you this from the people within the trenches, if you talk to these doctors, these veterinarians around the world, I probably have 450 hours of sound bites just from these people saying that their clinics are no longer practices of just standard disease and checkups.  These clinics have now become cancer clinics.  These doctors-- and this will be highlighted very soon-- have seen this epidemic not only rise but sore to the point that they even call the clinics cancer practices now. 

It is Carl, you know you and I-- I think I’d sent you an article yesterday, Dr. Carol Boshop(?) PhD, she wanted to find out you know is how much cancer is there actually in this animal world and when then she kept collected the data, out of any mammal that there was, the Tasmanian devil who we know that leads all categories in cancer rates and that is because they have this viral disease whether they bite each other, attack each other, or what have you this transmitted disease which the Tasmanian Devils should have lead all categories?  Well, the dog has surpassed that by many, many statistical levels.  So this is a worldwide epidemic for my option. 

CL: But Dr. Becker, it's understandable why the Tasmanian Devil may suffer from this cancer as Rodney has pointed out.  Do dogs in the wild develop cancers at the rates that dogs in captivity do?

KB: Great question!  So dogs in the wild-- all life—and not just all mammals Carl. I have an exotic animal practice.  I see cancer in snakes, I see cancer in birds, I see cancer-- and also this is my 32^nd years of federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator-- so I see cancers in wild birds, wild amphibians, wild reptiles, and certainly wild felines and canines as well. So certainly it can occur but hands down because wild animals can make—have more options to more choices, they can choose what they want to eat, they can choose to remove themselves from a toxic environment, they can sniff around so they can find a cleaner source of water.  That is not true with the animals that in essence Carl, we hold captive in our homes.

Most house cats never get a chance to leave the house and that is good.  We do can find them so they are safe, the downside is-- Carl, dogs and cats  that are domesticated, they don't have a choice over what they eat, the water they drink, if they are living with a smoker, they' can’t make independent choices to improve their overall health.  So if they are living with healthy humans, statistically speaking they will have less cancer, if they are living with unhealthy or uneducated humans, statistically speaking these animals have far more cancer because they are exposed to far more carcinogens.

CL: So we see this—you know one of my favorite things to talk about on the show when people thought to invoke genetics as being like you are hostage to your genetics.  And I love to say to people, “You know you get your genes from your parents but you also get your lifestyle from your parents, you learn to be sedentary, you learn to eat crap food, and we don't-- we can't tease that out and we can tease out the epigenetic effects. So what you are saying is we love our pets just as much as we love our children.  We make our children sick and we make our pet sick too.’ 

KB: Yeah, absolutely!  So if you are Iistening--

CL: Wait, wait, wait, there is an opinion here.  I want to hear this. 

KB: There is, there is, she wants to make sure that we don’t miss this point.  So absolutely if you are living a clean lifestyle, eating clean foods, if you're consuming toxin free water-- all of those variables can up or down regulate your genetic potential. And Carl when I went to vet school 25 years ago they told us that obviously cancer it has a genetic interplay and so there is not much we can do  but  that is the last part of the sentence is something we know now is not true. 

There is a lot we can do to affect our genome, there is ton we can do to affect our pet’s ability, to have a functional immune response so that the likelihood of them acquiring cancer regardless of their genetic predisposition can be either up or down regulated depending on how they live their lives, which you as a pet owner are ultimately responsible for.

CL:  Really, really, really?  And the last thing I am going to say about the whole genetic issue, if I jump in the Pacific Ocean and attempt to breathe water, I will drown.  So we can look at that in two ways of looking at that.  Number one is that I am an idiot.  Number two is I am genetically predisposed not to be able to breathe water.

You know when we get into this whole genetic thing, I tend to be an extremist from the standpoint of, yeah we have a genetic predisposition for a lots of things but what we do in our life is going to determine whether or not we triggered that to actually occur.  I have to believed from an outsider perspective and I may be oversimplifying this that listeners right now who have pets need to understand that you are either going to give your pet optimal health or you are going to give them a disease, it's completely up to you, completely up to you.  Is that too harsh of a statement?

RH: Well, you know that is another way to point it Carl.  Reality is that term “epigenetics”.  You know we know that in the dog world there is a sort of a cesspool of dirty genes if you may.  It is very fascinating and even Dr. Becker is the one that put me sort on of this course when I was trying to prepare for a TED talk.  Sadly that it didn't go in there because it was such a vast topic.

You start to look back at these animals in the 80s, excuse me, in the 1800s, these pugs that used to have noses that no longer have noses today because we wanted to breed the nose off of the dog because of the cosmetic looks of it.  What we've done to the backend of the German Shepherd? Sadly in this dog world, you know there's a lot of brother and sister that have been bred together so we know that these dogs have a stockpile of “bad genes” if you may, but that is a term “epigenetic” was what you're referring to is the fact that although they have a entire host of really lousy-- pardon for my French—“shitty genes”.  You have the ability to turn some of those genes on and off or delay the onset of the diseases that could be coming towards your pet with the lifestyle decisions that you make at home.

CL: Yeah, and I just wrote on the top of my-- I make scribbly notes as I am going along… domestication.  Because I wanted to ask you what role has humans driving domestication and obviously selection pressure because of the things that we like, like bulldogs that are going to die because we bred with legs so short, respiratory problems and so on.  How much of this is the selfishness of humans in the domestication and the driving selection pressure that we put on our pets?

