298. Dr. Judy Morgan: What Kibble Does to Your Dog's Liver

20:06Gary Brecka:Sure. But you don't know until you start looking at it and learning. So we're doing so many things wrong. If you know me, you know I don't recommend anything I haven't personally tested. That's not a marketing line. That's just how I operate. I've been on the road my entire career. Different time zones, brutal schedules, no margin for days off. and so I'm constantly testing what actually works in my own body. NAD was something I keep coming back to. It's the molecule your cells use to produce energy and repair and it declines faster than most people realize. When I found Symbiotica's liposomal NAD, the absorption technology is what got my attention.

20:43Gary Brecka:I tested it, I felt it, and it's been in my bag ever since. I'm always evolving what I put in my body and this one has stayed on the list. I'm genuinely excited for you to experience it. This is the standard we hold every product to before it even reaches you. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast. Well, you know, I think about, I grew up on a farm. We had a 300 acre tobacco farm. Nice. And so our dogs were outside a lot. And they were well cared for. But when I think back about what we fed them at that time, we had hunting dogs. My parents actually rescued old English mastiffs, which are massive, massive dogs.

21:21They're sweethearts, but they are huge animals. Some of the males would get well over 200 pounds.

21:26Gary Brecka:Oh, yeah. But we had these 30-gallon aluminum pins in the basement with a little lid. It didn't really seal. It just went on the top so spiders wouldn't get in there. And then I had a big scoop and a huge bowl. And twice a day I would go out and I would scoop this up and dump it in the bowl. and you know thinking back like how many weeks it probably took me to get to the bottom of that bin and you know I can still remember as a kid getting to the bottom of that bin and seeing like a little bit of fuzz down there at the bottom we've got mold we've got maggots we've got storage mites we've got rancid fats so guilty right now but then I was going upstairs and eating lucky charm so that's on that's on mom listen I was eating milk bones but you know it is the parallels are shocking, you know, because I was in the processed food mill and our dogs were in the processed food mill.

22:26Gary Brecka:And, you know, now that I think back, most of our dogs live nine to 10 years, maybe 11 years. My son and his fiance have two labs. One of them is about to be 18 years old. Which is amazing. Jack, shout out to Jack. And Jack is the happiest. Now he's old and you can tell he's an elderly dog, but he still gets around and they are so militant with his food. I mean, he eats, I kid you not, true story. I worked out with my son one morning, we went upstairs into the kitchen, he starts making something next to me and he walks away from the bowl. I slid it over because I thought it was for me because it had rice, had peas, had chicken.

23:08Gary Brecka:And I was like, thank you, man, I'm starving. He's like, that's for the dog. And, you know, so they have literally kept this dog alive but with food yeah absolutely and um and i'm also happy to hear about where you fall on vaccines i mean they're they're getting married in um september this year in like como and we're taking the dog and they got to get all these vaccines and and but they have a very progressive veterinarian who's going to help them with that and you know i think about the same thing in in children and the data coming out now on vaccination, especially group vaccinations. Oh, yeah.

23:47Gary Brecka:And we do the same thing in animals, right? We group these vaccines. And so that's one of the things that I talk about a lot. If you are stuck to go to boarding, grooming, daycare, travel, whatever it is that you need to do, and you're given this list of vaccines that you need to get. And interestingly, this is actually being published in the veterinary journals now. And I'm like, what took you so long? except that it's still ignored. They have great studies that show the more vaccines you give at one time, the more reactions you have, the more chance of anaphylaxis you have, the more chance of autoimmune disease secondary to it that you have, particularly with small breeds.

24:27So the smaller the dog, the more likely they are to react. There are some vaccines that they're now saying, these are core vaccines. I'm like, I never gave these to a dog under 10 pounds, and I never would. I've never given some of these vaccines to my own animals and never would. Rabies is really the only one that is pretty much mandated. Like, if you have a dog that you need to take anywhere and you need to license them, or, you know, somebody finds out you have a dog in your house. In New Jersey, they knock on doors. They hire college kids in the summer, and they knock on doors. And of course, your dog barks at the door and they're like, oh, let me see the license for your dog.

25:08You don't have a license? Okay. And then you get 10 days to get your rabies vaccine and your license. Wow. Yeah.

25:15Gary Brecka:And is there some big pandemic of rabies or is this like the scare tactic that's brought up? It's a scare tactic. And part of it is, and I get it because in countries where we have a lot of stray dogs, there are countries where thousands of people die of rabies every year. This country isn't one of them. Right. Part of that is probably because of how we handle our animals. We get a certain number of cases of dogs and cats with rabies every year. It's small. Usually it's strays. Probably the biggest problem is stray kittens. Like everybody finds a stray kitten and picks it up. They don't notice it's got a wound on it.

25:55Gary Brecka:Is that because they tangled with a raccoon or tangled with a possum or something like that? Yeah. So in the northeast of this country, it's raccoons. In the southeast, it's foxes. skunks are kind of in the middle and out west it's bats. Wow. So we know what strain of rabies and what's going to be our, you know, sentinel animal that we need to be watching. So back in 1989, 1990 in New Jersey, we hadn't had rabies cases in years. And all of a sudden there was a huge rabies outbreak in northeast Pennsylvania. and the raccoons walked across the bridges across the Delaware River and brought it to New Jersey.

26:37Damn raccoons. And so I ended up spending about two years decapitating a lot of raccoons to check for rabies because that's how they were. And my husband at the time actually was head of the State Department of Health as a veterinarian, but he was in charge of the rabies thing.

26:54Gary Brecka:So when they would trap these, you would test them if they tested positive. And so I actually had a client, it was an old farmer, and he had this little tiny floofy dog that was ancient. And he let the little dog out to go potty last thing at night and heard this commotion, opens the door, and this little dog comes in with a raccoon attached to it. Oh, wow. Racing through his kitchen and he couldn't get the raccoon off, so he grabbed a kitchen knife, yay farmers, grabbed a kitchen knife and slashed the raccoon to kill the raccoon so that it finally dropped the dog. Yes, it was a rabid raccoon because that's the kind of stupid things.

27:30Like we saw them attacking telephone poles, attacking people's doors, attacking tires on cars. Because their brains, I mean. Their brains scrambled. Right. So it's pretty obvious when you have a rabid raccoon, they're kind of nasty. So it was a problem. And interestingly, the state of Pennsylvania during all this decided because cat, you know, stray cats, outdoor cats, they're gonna be the most vulnerable, barn cats. I have a bunch of barn cats now, so I get it.

27:59Gary Brecka:Mm-hmm. So they passed a law that said that all cats had to be vaccinated for rabies every single year. Oh, my gosh. You know, it's a three-year vaccine minimum, but they just passed this law. Well, the wrong cats were getting vaccinated. If you had an indoor cat that went to the vet, it was going to get vaccinated. Right. If you had a - No chance it was coming in contact with a rabid raccoon. Right, exactly. But all the barn cats and stray cats that are out there that are coming in contact, nobody's - Like, if I had to catch up my seven barn cats and get them to the vet, it's going to be a big problem because some of them I can't touch.

