#15 Daniel Schulof – Healing Dogs with Keto

In this episode, Daniel talks about healing dogs with keto. The amount of grain in kibble may cause obesity, inflammation, and the same problems it does in humans.

Daniel Schulof is the author of “Dogs, Dog Food, and Dogma: The Silent Epidemic Killing America’s Dogs and the New Science That Could Save Your Best Friend’s Life,” the founder and CEO of KetoNatural Pet Foods and Varsity Pets, and an advocate for evidence-based pet care practices. He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, with his wife and three dogs, Nash, Kody and Lucy. In his spare time, Dan is a recreational ultra-marathoner, rock climber, and ski mountaineer.

KetoNatural Pet Foods Kickstarter Campaign

The campaign runs through December 23 and the proceeds of the campaign are being used to bring our ultra low-carb kibble product Ketona into the world.

KetoNatural Pet Foods website —

Where folks can learn more about what we are doing with the company.

Amazon page for Dogs, Dog Food, and Dogma.

Order Daniel’s book to really dive deep into this topic!

SHOWNOTES:

• In the year 2011 he left a law practice and started a company that would sell products for dogs over the internet
• The company’s name is “Varsity Pets”
• It sells active dog toys
• I came upon some facts that really kind of blew my mind, and so it has to do the prevalence of obesity among dogs in the western world today
• The best date out there said that more than half of dogs and cats in America today are either over-weight or obese
• Everyone seems to have these days that obesity is a bad condition and something you want to avoid and so it struck me how could this be happening
• So I basically started following the rabid whole intending only to try to improve my own dog’s health
• But the further I went down the rabid whole, the more it became clear to me that something’s was really wrong
• The kind of mainstream health and wellness positions in the veterinary community were arguing for why is many dogs are obese today did not make any sense
• And that just lead me to kind of to understand what the scientific reality did show with the practices of a typical western dog owner
  

WHY ARE MOST DOGS OVER-WEIGHT

• Dog owners just can say no
• They know obesity is bad, but they can’t exert the will power necessary to not over feed their animals more calories that they really need
• I don’t deny that it requires a certain matter of will power to say no when my dog wants to eat a bit more
• One, the science suggests that the calorie of carbohydrate in humans is more fattening than the calorie of other nutrients
• It is much easier to conduct feeding trials with dogs and cats than people.
  You don’t have to monitor people 24 hours a day. They keep it quite simple
• Over the past 15 years, there are half a dozen studies on the phenomenon. Nevertheless, it is not something that they mention
• The endocrinology in a dog or cat functions in a very similar way of a human body
• The very same thing that controls human insulin response are the same things that controls in dogs and cats and also the same things that cause blood sugar to rise
• It is very documented in the veterinary world and it is not in any kind of debate
• For me, basically what you have got is a system we used to train veterinarians in America. They have to understand all the entire animal kingdom in order to get their degrees
• And the nutritional side of it unfortunately gets a very short shrift in a typical veterinary curriculum
• They can graduate having never taken any formal training nutrition at all

• We have an obesity crisis among our pets in the United States and that’s because for more than 80% of pet owners in the United States, their food of choice is dry kibble product
• In many ways, they are really innovative and useful products. Dogs seem to love them, but they almost contain 40% to 60% carbohydrates.
• They are made with in similar process to baking a muffin.
  Basically, it requires just like a muffin requires a starch component to gelatinize to hold the stuff together, and so folks are using these technique for a long time before we kind of understood this
• So what you’ve got now is 85% of pet owners that feeding their dogs a diet were 40% to 60% carbohydrates comes from starch
• It is just a massive component and you would thing that there was a debate over carbohydrate and insulin obesity actually does govern the way that animals fatten or not in order for us to even remotely understand the true causes of this epidemic given the prevalence of carbohydrate western k-nine diet, but it is not. It is just something that we have been totally gloss over
• One of the reasons for that is just the way of the timing of development
• Much a little bit worrying of the aspect of the story is the major pet food companies played very significant role in shaping how the veterinary nutritional community looks at the helpfulness of carbohydrates
• In my experience, the pet food influence over veterinary nutrition is as bad as anything you’ll see in any of the sugar stories that you’ve read
• There’s no veterinary nutrition textbook that you can buy that was not produced by a major pet food company
• In the United States alone, you’re looking at something 50 billion a year spent on pets

SOLUTION

• My book is mostly focused on obesity, but it is not the case that I believe that, that is the only disease type of condition that is playing an outsized role when it comes to dogs
• If you believe like I do, that carbs are bad for dogs and what you have to do is reduce the carbohydrate content intake of your dog
• You have two options.
  One is get away for the kibble thing and you can feed your dog a raw food diet, or you can cook meat
• Carbohydrates are not considered as essential nutrients for dogs
• A raw diet feels more a lot natural than cooked product
• The problem is with them is there are a couple of reasons why you don’t see even more popular, one is that commercial products are very expensive
• So if you want to make a switch from a kibble product to a commercial raw food then you need to be prepared for your dog food budget
• Second option is to stay with kibbles but you have to feed them the lowest carbohydrate kibble
• Unfortunately the pet food industry has made it really hard for consumers to understand how much carbohydrates is really in their products
• So to a large degree, unless you have written a book about this, it is really hard to know which ones is truly low in carbohydrates
• In almost all cases, the producers uses potatoes instead
• I recently looked at the top 12 most popular grain free dried pet foods in the United States and they averaged about 33% of carbohydrate
• I am involved with a business that is trying to remedy that – Keto Natural Pet Foods
• We are basically trying to create the lowest carbohydrate kibble that’s ever been created as a way to address this problem to folks who just can’t afford a raw food diet
• Our first kibble product is called “Ketona”
• I’ve been feeding it for my dogs for the past 6 months
• The product has less than 8% carbohydrates
• If you make the switch from a grain free kibble to Ketona, you’re likely to remove 3 quarters of the carbohydrates from you dogs carbohydrate intake
• The results has been excellent
• You see very meaningful changes when it comes to relevant blood number, fasting blood sugar and fasting insulin

BENEFITS FOR PETS THAT ARE IN KETO DIET

• You have to reduce carbohydrate intake for your dog
• So one thing you see improvement to body composition
• It is not the case that you’re going to see weight-loss but what you’ll see is fat loss
• About 4 months ago my wife and I adopted an adult make Saint Bernard dog
• When we adopted him he was 165 pounds. Basically he was a fat dog
• He was not an energetic dog
• What we did is we put him on label recommended serving size of Ketona and 4 months later, he lost 45 pounds and is a very muscular dog
• My wife and I are Keto
• I believe in the science of it. I am very much a believer that that’s how I ought to eat, my wife feels the same way
• We fall off the wagon all the time, but there is no food in our house that is starchy or sugary
• I believe there are addictive qualities to sugar and starch that are uniquely pleasurable if you have the addiction established
• It can be tough walking out into a world where everybody is trying to pull you
• “The Keto Pet Sanctuary”
• What they do is to bring in dogs or cats as well that are already suffering from cancer and they put them on to a Ketogenic diet where they are feeding them raw products that are designed in their estimation to maximize ketosis
• I think there is an important part as we grow to understand the links of Keto diet and cancer treatment
• I feel like there is a significant aspect
• We have a singular commitment and it’s to improve the public the understanding the science relating to this issues
• Animals spent 99% of their genetic evolution just eating meat and we are compelled in that logic, and in the case of dogs and cats it is slam-dunk.

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