KB: Well most of it.  Unfortunately Carl, from my vantage point, humans of course in our desire to have-- we have different unique likes, we want dogs with blue eyes, short hair, short legged dogs, wrinkly dogs, white dogs, in our desire to have dogs that are tea cup size, as well as super, super giant dogs, we have manipulated genetics not based on health and wellness.  We manipulated genetics primarily based on the phenotype or what dogs look like.  And I get it, it is cool, some people like the way certain dogs look and that is fine. 

The problem is it has come as a sacrifice of the gene pool and that is the heartbreak of many afunctional, proactive [unintelligible] like myself is that unfortunately we’ve really sacrifice looks for our DNA and our genetic diversity as well as our pet overall well-being.  And that is really, really difficult because we’ve got a lot of beautiful animals dying very young of preventable diseases ultimately because we have not focused on the genetic diversity and we’ve not focused on improving the overall DNA of our pets.

So it really is a perfect storm because as the negative gene pools have become more amplified through inappropriate breeding, we’ve also, of course, are feeding our pets in an inappropriate diet combined with the mountingly more toxic world.  It is the perfect storm for animals to begin having mitochondrial dysfunction which ultimately of course will change how well the genomes capable of preventing stable which ultimately can lead to abnormal cell growth down the road.

RH: Yeah, I’m your classic dude Carl and the person that actually-- were genetics are actually have a huge impact in my life.  You know many years ago, I wanted a white shepherd, my first dog.  My next two dogs that I have gotten I've rescued but my first dog was-- you know I remember watching that movie I Am Legend with Will Smith, man and what an incredible movie that was to have him roaming around the world with the German Shepherd.  I was like, “Hey man, I wanted a German Shepherd.”

I got that dog from birth Carl and you know with the knowledge that I have, I made early mistakes as most pet owners have done but flash forward two years after and the work that I've done and the things that I know today, I really focused very heavily on what was inside that dog’s bowl,  but genetics still today, I still have to face those.

My dog—  it is very interesting, I was reading an article yesterday, the number one reason for German Shepherds to be euthanized is because they can no longer walk-- the Schillers scolidal (?) issues, the hip dysplasia.  What I'm going through today with my shepherd which is called the degenerative myelopathy,  which is ALS for humans, I get to slowly sit back and watch my dog not be able to walk on a day-to-day basis. It is a horrible thing that you have to watch as a pet owner but again this is where those lousy genes kick in.

And Karen tells me all the time,  Dr. Becker, is like you held it off for as long as you have with the choices that you've made but you know that is again like what you said we bred for looks, I wanted a white shepherd because I just thought they were so beautiful but I never talk what was going to happen in the future in genetics came to play.

CL: I want to cover this one last question then we are going to take a break, you know we’ve talk-- this show will be in its12th year November of this year and over the years we've talked a lot about transgenerational effects of different things.  For instance, if a mother is in a starvation mode during the gestation period of a baby, that baby’s genes will change so that the expected environment that they're going to encounter is adjusted for that expected starvation and those transgenerational effects can stick for three or four generations before they can actually maybe change back again. 

We also see transgenerational effects being caused by chemicals in the environment and obviously the food we eat clearly has transgenerational effects.  A lot of the things that we see today with dogs and the rate of cancer, are these first of all transgenerational in that even if we'd started-- pet owners really said, “Ok, I’m going to buy the dog that can breed this because it's cute or that the 1/2 pound teacup Yorkie that can't stand on its own.” And they started to really do good smart things to further the health of pets and they started to do the things as far as foods going on its own.  Will it take generations for what we have done to our dogs to actually unravel?

RH: Yes, what an excellent question.  You know when I was in a room with the world-renowned pet food formulator, Steve Brown, he had dropped like a landslide of studies on to me going back exactly what you're asking.  There was a beautiful example of what your question which would be a Swedish study that was done in Sweden where they would take a pregnant mom and what they fed her at that point affected those babies after their birth. 

You know what they were doing in that study Carl, which was fascinating, was they were feeding these animals processed foods.  So they are feeding the pregnant moms processed food before the birth of the babies and they found that if they-- on an opposite panel, the pregnant moms that were fed fresh food in a comparison of those babies, the babies that were fed processed food had double their risk of developing environmental allergies or just allergies per se or autoimmune issues just because what you fed the mother.

And the data that he was showing me, which will also be revealed in this documentary, was the fact that through three generations there plays an effect with what you do there.  It is a massive, massive problem.  Something that we’re not even addressing or highlighting today these effects of hey, look, you’re going to go out, you're going to adopt a dog from a certain breeder and Breeder A will tell you, “Well, I’m doing this right now.”  But some of those questions we don't ask is, “What did you do two breeds ago? Two generations I should say, sorry ago, with that dog before making those decisions.

CL: I want to take a break and when we come back I want to start to delve into the documentary and I also want to dovetail back to Pet Fooled because the pet food industry is at the root of much of the disease we see in pets and the owners don't realized this, they are well-meaning owners. 