28:30Gary Brecka:Right. So, you know, it's like, okay, you guys are really sweet and nice, but putting you in a cage is not going to happen. So we were vaccinating the wrong animals. Right. And a couple of years after that, the University of Pennsylvania and weirdly out at Davis, California, at the vet school's diagnostic labs, they were diagnosing a lot of vaccine-related sarcomas in cats. And they figured out, oh, all these rabies vaccines are causing cancer in cats. Wow. You know, and it's sad too, because I can still remember walking into the veterinarian's office and there were always these pictures of hearts of dogs just shrouded in worms.

29:10Yeah, worms.

29:11Gary Brecka:I mean, it looked like you put a worm back. It used to be everybody had a heart in a jar. They had that too. Yeah, a heart in a jar with the worms or just like the images or the pictures of just worms all over heart. And so, you know, somebody walking into the vet's office with their dog is like, oh my God, I don't want Fifi getting that. And so, but not knowing, well, what is this statistical incidence and, you know, the chance of that actually occurring? And where was that picture taken? And what was that animal's history? Right. Versus what's my animal's history? Exactly. Who's living in my suburban home or in my condo is on a leash and is going out for a walk every day and coming back, what is their chance of catching heartworms?

29:58Gary Brecka:Exactly. So that's another one of those that the Veterinary Parasite Council, I don't know their exact name, but they basically say that all pets, all dogs and cats should be on heartworm preventative. Oh, yeah. Heartworms is a dog thing. It's rearing cats. But all of them should be on heartworm preventative every month, and all of them should have some sort of parasite prevention every single month. Well, I don't use any of that stuff on my animals. I'm like, I look at their lifestyle, and the other thing that people kind of forget and that the veterinarians never talk about is a healthy animal won't be parasitized.

30:45An unhealthy animal. So, we didn't see that many heartworm cases in New Jersey where my practices were, but every year we'd have a few. And I could guarantee that that dog would have heartworms, roundworms, hookworms, whipworms. Like, it was going to have fleas. It was going to have ticks. It was going to have everything because that's an animal with a weak immune system, not eating good food, that can't fight off anything. And so, when one jumps on board, they all jump on board. If I had a family that had a dozen cats, they bring a dozen cats in for exams, and if they had fleas in their house, the old skinny kidney failure cat was going to have 3 ,000 fleas.

31:24The young, healthy adult cat might have one or two. Parasites parasitize the weak. So really important that we keep their immune system strong.

31:37Gary Brecka:Keep their immune system strong. And where do you fall on pet foods? Because one of the fascinating things, I wanna get into pet food. I also wanna talk about how you categorize different animals, wood, fire, metal. Because I find that fascinating too, because my former spouse was an Ayurvedic practitioner. It's like one of the oldest form of medicine, mainly based on observation. And they have different body morphic types that they put you into. And the characteristics, pita, vada, kapha, of the personalities, the diets, the tempers, their attitude, energetic, docile, aggressive, you know, congenial, really fits these descriptions.

32:26Gary Brecka:And you have the same categorization for animals, which I really find fascinating. And I was reading through this and I was like, wow, I was thinking back at the animals that I had. And I was like, wow, so many of the, dogs that I had, now that I think about it, they fit these verticals so perfectly. I just never thought of applying it to an animal. Yeah, absolutely. So on our website, there's a pet personality quiz. So you can download that and basically do check boxes. And it'll help you kind of figure out what makes your animal tick. And then we also have the human personality profile. So if you want to figure out what makes your spouse tick, it can be...

33:04My husband is the only person I haven't figured out. He's got equal checkboxes all the way across. I'm like, what are you? But it's really kind of fun to do because every element personality is ruled by certain systems. So metal is long and large intestine. Wood is liver and gallbladder. So earth is ruled by digestive system. So we look at all these different things. and if you, so I have a fire dog right now. I have four dogs, but one of them is a fire. She's a redhead. Well, redheads are usually fires. They're very vocal. So she's the one who stands there and screams at me the whole time I'm making meals.

33:47Like you are not moving fast enough. Let's get this. Really?

33:51Gary Brecka:Towels at you and stuff? Oh yeah, she screams at me the entire time. And I feel bad when we have guests come over because we're right next to the guest room making dog food and she's screaming. So she fits all those things. Well, the fire personality is ruled by the heart. Guess which dog has mitral valve heart disease? Oh, that would be that one. But because I know that a fire dog is going to, if something's gonna give way, that's what's going to give way. It happens to be a genetic thing for the breed too. But I have spent her whole life supporting her with supplements and food. So when we use food therapy, it's like, how do I support your heart?

34:32My dogs get hearts cut up in their meal every single day. So it's very cool to know kind of what rules them and where their weaknesses would be. So I'm a wood personality. A wood person, I'm your best friend until you do me wrong. Oh man, it's a volcano. It's scorched earth.

34:54Gary Brecka:Yeah, that's my life. So, that's a wood personality. But wood is kept in check by metal because the metal axe chops down the tree. So, metal is lung and large intestine. Well, my wood personality has been so strong for so many years that my poor metal axe has been working overtime trying to chop down this crazy tree. And if I'm ever going to get sick, it's going to be respiratory. Really? My weakness is my lungs because my metal element has just been overworked. And so I know that. Well, metal is supported by white foods. Like, give me more white foods. I will eat more mushrooms. Thank you very much.

35:36Cauliflower. Right. Cauliflower. So I look at those things and say, okay, well, what's going to support my system? What's going to drain my liver? Give me more asparagus and radishes, please. So that's why food therapy to me is so cool because we can keep things in balance. And, you know, where we get disease is where it gets out of balance. And so the same goes for our pets.

35:59Gary Brecka:So how do you, where do you fall down on food? I mean, are you feeding all of your pets raw food, whole foods? Obviously no kibble. Tell people how. I mean, the one thing they should take out of their dog or cat's bowl tomorrow is what? Kibble. Because it's ultra processed food. It's sort of like taking your pet to McDonald's and expecting to get good health when that's – and part of the fallacy and myth of the veterinary push for the ultra-processed food because that's what they all push. So Mars and Purina rule the landscape. They sell about$23 billion worth of pet food a year. The next after that is Hills, which is owned by Colgate Palmolive, and they're about$6 billion.

36:43So it's a huge difference. And so the veterinary industry is greatly influenced by Mars Candy Company and Nestle Purina Candy Company. And they make ultra-processed food and the waste products of all that ultra-processed food go to our pets. Wow. And, you know, they call it upcycling. Sounds good. Sounds really good. And there are some upcycled products like hearts. People don't usually eat hearts. They should. Right. But they usually don't. that's a great upcycled product for my dogs who need it for their heart health. I'm in. So, but they also use the really awful ingredients in that extruded kibble.