A good friend of mine, Lou Donofrio, who lives in Florida, who is probably listening to today’s show live and he has a love for these mastiffs and they are beautiful dogs.  He told me today after seeing the post,  he said, “The last three dogs I’ve had to put down, I’d have to put them down because of cancer.”  And I said, “Did you see the movie Pet Fooled?” And he said, “No, should I watch it?”  And it's almost bittersweet to say, “Yes, you should watch it.”, because he is going to watch it and go, “Oh, my God.  I could've probably avoided getting my dog sick had I’ve known about the pet food industry.” 

So I want to come back and talk about that.  I want to talk about the upcoming documentary.  We’re talking right now with Rodney Habib and Dr. Karen Becker.  This is Super Human Radio, superhumanradio.net.  Stay tuned, will be right back.

Carl Lenore: Welcome back.  We are talking with Rodney Habib and Dr. Karen Becker.  We are getting a little feedback all of a sudden, I don’t know where it is coming from.   We got too many technologies going on, we have video and… anyway we are now about to discuss an upcoming documentary.  Tell us about the documentary, when does it come out and what are we going to learn in it?

Rodney Habib: Yeah, that is sort of the anticipated question right now worldwide.  So Dr. Becker and I really gearing up here. So Carl, ideally we’re going to have this in the hands of the distributor probably by mid September and our hopes are that this will be out globally by early-- late September or early October.

CL: Okay, and are we going to hit or beat that drum again about the problem with pet food in general in this documentary?

RH: You want me to take it?  So, you know this documentary when we seat back and reflect on it Carl, Dr. Becker and I wanted be the first to be able to bring the metabolic theory of cancer to the limelight… to the to the pet world.  This is something that right now in the human world everybody sort of talking about, I'm sure out of the million guests that you brought on the metabolic theory of cancer is no mystery but in our world it hasn’t been brought to light.  so we really want to be able to bring that out and focus on cancer being a metabolic theory and then as far as the pet food goes-- you know we have to address why pet food-- the issues within pet food, the issues within the industry,  why they don't work when you have a pet with cancer?

Karen Becker: And I think along that same vein Cark, we can't address the whole topic of cancer regardless if you think it's genetic or metabolic or a combination of both. We can’t discuss it without discussing cancer’s primary fuel source which is glucose.   And we can’t discuss and we really can’t have a conversation about glucose when it comes to dogs and cats without entertaining at least a brief conversation about the pet food industry because the pet food industry as it stands was a 100% founded off of this cereal industry or the grain industry and we know that even to this day the vast majority, 96% of pet foods out there in the market contain at least 30 to 60% starch which ultimately breaks down into sugar which will obviously be the whole host of inflammatory processes including cancer.

CL: Well and Rodney, you have something on your wall right now because I guess someone is searching for people to who had fed their dogs raw food to come forth and say whether or not they’ve been sickened by raw food because I guess the authorities now say, “Hey don't feed your dog raw food, it is bad.” and I chimed in on that thread. 

First of all, not that I'm a dog but I have been told I am by someone. I eat raw beef, I eat raw fish, I eat raw eggs, and I have been doing it for couple decades now, I've never gotten sick from them but forget that.  Whose telling the wolves and the coydogs not to eat raw food? And when is the last time a farmer came out of his house and went, “Those damn dogs ate all my wheat again.”

RH: Yeah, yeah.  This is the wonky world that we live in here in the pet world.  Reality is if you and go talk to your mother and you talk to your grandmother about feeding something from your refrigerator fresh, it seems like the right thing to do but sadly in our world than in the pet world going to your refrigerator is a horrible, horrible mistake and your animal should be fed packaged foods that could sit on a shelf for an eternity with no decay. 

This is the problem Carl that the world that we lived in. you know we were almost 50 years behind of what you're talking about today and we’re trying to flash forward that as quickly as possible.  So sadly when it comes to feeding a dog-- a species appropriate or a cat, a species biologically appropriate meal and that would be something that came out of the refrigerators, something to mimic what they were eating and their ancestors ate, that is blasphemy today. It is heresy. 

You can’t-- there is a  huge quandary right now, you know feeding these animals these types of foods.  What about the bacteria? What about the E. coli? What about the salmonella?  You’ve got marketing scares right now all over the world, scaring the life out of you if you are a first time pet owner.   

So that caught—that post  that you saw on the wall, that is coming out of Finland.  That is what we loved about Finland.  Dr. Becker and I had to jump on a plane and travel halfway across the world to bring the data to pet owners today because Finland are the only people that are fearless, they have taken that food pyramid as you know in the human world and flip that upside down.

CL: Yes, they ate a lot of fat, they ate a lot of protein. Yeah.

RH: Absolutely and now that's what they're doing in the pet world.  So what you're seeing now these people want to dispel some of these myths and you know a lot of the media today are really heavily responsible for that. And that is I believed the backlash of what we seen what the BBC recently did from London where they posted that viral video to scare the hell out of pet owners showing the salmonella and the contamination that come from raw meats.

CL: So and I come back to the same thing.  Well first of all let me tell you this when I was in my early teens-- my late teens beginning to getting my 20s I was like you Rodney, I had this dream of having a dog--, a boy and his dog there is something magical about it, right?

So I hunted back then and I want a hunting dog and I did a lot of research and I learned about the Hungarian vizsla.  I love the dog.  His name was Theron because from Greek mythology Theron was a hunter who was out hunting when a village was pillaged and all the men were killed.  So he had to hunt every single day to feed the entire village of women and children.  So he had to become a really good hunter and I thought well I’m getting a hunting dog and that's an appropriate name. 

Well when I bought Theron from John and Bayba Norton who were breeders up in upstate New York, they made me promise that I would only feed Theron raw chopped meat and cooked rice.  This is 1979. I’ll be 59,  I just turned 59.  So I fed Theron raw chopped meat and cooked rice every single day for his meals and Theron lived to be 16 years old and looked like a puppy for the entire 16 years and he never got sick eating raw chopped meat.

Maybe because I'm Italian and my mother used to make meatballs, my father would stick his fingers in there and eat a bunch of raw chopped meat and she smacked him on the hand and say, “Stopped! I got to cook them first.”  I was raised that raw meat isn't really a dangerous thing if it's handled properly, if you know where it came from. And I come back to the same thing that I said before, why aren’t the wolves and the coydogs getting sick when they eat a chicken or a bird or even a pisacarian(?) that was recently killed and they know it's-- they can tell it's safe to eat? 

Now, the question comes to you Dr. Becker, is there the potential-- to play the devil's advocate-- is there the potential that through domestication, our domesticated pets are not capable of eating raw meats because their stomach acid is lower through evolution or something like that?

KB: So Carl, absolutely through our unnatural genetic manipulation that we have in the last 400 years that we have really focused on in terms of creating beautiful but not necessarily genetically healthy dogs. Absolutely domestication has done a lot of things but one of the things that we've done is that we’ve created a whole host of diseases because of our our genetic manipulation. 

That being said, dogs are still 99% related to their wild ancestors but I will tell you as a licensed meat inspector, absolutely there can be contaminants found within the human meat industry, absolutely there is a potential.  So I am thankful that you have not gotten sick from you eating raw meat or eggs but if you were to culture which batch per batch of course the USDA has built in safety food checks to help reduce the potential of people becoming ill because of foodborne illnesses coming out of the meat industry, but that being said you are a different species than dogs.  Dogs lick their butt and eat poo right?  So you--- Yes.

CL: I know.  I'm actually jealous.

KB: Yes and let me tell they have been doing that for thousands and thousands of year and they are genetically set-up to handle that bacteria load.  What happens with domesticated pets Carl is if we were nourishing them the way that we were supposed to be, which if we were trying to emulate an ancestral diet to the best of our ability, if we were not feeding entirely processed foods that have been really chemically altered from the processing techniques, not to mention the quality of the raw materials going into the average pet food. 

By feeding such inappropriate foods, what happens Carl is we not only modulate the stomach pH, we increased the stomach pH which naturally reduces the dog’s GI defenses but in turn we create a whole host of inflammatory small intestinal diseases that makes dog have a—their GI tract is not as strong and resilient as it should because of the foods that we’ve been feeding in the lifestyle that our dogs are thrown into.

So because our domesticated dogs may not be as gastrointestinally resilient as their wild counterparts, what I have found all dogs can handle their evolutionary diet.  Absolutely!  But how quickly we wean them on to their evolutionary diet and whether we do things to help with leaky gut or dysbiosis, whether we need to add some probiotics to their  digestive enzymes to help regulate their pancreatic secretion of enzymes until their body is capable of coping with it. 

Sometimes I used butane and other gastric acid modulators to help dogs re-create a very healthy gastric pH. Sometimes we have to help these poor blessed souls that have been so dietarily abused from commercially available pet foods.  Sometimes we have to help their bodies get back in line to what they were evolutionally meet to consume and that takes an educated veterinarian within the raw foods space to be able to coach a patient through that process.

CL: We are going to take a break and we are going to come back and talk specifically about the topic at hand which is cancer and dogs but for those of you who are listening to today’s show solely because we are talking about pets and you’ve never heard it before, I'm proud to say that last year we actually did a  show on cupafadia(?) which is the-- what dogs do when they lick at other dog’s butt because I started thinking to myself, we are doing all this work with the micro biome and with fecal implants and now they’ve actually purified some of these microbes and they are enterically coating them so you—and I am thinking of myself, you know what humans probably lick butt before we became refined too.  Maybe it is something that's missing and we actually did a show about that.  As bizarre as that sounds because when we start to talk about these issues—these things we are learning about-- the gut microbe biome.  We know that.  We are missing a lot of microbes that we used to have many, many, many thousands of years ago.

KB: Processed food.  Yeah and I knew that is one of the things-- just briefly we can talk about it after the break is the fact that animals eating processed food have a very limited micro biome and that the more nutritional diversity that we really intentionally aimed at helping to help our dogs acquire the better more resilient their GI tracks and through their entire immune system.

CL: We are going to take a break and when we come back I’m going to start jumping deeper into the whole cancer-- canine cancer issues.  Stayed tuned, we’ll be right back with more Super Human Radio.

Carl Lenore: Welcome back. We are talking with Rodney Habib and Dr. Karen Becker about the… well now I am going to get deeper into the whole cancer thing.  There is that feedback. I don’t know where it comes from?  It comes and it goes.  There it goes.  It is gone.

So how much of what's emerging now in human cancer therapies as it comes from nutritional therapies is influencing what we can do for our dogs now and especially when we talk about this we have to talk about the KetoPet Sanctuary, right?

Rodney Habib: Yeah, you know the KetoPet Sanctuary Carl was probably is the most impactful thing that had probably happened to myself. I don't want to speak on the behalf of Dr. Karen Becker but it literally changed the entire way I look at things and the way I perceived food today. 