37:25Like I said, it's very little meat. It's what's the cheapest ingredients we can put in there and get. So, AFCO, which is the Association of Feed Control Officials, they set the minimums, some maximums, but mostly minimums. Like, we need minimum this much protein. We need minimum this much fat. If we allow our cats and dogs to choose free choice, they're going to go for about 50 % protein and about 45 % fat. Wow. And then the other 5 % is that fiber. Just instinctively. Instinctively. If you give them a choice, that's what they're going to go for. The minimum for AFCO is 18 % protein for dogs and 22 % for cats.

38:09Gary Brecka:Wow. Not even close. Yeah, not even close. But, you know, they were like, well, what can they survive on? Oh, they can survive on 18 % and that's a lot. You can put a bunch of cheap ingredients in there. And it's really interesting. I remember my first few years in practice, we used to say, oh, too much protein is going to wreck their kidneys. You don't want to feed that high protein kibble. Right. Oh, my Lord. So, yeah, we need to change what we're doing. So my animals, sometimes I make my own food, but I'm a little busy and I travel a lot. So I do have a few companies that I really, really like that are doing things the right way.

38:47You can download that list on my website as well. What's your website? One more time. It's naturallyhealthypets.com. Naturally healthy pets. You can also go to drjudymorgan.com, same place. But there's a great website, truthaboutpetfood.com. Susan Thixton lives here in Florida. You might want to have her on.

39:04Gary Brecka:I would love to have her. She has been the consumer advocate for pet food for about 20 years, and the battles she has had, it'll blow you away. But she puts out something called The List every year, and she's up to about 40 companies on the list and are the companies that are doing things right. Okay, in terms of food. In terms of pet food. And they can't buy their way onto that list. they actually have to submit all their receipts for the year for everything that they purchase to go into their food so she can see what's going into the food. It's a big process for the pet food companies. So for big kibble, ultra-processed food, the law states that animals who have died otherwise than by slaughter, so like a cow dies out in the field, not allowed to be used.

39:58However, all of those animals that die out in the field go to pet food. They get picked up. This is where, sorry if you're eating, stop right now. They take these dead animals that might have laid out in the field for a few days. They're decomposing and rotting. They put them in these big open trucks and then they take them to the rendering plants. And at the rendering plant, it's all dumped into the parking lot in the sun.

40:19Gary Brecka:Oh my gosh. And they stay there for a few days and then it all gets bulldozed into a large vat and it's boiled down. And so it's a whole animal. So we're not taking out intestinal contents or hair, or we're not getting rid of the ear tags and the chains, and it all just goes in there. The whole animal goes in. It gets cooked down into a soup, rendered. And then the fat that's on the top is tallow fat that goes into a lot of different things, including pet food. And the meat meal is separated from the bone meal, and it's dried and ground. So if you see on a label something that's an unnamed meat.

41:01An unnamed meat? Unnamed meat. So if it says meat and bone meal or animal digest or meat meal, it's unknown meat because it could have been pig, cow, horse, dog.

41:13Gary Brecka:Any scrap. Whatever went into that vat. There was a lawsuit against Rachel Ray dog food in 2023 because somebody tested the DNA and there was dog DNA in there. ended up in the rendering vat. Wow. Dog DNA and dog food. Yeah, makes sense. Wow. The head of the largest rendering association gave the keynote speech at one of the AFCO meetings a few years ago. And in that, he said, it's almost impossible to have a rendered product without euthanasia solution in it. Because, oopsie, that one was euthanized and it accidentally went in the vat. We didn't mean for it to. FDA knows it, and there's been lawsuits about that too.

41:54and FDA says we find it non-actionable. It's not in a large enough quantity to be a problem.

42:00Gary Brecka:Wow. Where do they get these euthanized animals from? From veterinary clinics? No, most of the veterinary clinic animals go to cremation. Okay. But there's been zoo animals known to end up in there. A lot of horse meat can end up in there and we don't normally think about eating horses. But the thing is, nobody, it's rare for somebody to test the food and look at the, I mean, it's not cheap. So rare. Let's look at the DNA. Let's look at the mold toxins. One of the biggest recalls ever was for mold toxins. So where do you think the moldy corn goes? 60 % of the grains in this country are moldy. Yeah.

42:38Gary Brecka:Doesn't go to human food. Yeah. Glyphosate is a desiccant now to dry it out. Right. So, but it kills the mold, but the molds release mold toxins. So we have aflatoxins, vomitoxins. toxin yeah all those those cause liver failure in animals and one of the largest recalls ever was for mold toxins in dry kibble wow so you can fumigate it all you want and kill the mold but nothing kills the mold toxins right so you know if i had an animal come in the clinic and i did lab work and the liver enzymes are high i'm like well which kibble are you feeding because you I know that's where it's coming from most of the time.

43:17So back to my animals. No, they don't eat kibble.

43:20Gary Brecka:Yeah. And that's, so that's the one thing that everybody should get out of their pet's bowl right now. And partly because for cats, it is so species inappropriate. Like our dogs can survive on it better. But for cats, we're just, we're asking for urinary problems. It's a dry food that has 6 % to 8 % moisture. Cats are desert animals. They don't drink very much. And then we wonder why they have crystals and very highly concentrated urine and urinary obstruction like the cat I was talking about. Because they're dehydrated. They're eating a high carbohydrate diet. They're not meant to eat a high carb diet.

43:53And they're obese and they're diabetic.

43:55Gary Brecka:Yep. And the same way that we started the war on saturated fat and protein in favor of high glycemic carbohydrates in humans, we probably did the same thing with our animals. Yeah. Listen, there's what I share on this podcast and then there's what I share with my inner circle. If you've been following me for a while, you know how I hold nothing back here. But my VIP community, that's where the real magic happens. Picture this. You're struggling with energy crashes, brain fog, or just feeling like you're not operating at your peak and you don't know where to get real answers. But here's what really sets this apart.

44:31Gary Brecka:You're not just getting my insights. When I have incredible guests on the podcast, VIP members get to submit questions for a private podcast segment. So that world-renowned expert we just interviewed, you get exclusive access to their knowledge tailored to your specific situation. This section is under the private podcast section in the Ultimate Human Community. And speaking of exclusive, you're getting my personal protocols, the exact tools I use for water fasting, gut optimization, and morning routines that have taken me decades to perfect. This isn't theory. This is what works in the real world.

45:02Gary Brecka:The community launches challenges throughout the year where you get direct access to me and my network of experts. It's like having a personal health advisory board for less than$100 a month. Your health is your wealth, and this investment pays dividends for life. Join the VIP community at theultimatehuman.com forward slash VIP and step into your ultimate potential. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast. And you talk about the industrial food complex in veterinary medicine and pet food. And you've touched on that a little bit, but what do you mean by this industrial food complex? Is it because honestly, you know, I chair a committee for Secretary Kennedy called the Maha Action.