The KetoPet Sanctuary is-- for people that aren’t familiar to or your listeners-- is the sort of the groundbreaking sanctuary out of-- in Texas that brings in animals that are literally going to be euthanized. These animals that come from rescue shelters that are just plagued with cancer.  They bring them into their facilities, they show these animals love, they give them a second chance, and what I got to experienced Carl was what these guys were doing on a groundbreaking level when it came to the metabolic theory of cancer and how they were reversing, halting, and stopping cancer in these sheltered dogs. 

It literally floored me and opened up a whole new chapter in my life. I remember Dr. Becker and I like leaving KetoPets.  Literally it was midnight walking up and down the streets thinking we have to tell the world what we are seeing here.

CL: You know I've actually—I meanfirst of all Ron Penna doesn't like publicity at all but I have to commend him and the folks at Quest—Shannon, his wife and also Daniel Orrego.  I’ve been with Daniel Orrego on business trips where he's taking phone calls from pet owners who were getting ready to euthanize their dogs and he's trying to explain to them that if you give us the dog, will bring to Texas, the dog will be treated so well and the quality of care and that sorts of stuff. 

I'm very familiar with what goes on just to recruit people to say, “Okay, I’m not going to put my dog down. I'll let you guys take a shot at it.”  And it's really amazing because of the way I had the scientist on yesterday, Dr. Makinen from Sweden, who's telling us about how they are using dog tissue to better understand human cancer. 

What happened at the KetoPet Sanctuary has influenced human cancer therapies-- nutritional therapies with places like Cedars-Sinai and other places.  That facility is having such far reaching effects not only for pets but for the human owners as well.  It is just amazing what comes out with that.

Karen Becker: I am right there with you Carl.  We have to just stop for 2 minutes and say thank you from the bottom of our hearts, all of us, because Ron and Shannon, Daniel, the entire Quest and KetoPet team. They are all dog lovers so of course they did this because they love dogs but the truth of the matter is they have a burning desire to see the role of nutrition playing into human cancers. 

So yes they dropped $6 million of their own money into saving terminal Stage IV cancer dogs and for that Rodney and I are forever thankful because they’ve changed our lives because of that gracious and kind desire to spend a lot of money seeing if indeed food can be used as a form of medicine. But the cool thing is that because dog and human cancers really—they were really plagued  by the same of types of cancers-- man and beast both-- that using dogs as a model for human cancers because dogs live and die in let us just say 15 years. 

KetoPets they are able to track these dogs after they have been cured and they go back to their homes or they are forever living in this beautiful sanctuary enjoying a cancer free life.  They’re tracking these dogs to the end of their lives which is really the first time this has ever been done.  In veterinary medicine are cancer trials maybe goes 6 weeks, maybe 3 months,  hardly any more than a couple of years.  So, yes for tracking short cancer therapies in a short window of time.

KetoPets is really the first private institution tracking the dog’s entire life during treatment and then of course what happens after treatment.  Most importantly they are utilizing dietary intervention to dramatically shift the metabolism dogs which is indeed having a profound effect on not only how quickly the cancer is resolving but how long that these dogs are staying in remission.  And the human world benefitting from that but of course so many dogs have benefitted as well. 

CL: Well and I want to ask you--  Go ahead Rodney, go ahead.

RH: Yeah, you know just to go off of what Dr. Becker has just said.  The big thing here Carl is that not only is the work that they are doing ever so important but what they're about to highlight is literally going to shift the entire pet food industry as a whole. 

To go back to answer your question when you asked me earlier, does this-- Are you going to be following the same sort of scheme as Pet Fooled? Pet Fooled brilliantly laid out to the entire world how food is being made, how people should be more conscious of when they're making their decisions and how marketing plays a giant role in purchasing decisions. 

So Cole Harrington, the director, really nailed that epically well.  What we want to do is that we want to be able to show why this can't work.  KetoPets has been able to through their research, they’ve tried different types of foods trying to get these dogs into what's called ketosis, these ketogenic diet, these lifestyle of disciplines if you may, and the challenges here are that when you try to get an animal into this nutritional state of ketosis using a diet that could be anywhere between 50 to 70% carbohydrate is virtually impossible.

KB: It is impossible.

RH: And this is the problem right now that you know as a pet owner, the people that are listening to this that have a dog with cancer.  You know it is funny because no matter how many times you tried to explain to them, well is there a brand or a food that I could buy that could help my dog into ketosis?  What can I go buy and just put a scoop in a bowl and give it to my animal to help stop or reverse this cancer and the challenges? I don't think it can be done.

CL: Well and I want I to also underscore something to the listeners.  I know of dogs that went to KetoPet Sanctuary, will put into complete remission, tumors shrunk, some disappeared, someone into what they call I guess suspended animation where they just shrunk and they didn’t progress any longer, and the dogs by and large were able to live out there predetermined normal lives.

They were given back to the to the owners, the owners fed them the keto diet for a while and then after a while and they started feeding and the dog died… the dog died of cancer like a year later.  Oh no, the dog got the cancer again. 

So this-- it’s undeniable that the dietary intervention is what's working because not only do we see it work with the dogs that stay on it long-term but we see the dogs that go home and they, “Oh, we’ll just feed them this dog food” and the dog dies of cancer again… the cancer comes back.  You know what I'm talking about right?