45:41Gary Brecka:And in fact, we're meeting in Washington right now on peptides. And my son's dog is on peptides, which I thought was really cool. And it's helped the dog a lot. He's BPC-157 for his hip dysplasia. You get a noticeable difference in the pain that the dog had walking around. Now it's actually pain-free. and like I say, it's going on 17 years or going on 18 years. But the absolute sinister nature and what I call commissive errors, you know, you have errors of omission, you have errors of commission. Omission is, hey, we didn't mean to do that. Some e. coli got into the lettuce, but it wasn't intentional.

46:21Gary Brecka:The commissive errors are, we know exactly what we're doing. We know exactly what the risks are, but it's profitable. We're gonna do it anyway. Right. And the voluminous extent to which this is done in human food production and the stranglehold that they have had for decades on our regulatory bodies, again, never made the applicable transition to pet food. Right. But you're saying it's the same. The FDA chooses not to enforce that animals dying otherwise by them by slaughter are not allowed in food. But they're going to the rendering plant. It's like that cow died in the field. Why are you not enforcing that?

47:04They said, we choose not to enforce it. We don't think it's actionable. Well, it's a law. So we just pick and choose which laws we want to follow.

47:14Gary Brecka:And that's so widely known. And that's an inexpensive source. and so they grind it up and it becomes kibble. What else is in there? Like what else is, is it ground up animals? Is it ground up vegetables? Is it, I know seed oils and other highly processed ingredients are in there. So the thing with kibble, it goes through the extrusion process. So think of, you know, cereal, breakfast cereal. That's the extrusion process that the Kellogg's invented. And then, hey, we can make pet food out of that. And that's why, because it's that process, that's why we have to have this starch to hold everything together.

47:51Otherwise, it dunks up the machine. So, we start with, hopefully, a meat of some sort, a meat meal. But if you're looking to, well, if you're extruding it, you have to have a starch. So, it's going to be corn, peas, legumes, potatoes, something to hold it together. So that's, and they do something called ingredient splitting. So it might be pea protein, pea hulls, like they'll have peas in their five ways, corn in their five ways, corn gluten meal, you know, spent corn, whatever. Like they'll name it five different ways. So when you add up all the ingredients, it's like, oh, I just fed my cat a lot of corn and he's a carnivore.

48:39So we've got that. And then it goes through multiple high heat processes. And so by the time it gets done, we have killed off a lot of the nutrition.

48:51Gary Brecka:The nature of the proteins. And now we have AGEs, Advanced Glycation End Products, which, carcinogenic. Then we put preservatives in it. One of the companies that when Susan Thickston first got into being the pet food consumer advocate, her dog had died of bone cancer, and her veterinarian said, it's probably from that preservative in the pet food. Really? Ethoxiquin. And so she called the pet food company, and they said, oh, that stuff's shelf-stable for 25 years. Great. That's not something I'd really want to brag about. Right. So BHA, BHT, Ethoxiquin, and what's really interesting, and a lot of that's been taken out, but a lot of it's still there.

49:33So we've got preservatives because they want it to be shelf-stable for minimum two years, but probably longer. Two years. Yeah, yeah.

49:41Gary Brecka:Think about a food product that you could leave out for two years. The expiration date on those bags is generally two. So if you're looking at, you know, if you're going to buy pet food, look at the expiration date because it's generally two years. So if it's about to expire, it was made two years ago. Wow. So a lot of our - Great tip. A lot of our fresh and frozen foods, it might be one year, but some of them are still even two years. So that's because they don't have to put the made on date. They have to put the best by date. I mean, that kind of goes with human food too. Right. So I would definitely look at that.

50:17But then because they have cooked out all the nutrients, they add back in a synthetic vitamin mineral mix. And we know that the body uses synthetic vitamins and minerals very differently from whole food nutrition. and so one of the things that we have seen so much of is copper toxicity in our pets again causing liver problems because the copper is stored in the liver yeah and the afco has a minimum for copper but no maximum so let's say the minimum is seven some of these companies are coming in at 80 wow and so one of the things that people should ask is i want to see the complete nutritional breakdown on the food because all they're required to put on the label is protein, fat, moisture.

51:11Carbohydrate. No, they don't even put carbs on that food.

51:13Gary Brecka:No. No. Really? It's like four things. It's ridiculous. And they've been working on changing the labeling, oh, for about 10 years. That's the infamous Washington, kick the can down the road. And actually, after the huge, there was a big problem that killed tens of thousands of animals in 2007, 2008 where we had melamine, you know, melamine plates, plastic, that was being ground up and added to ingredients from China and it caused kidney failure. Is this straight plastic? Pretty much, yeah. What is melamine? It's made, it's used to make plastic plates, but it artificially elevates protein content.

52:03Oh, wow. So, they were putting it in ingredients that were used to make pet food with, you know, dry kibble. Actually, it was even in some canned foods. And a lot of animals died before they figured out what the problem was. I actually was in China studying acupuncture the next year. And all of the Starbucks and all the coffee shops had no dairy products because melamine was being put in the dairy products. Wow. So what was happening, I mean, it's so corrupt. It is so crazy. They were diluting down the milk and the dairy products, but adding melamine to bring the protein level back up so nobody would know that it was diluted.

52:43And infants were dying of kidney failure because it was in the milk products that were being fed to infants. So nobody could get dairy products. Yeah. So that's how corrupt the food system is. It's like, oh, well, we killed 10 ,000 dogs. Who cares? oh wait we just killed a bunch of kids uh you know wow how did how did that crossover occur

53:04Gary Brecka:i mean how do we cross over into human food so that children got a hold of it it was in i was in china and it was happening in china wow and so you know the company the dairy companies were like well we will dilute down the milk so that you know a little bit goes further yeah and but we have to pass the test of the protein level in it so they were adding it helps artificially raise that. Yeah, it's just crazy. So, you know, we get the vitamin mineral mix is a huge problem. We had another recall in 2018 and 2019. Again, tens of thousands of animals died because there was excess vitamin D in the vitamin mineral mix.

53:40That much? Yeah, it was like 100 times what it needed to be.

53:43Gary Brecka:Wow. And again, all these animals are dying of kidney failure. And it takes a bunch of veterinarians to get together and say, you know, I'm seeing a lot more kidney failure than I did. Like, you think there's something going on here? Like, wow, why are there so many young animals with kidney failure? And then finally somebody said, oh, maybe it's the food. And one of the biggest culprits in that was Hills. But it was across many brands because there's only a couple of these synthetic vitamin mineral mix companies. And they're from China. Feeding the food supply. They're from China. And so all these companies buy from the same manufacturers.

54:21so when you have a problem you have it across many many many companies so when i'm looking at food when i read the ingredient label i want to know how to read every single one of them and i don't want to see chemicals i want everything coming from whole foods and i i get pushback from veterinary nutritionists who say those synthetic vitamins are just fine and it's impossible to balance it without that. I'm like, really? I'm pretty sure we can do it. And I have done it. And we do a lot better that way.

54:56Gary Brecka:Just in whole foods. So what are some of the, you produce your own pet food? I don't. No, you produce your own pet supplements. Your daughter runs a supplement company. I produce some of my own supplement. Well, I don't produce them, but I formulate some of my own supplements. I have formulated recipes for pet food companies, and I have a couple that I work closely with, but I don't own a pet food company, and I don't want to because I don't want to play with FDA. It's hard enough. So we sell products from probably... We have 75 different small companies. In order for somebody to get their products in our warehouse and on my website, they have to jump through a lot of hoops.

55:39Kind of like Susan has her list of pet foods that people have to jump through the hoops. We look at the ingredients very closely, and then we also look at the company very closely. What are their morals and ethics?

55:51Gary Brecka:I love hearing that. And, you know, if they're trying to claw their way to the top by saying bad things about all their competitors, we're not going to work with them. Yeah, we have the same thing in our industry. It's, you know, there's 160 million dogs and cats out there. We don't have to compete. We all need to work together. What are some good brands of either raw or human-grade food for pets? So, right now, for my own animals, even though I work closely with a couple of companies, I like to rotate brands. Because a lot of times a brand will, and not all of them, but a lot of times they'll have like sort of a formula.

56:35Like, here's my meat source, but then when you get past the meat source, it's like broccoli, carrots, sardines. You know, it's kind of the same formula after that. So, let's just say there's a micromineral deficiency in there. I don't want to be feeding the same thing all the time. So I rotate and I also rotate proteins for my animals. So in my freezer right now, I probably have All Provide, Viva Raw, Small Batch. I might have Evermore, Raised Right. Some of them are raw foods. Some of them are gently cooked. I'm fine with gently cooked, but these are all companies that are not using synthetic vitamin mineral mixes and they're not throwing a bunch of starchy carbs in there.

57:19These are complete meals. So it makes it, my mom is, my 89 and a half year old mom is in charge of feeding the cats. So I need some - Good for her.

57:27Gary Brecka:That's going to keep her alive for a long time. Oh yeah. It's like gardening. She runs back and forth to the barn multiple times a day. She's really cute. But, you know, she's, she always, she's really funny. The cats always have two choices. So it might be rabbit and chicken, or it might be turkey and venison. Yeah. She always gives them two choices twice a day. But our animals also get raw milk from our cow, the yogurt that we make, they get the eggs from our chickens. We process our own meat chickens. So, you know, it's sort of a combination, but we've kind of gone off the deep end. But still all coming from whole food sources.

58:06Gary Brecka:One of the things you also talk about is constitutional matching. Yeah. Right? Right. Not all food is meant for the same animal. So cats, not all cats. Dogs, not all dogs, just because it's a dog or a cat. So how do you, because I know there's so many people watching this right now that deeply care for their pets and they're like, I'm already somewhat on this bandwagon. And probably if they're watching the Ultimate Human podcast, they're attentive to this, at least for themselves and their children. And if they have pets, their attention is drawn to it. So what is constitutional matching for? So, I actually have a line of food called Constitutions, and it's made by all provide, but it basically matches the Chinese elements.

58:50Gary Brecka:To these personalities, metal, fire, wood. And what's really interesting, like I was talking about with myself, I wouldn't, because I'm a wood personality, I wouldn't necessarily buy the wood diet to feed me. I might buy the metal diet because my metal needs to be supported. but when I formulated those diets, I tried to make them balanced. So like the wood diet would actually be helpful because it has things that are gonna help drain my liver. So it's gonna support it, but it's also gonna drain it because we don't wanna make an excess of something. So the constitutional medicine goes along with the personalities, but it also goes along with yin and yang.

59:34So yang is hot, yin is cold. and you can look at your animal and say, well, is he always laying on the air? I mean, we're in Miami and it's 95 degrees out. So it's hot out. I don't want to feed something that is going to add more heat internally to the body. So lamb, chicken, venison, goat, very warming proteins. I'd probably save those for the winter down here.

59:57Gary Brecka:Right. But in the summer, we can feed things that are gonna be more cooling, duck and rabbit and turkey and pork. So we not only change the diet based on the personality or constitution of the animal, we also change it on the seasonality and the weather. and you may have a dog who, like your 17-year-old dog, a lot of times they're cold. They don't have as much body fat. So even though it's summer and it's 95 degrees, he still might need a warming diet like venison or chicken because he's an old cold dog. Yeah. But, you know, a lot of the youngsters, they're hot. Oh, yeah. It's so funny because that's the personality of these two dogs.

1:00:42Gary Brecka:They have a very young lab named Aspen, female. And then they got the crotchety old man. And like Jack loves Aspen, but kind of doesn't want anything to do with Aspen. It's like if you're 15 years old and you have like a five-year-old little brother, it's just constantly like - You're a little much. And so, I mean, she's always wanting to play and running around him and nipping at him and what have you. But she also has heat seizures. So they have to be really careful because she's jet black. And she has heat seizures when my son would take her out for runs in the wintertime, fine. But even just on walks in the summer, she actually will start seizing.

1:01:20We've had dogs that will do that too. So that's where knowing that what the energetics of the food are, you could say, okay, this dog, particularly in the summer, really needs a cooling diet. Love that. And then the older dog really needs a warming diet.

1:01:37Gary Brecka:And the guidance for this is on your website where they can get these different constitutions. Yeah, it's on the website. And I didn't bring that book with me, but I have a book that's Yin and Yang Nutrition for Dogs. And it's 62 recipes. There's the original one and now there's the 2.0 version, but I would do the 2.0. But the recipes are based on the five elements, but also on the yin and yang, the heat and the cooling. And so if you want to make your own food, it's okay, here's a complete diet that you can make. and I do recommend rotating. So like if your son is making your pet's food, he should be rotating recipes and ingredients just like we would for ourselves.

1:02:19You know, I find it interesting that people go to the veterinarian and people are really getting away from asking their veterinarian what they should feed because they know what the answer is gonna be.

1:02:28Gary Brecka:Yeah. But if you go to your veterinarian and they're like, well, feed this bag of dry burnt brown balls, don't add anything to the bowl because you'll unbalance it, which is a fallacy. they're not balanced anyway. We know that from testing. But, you know, only put this in the bowl and don't add anything to it because you'll mess it up and feed the same thing day in and day out. 24-7, year-round. If they handed you a cereal box for your kids and said, everything is in here that your child needs, don't add anything to it, don't change it up, they just get this dry cereal twice a day, every day, you'd look at them like they lost their mind.

1:03:03Gary Brecka:Right. But we go to our veterinarian and think that is perfectly normal. Right. Wow. You also talk about prevention, not like crisis vet medicine. And obviously crises are gonna happen. Dogs get in a fight or they're out, they burn their paws or they hurt themselves. But what do you mean by preventative medicine for a dog? Do dogs need routine like humans do? Exercise, sunlight, community, connection like we do. I mean, dogs have, what, 100 times the oxytocin that humans do? And they form like these bonds. Maybe it's not 100 times, but they have a lot more oxytocin than humans do, from what I understand.