RH: Yeah, you know and this was a brilliant sound bite that we got from Ron Penna.  You know he's like the reason why this has worked successfully with dogs is because the dogs don’t cheat.  The dogs don’t get up in the middle of midnight, getting in their car and drive out to McDonald's and grab that burger and fries when they are having those cravings.  You see that is the issue is self-discipline.  It is the pet owner has to be 100% completely on board and understand what is happening metabolically in their pet.

Dr. Becker and I, when we sat down Daniel Orrego, part of a-- the president over there at Keto who flew down here to Nova Scotia to help us film over the last course of the week.  When we sit down in our little bubble here in my gym, we came up with this Facebook Live idea that we haven't released yet. 

You know pet food manufacturers are very-- let us say in tuned about telling you why they’ve used the ingredients they used and all the different types of vitamins and nutrients,  Like let us say corn for instance being a high source of protein and having a giant amino acid.  A big profile-- yes, thank you. You fill me out on that one. But what we don't talk about is metabolically what happens to our pets once they consumed that corn, once they consumed that food?

And so what we’re not using today Carl in the animal world-- and this is very new to me but is not new to of course like veterinarians like Dr. Becker and Daniel in KetoPets and everybody down there-- is blood glucose level.  What does it mean when you prick your dog and you're getting a number showing up on that screen?  What is it doing long-term? 

You and I at the metabolic conference that we’re have a conversation on that word “emtor(?)”, right? And what is happening when we are cell replicating at a 150,000 miles an hour?  And so these are things that pet owners today, these are the better questions that we hope that inspire the pet owners to be asking of their manufacturer, of their veterinarians, whoever it is when you have a dog that is sick or not even sick when you're just trying to extend their life spans.

CL: I want to take our last commercial break and when we come back, I have 2 questions.  The first one, I want to talk about is if things could change, how should they change especially from the pet food manufacturing side?  And then I want to invoke two names from yesteryear and whether or not we have forgotten that they were right, that is Dr. Francis Pottinger and I don't member Dr. Price's first name but they did they did research on cats back in the day.  We’ll talk about that when we come back. So stay tuned, you are listening to Super Human Radio, superhumanradio.net.  Will be right back.

Carl Lenore: I realized it could be a little confusing when you are hearing the superhumanradio.com on some of the spots and I am telling you it’s superhumanradio.net.  We just recently after 11 years lost our domain, it is coming back, it's a whole court battle blah, blah, blah, messy thing but the bottom line is the website is superhumanradio.net. We have to get those spots updated, this just happened in the past couple of weeks so but we are trying to keep on moving forward and doing the good work and spreading the word.  We got Rodney Habib and Dr. Karen Becker on. 

For those of you who never watched the documentary Pet Fooled, it is on Netflix.  If you own a pet and you don't watch that documentary, I say shame on you.  Shame on you because you have an opportunity to change the trajectory of your pet’s health immediately and moving forward and it all resides in that movie—in the documentary and the documentary that will be coming out shortly.  How can people track and stay on top of this for when you release your documentary Rodney?

Rodney Habib: Yeah Carl, it will be the dogcancerseries.com and of course it would be on Dr. Karen Becker's website, her Facebook page, and Planet Paws as well… the Facebook page that we had.  So we are really trying to extend it to as many platforms as we can and globally to as many. This is going to be offered Carl to almost everybody that would have a social media page to help sort of get this message out.

CL: And that's what it's going to take, it's going to take almost a carpet bomb of grassroots effort because there are big powers at the home of the dog food and pet food industry in general.  And you know every day becomes more and more evident that people eat a lot of processed foods.  They get all sorts of diseases including cancers.  And so as humans we have choices.  Well I am not going to eat processed foods, I’m going to buy some salad, I am going to buy some vegetables, I am going to a nice cut of beef or a piece of salmon.  I’m going to eat good food, clean food-- but our pets don't have that option because everything you bought for your pet is in fact a processed food that they would never designed to eat. 

So let's imagine that this effort, this documentary that comes out, it explodes, it goes—a new word has to be developed because viral doesn't do it. And what happens? What do the pet food manufacturers do, what do the Purinas and all the manufacturers out there that have literally billions of dollars at stake? How do they turn on a dime?

RH: You know let me say this-- this documentary is going to force a shift in the industry.  That's how confident I am about this documentary because I'm confident in the people that share these messages on a daily basis.  We put out only three tiny trailers with over 10 million views on them.  This is an issue Carl that should have happened.  This should have been addressed years, decades ago. 

We have a problem in the industry because an industry as a processing system and they have a system that they tried to follow and nobody can break the ties of that system.  You have these bags of foods that have to be produced in a certain way.  You have an extruder that is going to produce these little pellets in a bag that needs starch to be able to bind it together. 

And so when we got back—there are two brilliant people that really, really-- I can't say enough about these two people and probably they are too big, two giant heroes in our documentary and that is because of the good people of KetoPets who see us a way would be Dr. Thomas Seyfried from USF and of course your good friend Dr. Dominic D’Agostino from USF.  Sorry, Dr. Seyfried from Boston College. 

You know both of these pioneers have highlighted the issue today.  When you have a high carbohydrate diet laden with high-fat or if you just even have a high carbohydrate diet in general, what those high blood glucose levels will do when you got a tumor that's just hanging around in your dog waiting for an energy source? 

The issue right now today in the pet food industry Carl is they can’t make these foods-- you know you have to switch the fuel source in your animal. Are you going to burn sugar for fat or are you going to-- excuse are you going to burn sugar for energy or are you going to burn fat for energy?  You can't make these bags of food that high in fat because if you ever ate a whole or something pops in that bag that bag is going to go so rancid on you.  That is not a shelf stable product at that point and it's going be extremely dangerous.   So you’re forced as a pet food manufacturer to make it a high sugar diet. 

Well that right now is the giant elephant in the room.  The industry after this documentary in our hopes is going to see this and better themselves as far as there processing techniques because the way they are going now and the cancer rate which you talk to some integrative veterinarians out there will tell you that 1 in 1.65 dogs.  It’s not if my dog only gets a cancer… is when is my dog going to get a cancer?  And the way the industry is going now is only feeding that cancer.

CL: So Dr. Becker, you know this industry, you are a veterinarian.  We know that the veterinarians really are kind of taken hostage by the dog food manufacturers.  What did you see the next iteration of pet food looking like?  Is it simply there is no way to do this from a business category standpoint, people will just going to have to go to their butcher and buy scrap meat and feed their dogs raw foods from home or is it-- then you talk about someone who has actually-- or is it a Darwin or something like that, that has a product now?

Karen Becker: Yes, well a bunch of great questions.  First of all Carl,  it is not so much that the veterinarians are taking hostage, it is veterinarians are so blessedly clueless about nutrition and it is just me defending my own profession, it's not that were idiots.  In veterinary school, we actually-- some people can escape through eight years of education, getting a doctorate degree, and having a nutrition class as being optional at some veterinary schools, which means you can graduate never having required small animal nutrition which is shocking but true. 

Those of us that do—those of us that had required nutrition, many of those classes were taught by the pet food representatives.  We weren’t taught by board-certified clinical nutritionist that had an unbiased opinion.  We were actually taught by pet food reps.   

Needless to say, we graduate with very little foundational education when it comes to appropriate nutrition.  And then of course we end up having to sell processed pet food and when clients come to us and say, “Hey, I am not really interested, I want to do more of a homemade fresh food diet” because veterinarians aren’t giving the tools to know how to even balanced those diets.  We just generally speaking, we tend to recommend our clients not to do that. 

Then you have organizations like the ABMA saying don’t do homemade food. I bet your dog would be the healthiest if you only feed them an entirely processed diet from birth to death.  Never consider a home preparing for your dog because we don’t think you are smart enough. 

So when you have veterinarians saying don’t do homemade species appropriate diets and you have industry organizations saying it and you have a $60 billion pet food industry saying don’t do it, it is really hard for pet parents to become empowered enough to want to be able to take the plunge and do a species appropriate balance fresh food diet from home because they don’t have guidance, they don’t have tools, they don’t have recipes to follow and they have their veterinarian not supporting them.  So it is a really hard goal.  How I think we are going to come out of this?

And within the pet food industry itself Carl, they are going to watch this just like they watched Pet Fooled and here are the three options.   They can bash it, which is going to happen undoubtedly. 

They can B, produced a product to fulfill a niche-- and we are actually already seeing that.  We are already seeing a half a dozen pet food companies producing keto diets because instead of bashing, if they are like this is a nice to see a marketing opportunity where we can have a more species appropriate diet and instead of bashing this I am going to provide a product, which Rodney and I think are wonderful because instead of contributing to the problem, they are providing a solution. So commercially available ketogenic pet foods will absolutely be available within the next 24 months and we loved that. So at least the industry-- some players in the industry are beginning to think about contributing positively by producing more species appropriate foods.

The third option is going to be what every veterinarian and most of the pet food industry is going to say which is, “That was really interesting.  We are waiting for six double blind placebo controlled studies to be released and until we can see studies Carl we don’t believed it. Nice job Rodney, beautiful documentary, we need the papers in order to substantiate your viewpoint.”  And that is what we are left with is my entire industry saying, “Until we can get a bunch of papers, I am sorry this is fascinating but we are unable to accept it as science, right?”

 

CL: But meanwhile you have a multitude of an equals one events taking place out there that show that this works,  I mean there was a-- the talk that Dr.-- and Seyfried has been on the show a few times over the course of years.  The talk that he did recently with the dog that had the tumor under his nose and in 120 days the tumor went away without chemo or radiation. I mean how can you ignore that?  How can you ignore that?

KB: Wonder(?) one.  And so you have to hit(?) it around the head.  This entire movement Carl is not only just grassroots,  it is one person being touched and effective because they actually—“they” not their veterinarians-- they actually were not only influential in saving their dogs like their changed of diet halted, slowed, or reversed their dog’s cancer and they not only are believer-- you don’t have to convince them of anything.  They have convinced themselves.  So they are on fire and they’re passionate about helping other people save their dog’s life.

So Rodney and I have through this last year, we bumped into dozens and dozens of people who were forever changed because they have single handedly impacted their own dog’s health though better lifestyle choices that they certainly didn’t get from the industry , they didn’t get from their veterinarians.  That is exactly how this movement is going to go forward until KetoPets can release lifetime studies of 15 years of research, which will come, but it is going to be a little bit of time before those studies are out. 