1:03:45Gary Brecka:And so they've really formed these bonds. And a lot of dogs, I mean, when we grew up, they would get anxiety. They would get separation anxiety. Oh, anxiety is huge. We have more anxiety in our pets than we ever have. Like I said, over 80 % of indoor cats are highly stressed. Really? And I see the difference. We have two indoor cats. Is this because the owner's just leaving every day and they're in the... Well, that's part of it. We think that cats are like, you know, solitary, do their own thing. They're really not. They want interaction. So I look at my outdoor cats. They are all over the place.

1:04:22They're jumping through the air, catching grasshoppers. They're getting birds. They're chasing mice. They play with the mice before they do the mice thing. Yeah, it's sort of cruel. It is cruel, but you look at... Play a game of tag and then eat them. But it's cats doing cat things. And because they're on a species-appropriate diet and they have a lot of exercise, they're in a very safe environment, they're being real cats. They don't have any stress. I actually tested the microbiome. All my cats eat the same. The indoor and the outdoor cats tested the microbiome on all nine cats. The outdoor cats had perfect microbiomes.

1:04:55Gary Brecka:Really? The indoor cats had not so great microbiomes. The only difference is to live inside. They don't pounce, they don't hunt, they don't climb, they sit. And they don't interact much. They don't really like the dogs. But they also don't want to go outside. They could if they wanted. But so, there's a huge difference in the environment that we see. So, it is critically important that our pets have human interaction. and for indoor cats that we allow them to hunt and pounce and climb. Cats are really into vertical spaces. That's why you find them on top of your refrigerator. Yeah. Like they need - We had barn cats growing up too and they were always up on the rafters.

1:05:41Gary Brecka:We had these tobacco barns. Yes. And they were always up there on the rafters and they would go up there and tangle with raccoons at the top of our barn, like 50 feet off the ground. Yeah. So that's cats doing normal cat things. And so we need to get back. And so - I'm going right up the side of the barn too. Yeah. Crazy. For those who play laser tag with their cats, which is a great thing for them because that's hunting and pouncing, make sure they win at the end. Don't just turn your light off and walk away. They're like, where did it go? And I didn't win. They always have to win. So throw a piece of dehydrated meat or a mouse toy.

1:06:18Throw something at the end where you ended up with the laser that the cat gets to win and gets to walk off with his prize.

1:06:24Gary Brecka:Great tip. Always let them win. for our dogs. They need that mental stimulation and they are pretty darn social. So my youngest dog, when we got him as a puppy, he's a special needs kid with hydrocephalus. You told me about this one. He's got everything going wrong. He's a little crazy, but he really bonded with our 10-year-old Cavalier and they were best buddies. The 10-year-old Cavalier happened to be in late stage heart disease and heart failure. And when he passed away, we had other dogs, but they would not play with the youngster. And so now he didn't have a friend and he didn't have a buddy.

1:07:08And yes, I will play with him. Isolation, yeah. But it was very different for him. And he was a COVID baby, so he wasn't socialized outside of the house at all. The first time I took him into town, I thought he was gonna lose his gourd. It was not good. Right. So, yes, we have COVID children. My granddaughter's a COVID baby too. So, you know, a whole different thing. So, another English toy spaniel came up online and a friend said, you really need to take this dog. He's been returned like three times. He's two days older than my Cavalier. And he was really cute. And my husband's a big mush and he said, oh, we need to adopt Gilly.

1:07:50I go, okay. So we get Gilly and I still say, they're five years old now. We got them when Gilly was two. And I still say, I got my dog a dog. They are, they're like two brothers in that they are best friends. They do everything together. They sleep together. They play together. And then they fight like two brothers who want to kill each other. And then they go right back. And then they go right back. But I needed to get my dog a dog. I'm not recommending that everybody get their dog a dog. but we saw that social interactive need. And I know everybody hates, not everybody, a lot of people hate dog parks.

1:08:28A lot of people speak very badly of dog parks because a lot of bad things can happen in dog parks. Yeah.

1:08:34Gary Brecka:However - I see with dogs that aren't trained well, they attack other dogs and things like that. Right. And it's not a dog park problem. It's not a dog problem. It's a people problem. It's people who aren't paying attention to their dogs, people who are bringing the wrong dogs to a dog. Like I would never take my dogs to a dog park. They're unsocialized. They'd be horrible with other dogs. But they have each other. But dogs really are social creatures. And like the owner of All Provide Dog Food, single guy, he has a dog. And he takes his, this dog loves, the dog lived most of its life in the shelter.

1:09:06And he adopted him. And he loves the dog park. And he has friends. And so you get these dogs there. Like they look forward to going to the dog park every day and playing with their buddies. Sure. And so, that social interaction is really critical. So, we need good food. We need good social interaction. We need training. I love, you know, non-obnoxious training. I'm not a dog trainer. If you want to untrain your dog, send it to my house, I'll ruin it. I'm really good at ruling them. But yeah, you know, if we could go back to -

1:09:44Gary Brecka:In training, just to touch on that for a minute, is this important in the early stages of the dog, like the younger, the better? The younger, the better, but Forrest Gump did not go to training until he was two. Forrest Gump is her dog, by the way. Forrest Gump is my little hydrocephalic crazy dog. He didn't go to training until he was two. And I finally took him because our veterinary office that we go to, since I don't have a license now, I have to go to a veterinarian, it's really fun. She's great though. She had one of her technicians was a trainer. And so they were offering puppy classes.

1:10:17And I said, well, he's two. Can he still go to puppy class? She's sure. Bring him on in. And the reason I wanted to go is he wouldn't walk on a leash. When I put a leash on, he would just hit the brakes and collapse. I was like, all right, he's scared to death of a leash. I have no idea why. And so we had to go to learn to walk on a leash. And now he's my best walker.

1:10:35Gary Brecka:Wow. Of all the dogs we have. And then when we got Gilly at two, I was like, all right, well, he's going to puppy class too. Yeah. And so they went at two. My mother had dogs that she took at five and seven. I mean, you can take, like if you adopt a new dog that's older, you can still take them to school to learn things. You can still, old dogs can learn new tricks. Yeah. And they should. We have a few dogs in the family that need some training. We just want them to be good citizens. Yeah. So they can be good citizens. They're great dogs, but not model citizens. And you know what? It's really, if you have no rules, it's really confusing for the dog.

1:11:11Like, he's allowed to jump on the bed today, but then you come in later and yell at him for jumping on the bed. Yeah. Just set the rules. Yeah. Either you're allowed on the furniture or you're not.