How this is going to change your dog’s health?  Is you are going to hear this information, you are going to make a homemade balanced ketogenic diet, and you yourself will witness the transformative of facts of feeding a healing diet to your dog, and then you will stand on a mountain top and tell the world.  And that is exactly what this documentary is going to do as well.

CL: You know I’ve been saying for probably the past six or seven years now on this show that the new evolutionary selection pressure is where you get your information from.  That will determine—I am talking about humans first of all here that will determine your health and your health span and your life span and your children's health and health span-- and that's what's happening with pets as well now.  If you choose to get your information from the mainstream, you'll keep feeding your dog or cat the processed food and your cat or dog will not have the quality of health and life that they could've have had, had you chosen the other message about-- and folks it makes more sense.

Nobody was cooking food for dogs when they lived in the wild.  They ran an animal down, they ate the viscera first-- I know, I used to hunt. I used to find deers that were rundown by coydogs.  They eat the viscera first, they all the organ meat first, and they work on the haunches and the back. I mean no one is cooking that food for these dogs and they lived fine… they lived fine. 

The last thing I want to mention here is every time we talk about something it was so myopic and we have such short memories span and that is part of the problem of the human condition.  Every time we talk about something, I can go back and find the point in history 50, 70, 80 years ago were someone said this but no one paid attention.  Didn’t Dr. Francis Pottinger proved this with his work with cats and raw foods, raw dairy? Didn’t he do this already?

KB: Yup, both Weston Price and Dr. Pottinger both very clearly proved with some great experiments that you can actually destroy a dog and cat’s genetics within 3 generations from feeding processed foods and you can restore their health but it took many, many, many more generations. 

Now those studies were of course done in their early 1900s and of course my entire profession says, “Well, that you know that was not double blind placebo controlled so we are not going to take that into account.”  So my profession has entirely discounted the work of Weston Price and Dr. Pottinger because of course they want to be able to replicate it and there is no money.  There is absolutely no money and better their research.  So these studies will never be done.

But the great thing is Carl we’re on a platform-- actually Rodney-- Rodney is the largest social media page per pet lovers in the world.  The great thing is you don’t have to be a top tier researcher, you don’t have to be a veterinarian, you can actually be an overwhelmingly passionately pet parent like Rodney is and be center stage around the world to get a message out that you genuinely believed in and this is part of the blessing of living in this day and age is--

RH: Yes and absolutely and that is the power Carl, as you know the power of social media.  I mean it has the ability to connect the world together.  Look, this documentary is for first and foremost for every pet owner on this planet, whether you’re a veterinarian, whether you’re a researcher, whether you're a doctor.

We traveled the world because we also love science.  We are giant science junkies.  We went to every single scientist out there is.  This documentary is 99.5% scientists.  So we will bring you the science but all of these scientists are also dog lovers and pet owners.  You know it didn't matter whether we talked to Dom or it didn't matter whether we talked to Seyfried.  All of these people, they had dogs and so they actually cared and said, “Come on into our lab, let us sit down, let us talk to you.”   But we also went to oncologists.  We traveled throughout America and took the top veterinary oncologists in the US to also talk about this issue. 

So we are not going to-- you know we know, we know where the [we call soon(?)] in this documentary series could be and we are making sure that we’ve got everything padded properly so we can get it from every angle that there is.  And whether the industry itself decides to change, decides to improve, the hopes are to inspire them but ultimately the end of the day, my care, my concern is with my fellow pet owners and their pets, and having their pets live to be 30, like Maggie that comes out of Australia because we know that dogs have the ability to live 30.  We know that cats have the ability to live their late 30s.  However statistics today show that it's only 10 or 12 and that is what I won't stand for and I’m sure there is a million that stand behind me as pet owners that won’t stand for that as well.

 

CL: Yeah, I love it. I love it.  And I want to do whatever I can do with this show to help the cause and I actually just made a note. I'm going to write the pope later today and have you two beatified. St. Francis move over, Dr. Karen Becker and Rodney Habib, the new patron of saints of pets. I think it is wonderful and thank you so much for making time to come on the show today. I want to plug Dr. Becker's website again please. 

KB: healthypets.mercola.com

CL: Okay, healthypets.mercola.com.  And Rodney, people can reach you on the Facebook page for Planet Paws.  You also have a website for Planet Paws?

RH: Yes, it is planetpaws.ca.  Whether it’s Facebook or whether it's the website but I’m a huge Facebook junkie and so Planet Paws on Facebook will probably be the best place for updated information.

CL: Folks, listen.  You have a chance, you love your pets.  I know I have friends who haven’t been able to have children.  Their pets are their children.  And you would not poison your children knowingly.  Well, if you are feeding your pets especially dogs some sort of kibble, I'm telling you,  you are not going to like me after I say this, but you are poisoning your child, okay?  And so get with the program, watch the movie Pet Fooled, visit the website, visit the Facebook page, become part of the movement.  We don't have to wait for the industry, we can drive the industry.  Listen, thanks so much for being on the show today.

KB: Thanks Carl. 

RH: Carl, thanks for having us.

CL: Talk to you later and that is all for today.  That was a lot for everybody to absorb. Pass the word, get the show out there, let your friends know more about this. We’ll see you tomorrow for more Super Human Radio.  Thank you for listening.