1:11:21Gary Brecka:Right. But just let them know. Right. And they'll get it. And they'll get it. And then, like, Gilly is a food maniac, and he'll steal everybody else's food. Mm-hmm. He has learned to sit in his corner while food is being made, and he doesn't leave. Like he just learned that and it's like, well, this makes life a lot easier that you're not attacking everybody else's food. Right. So I've been working out with my son lately, trying to keep up with him and his high rocks competitive athletes. And I've been starting to use this Perfect Amino pre-workout. I really like it. It's got BH4 and improves nitric oxide output, but it actually seems to stay after the workout and not crash.

1:12:00Gary Brecka:There's no stimulants. So no caffeine, no Mao Wong, nothing that gives you that kind of amped feeling. You just feel like you're maybe better able to move during the workout. like you have better blood flow. So if you're in the market for a pre-workout, check out the Perfect Amino pre-workout. It's my favorite now. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast. I'd love too that you apply traditional Chinese medicine to dogs. So these are things like herbs, acupuncture. So for the listeners that have probably aging dogs or dogs with hip dysplasia or dogs that are exhibiting pain or even anxiety, separation anxiety?

1:12:39Gary Brecka:Because sometimes there's not a lot you can do. You got to go to work. Right. And so we're leaving our animals, then we're coming back home. What are some things that pet owners could do to help manage those scenarios with dogs, especially separation anxiety? Yeah. Well, Forrest Gump has separation anxiety. When I leave the house, he does laps. He's nuts. So, and there's always somebody in my house, so it's kind of funny, but it's not me. So a lot of it is training, but there are also things that we can use to kind of help with that. I'm a huge fan of CBD for dogs. And they all react differently.

1:13:16Some of them, it calms them right down. Others, like when our cleaning lady comes every Tuesday, Gilly and Forrest lose their minds. So they get an herbal tincture called Tranquil Times and CBD the night before and the morning of. Makes life a lot better.

1:13:33Gary Brecka:Is that something that would help them travel too? Yes. So we have, so what's really interesting, we also use flower essences and a lot of people have heard of rescue remedy and they tend to wanna use rescue remedy for everything, but it's actually pretty specific. But there are other flower essences that you can use for specific situations. So we have one called safe journey. Well, that's pretty easy. We're going on a journey. I need to be safe. Right. Is that like an immune booster? No, they're flower essences. They call it emotional training in a bottle, but it's basically the energetics of the vibration of flowers.

1:14:11Gary Brecka:So they don't get so agitated. Right. You know, new environment, new surroundings. They're not freaking out. So we have flower essences. We have homeopathics. There's one called travel anxiety. Pretty easy to know what that one's for. Yeah. We use melatonin. We use CBD. We have herbal tinctures. So, and it depends on the animal. sometimes you have to layer on a lot of different things. We saw this when I was in the horse training world. We use flower essences a lot in the horse training world. Wow. Because when you're showing, you're not allowed to use any chemicals that would show up on a drug test.

1:14:48Sure. But flower essences are fine. You can use something like that. You can use homeopathic remedies. Wow, that's great. So, you know, it's just kind of knowing what is accepted. like CBD is not accepted in all circles.

1:15:01Gary Brecka:Oh, is that something they can test for? I don't know if they're testing for it or not. It's really interesting. I'm traveling around the world speaking this year, and in some countries, CBD is not allowed. So that makes it really interesting because you're like, well, this would be exactly what you, oh, you can't do that. That's against regulatory environment. But here in the US - Just kidding. They're good. And so you have these different tinctures essentially do what the tincture says it does. Yes. makes it very simple because i know a lot of people um travel with their pets but maybe it's two or two or three times a year maybe it's only once or twice a year right and so dog has barely been out of the house or maybe socialized in the neighborhood and then all of a sudden you're taking on this commercial flight hundreds of people and that can especially for our short face breeds that travel can be really a nightmare and so one of the things like if you go to your traditional veterinarian.

1:15:55They're going to say, oh, here's tranquilizers. Here's trazodone. They're going to give you something. We used to use acepromazine before we had other drugs. But we can end up suppressing respiratory function in some of these animals who are kind of on the edge with that anyway. So, you have to know your dog. And again, if you need to travel with them, it's kind of like taking cats to the vet or traveling with you. get them used to whatever they're traveling in, that carrying cage. So my cats, at least my indoor cats and my outdoor cats that are really friendly with me, they were all strays that came, so not as easy.

1:16:34But I leave a carrier out and leave treats and food. And so like my dogs will run right in a crate and just hang out.

1:16:45Gary Brecka:Right. Because that's just, it's sort of a den. The first time it comes out of the closet, you're stuffing them in there. and then they feel like they're in prison. Yeah, and that's why so many people have a problem getting their cats or their small dogs to the veterinarian. It's like, you know, he's hiding under the bed. I couldn't get him out. First of all, they know. Right. They know that you're getting ready to go. And if they see the carrier come out, there's no way you're getting them. Yeah. So make the carrier a place that they like. Right. And so it's all about planning ahead. I understand things happen at the last minute sometimes, but the more you can do to plan ahead and make it seem like normal everyday stuff, the better.

1:17:19Sure.

1:17:19Gary Brecka:So I want to go to like the raw, fresh, homemade conversation because there's a lot of online manufacturers of pet food now that seem to be doing really the right thing. I don't profess to know these brands because I don't have animals in the house. I know that my son and my daughter-in-law do. Actually, we just started having animals in the house. I forgot. I got hoodwinked by my youngest daughter. We were supposed to be fostering a dog. And she was like, oh no, it's gonna be here for like week, two weeks. We're just gonna nurse her back to health and then we're gonna foster it home. And it's a whole racket for like kids and parents.

1:18:06Gary Brecka:And apparently it's a thing because now I've talked to other parents that have been hoodwinked by the same situation. So this dog comes in, his name's Tori. It's great. he's a staff shark and he's an amazing dog, but he came in very emaciated and, you know, came from the shelter and now he's put on weight. And I don't know that we've done a social media post or ever actually talked to somebody about adopting the dog. So that's how I know that I got scammed. That dog's staying. But now we're going on like four months and now my wife and I are getting attached to the dog. And so actually I think I do have a dog in the house now.

1:18:39You have a dog.

1:18:39Gary Brecka:Not that you mentioned it. Um, but the, you know, I, I spin the label around on this and it is organ meats and, um, organ blends, ground beef, rice, chicken, whole lamb, uh, peas, you know, a whole foods, like probably something that I would actually eat. Do you find that brands that are doing that, there are some really good, trustworthy farm-to-table brands, or are you back to, we should be making our pets food? No, there are some really good brands out there. Unfortunately, some of the biggest ones that spend money on advertising and are the, you know, shipped direct to home are still too high in carbs.

1:19:23So I don't want to see grains. I don't want to see peas. I don't want to see, I don't want grains. I don't want legumes. I don't want white potatoes. Okay, great. And so some of these brands are making huge strides within the veterinary industry and influence. And I'm so thankful because it is so much better than ultra-processed kibble. But they still have a price point that they need to make. So there's way too many carbs and a lot of them are still using synthetic vitamin mineral mixes added into there. so I do want to see all whole foods in there but I don't feed any like when you look at my recipes in the yin and yang nutrition book they're formulated without any grains and then at the bottom it'll say if you want to add grains this is the grain that would be appropriate based on the constitution or whatever it is that we're working on but for me personally no grains Yeah.

1:20:27Gary Brecka:So, I mean, and cat owners, like, listen up. I have so many cat owners in my life. No grants. And all the cats are fat and I never really even thought about the carbohydrate, the high glycemic diet. Cats don't know what to do with carbs. Yeah. Breaks down to sugar. Yeah. I didn't realize they're carnivores. Yeah. And we see so many of them that end up being obese and then becoming diabetic. Yeah. Because, so the thing is, the ultra-processed food has palatins added to it, which is basically the umami to make it taste good. And these companies spend a lot of time and money on what is going to make this cat be addicted to this kibble.

1:21:09And they truly are addicted. And the problem with cats is you cannot starve them into feeding them the correct thing. because cats will go into liver failure in about three days if they don't eat.

1:21:21Gary Brecka:Really? So you can't say, I'm gonna hold out, he'll eat when he's hungry. No, he'll just die. Cats are a big problem. It took me - So what do you do, transition slowly? Very slowly. And so for anybody who has a cat that is kibble addicted, you can try offering them canned food. Sometimes they'll lick the juice and then walk away. For when I first did all this transition 25 years ago with my cats that were kibble addicted because I didn't know any better. I started with freeze-dried raw food because it is dry texture, more similar to a kibble. It's still a complete diet. And so I would put their kibble in their bowl and then sprinkle some of the freeze-dried over it.

1:22:05And kind of not, and don't put a ton in, like at the very beginning, like crumble a piece. And then, you know, a couple of days later, it's a couple of pieces. It took me six months to get the original cats to change over. Transition, yeah. But in our house, kibble for cats is kitty crack. And I guarantee you, if I went and bought some kitty crack and put it in my barn for my cats that have only ever eaten raw food, they would dive in headfirst because it's made so addictive.

1:22:35Gary Brecka:And, you know, interestingly, we saw that the administration recently open the door to psychedelics for human beings. And a lot of this is microdosing with mushrooms. And where do you fall? I mean, because traditional Chinese medicine uses a lot of mushrooms, reishi, cordyceps. So I haven't played with that at all. There is a veterinarian, Dr. Rob Silver in Colorado, who has written books on cannabis for pets and for the psychedelics. He's been doing a lot of the research into that. And I think there's a place for it. These are condition-specific, though. It's not like blanket across all dogs, blanket across all cats, but ones that have severe separation anxiety or severe behavioral issues or what have you.

1:23:31I think that there's a lot of substances in nature that we haven't looked at nearly enough. We just need somebody to do the research, and the pharmaceutical companies are not going to do that research. There's no money in it. No, no, you can't patent it. I get that. Yeah. And if you can't patent it, there's no money in it.

1:23:55Gary Brecka:Yeah. So tell me about the books that are on the table right here. Keeping Your Pets Naturally Healthy, Raising Naturally Healthy Pets, So, I wrote my first book, which is Needles to Natural, back in 2014. And that one's sort of autobiographical, like how I went from being traditional to what I ended up doing in my career. But it also has a lot of chapters on seizures, diabetes, pick a disease, and how I was treating them in my clinic. that was different from what everybody else was doing. And I actually wrote that first book on a dare. It was a Facebook group that said, you know, you answer the questions different from everybody else.

1:24:34It was a dog group. You know, you should write all this down somewhere. And I said, okay. So I wrote a book. And then the next book after that was Canine Kitchen Capers,

1:24:44Gary Brecka:which it was stories that were sent in from people who started making their own dog food. and like blowing up their kitchen and like all the different things that went wrong. And so it's kind of a fun, funny book, but also has recipes in it. It also has recipes for humans, like how to order takeout for dinner because you spent all day cooking for your dog. Right. That's great. So that's kind of a fun book. And then I said, well, I'm gonna write a serious book. So I wrote my first yin and yang nutrition for dogs based on Chinese medicine food therapy. And then I said, you know, I need to write something that is more for somebody just entering the holistic space and not necessarily into Chinese medicine.

1:25:32And so that's when Raising Naturally Healthy Pets came out. And so that's, it has things in there like how to find a holistic veterinarian, how to talk to your traditional veterinarian if you can't find a holistic veterinarian and not get kicked out of the office. There's a big chapter in there on vaccines because for me, education is power. And so as the pet parent, if you can walk in and say, well, I know how distemper is transmitted from one dog to another, and I really don't think that my dog has a risk for that. So this is why I'm saying no to the vaccine. Or my dog had that two years ago, and I know that vaccine lasts five to seven years or more.

1:26:12So, you know, if you go in with that kind of knowledge versus just no, you're going to get a lot further. You don't want to have an argument with them. You don't want them to feel backed into a corner. So that's, and that is cats. I love that. Cats and dogs. There's a chapter in there about making your cats not so crazy, like, you know, climbing and all that stuff. Talk about cat litter. that's the cat litter industry is multi multi millions of like crazy amount of money spent on cat litter research yeah it's nuts um and it is true they have huge preferences um cats do cats do for the type of yeah yeah and don't use anything that's very clean either because

1:26:56Gary Brecka:sometimes yeah you come in and it smells like litter that i use is a dried grass like potpourri over it. Yeah. Yeah. So, mine's a dried grass litter because I have two indoor cats. It tracks a lot, but where I have it, it's not a problem. So, talk about, you know, how to choose that. So, then I said, okay, well, for somebody who's already been in the holistic field a little bit with their animals and they want to dive a little deeper, that's where Keeping Your Pets Naturally Healthy came about. So, that one takes a deeper dive in. There's a big chapter in there on allergies because that's such a huge problem.

1:27:32Huge. Big chapter on inflammatory bowel disease. Like, you know, this is how they're going to diagnose it. This is what they're going to tell you to use. This is what I would do instead. So lots of tidbits in there for how to treat your animals. Oh, geez. What else? Oh, protecting your pets from parasites. So this one started out as an e-book and we said, oh, we need to put it in print as well. And it's actually on Audible and coming out in Spanish very soon.

1:27:59Gary Brecka:Because flea sticks and heartworms are something that panic a lot. Flea sticks and heartworms, which is huge. And it also goes into Lyme disease because that's a big scare tactic as well. So how do we protect them naturally? How do we not use all these chemicals? Do dogs get Lyme? Oh, it's a huge problem. Huge problem. Huge problem. About as big as people. Wow. But they also... Do they respond to the same type of antivirals and antiparasitics? So we use herbs. We use homeopathics. and what's not told to pet owners is a positive Lyme test doesn't mean your pet has Lyme. It means they have antibodies to Lyme.

1:28:39It's like, oh, he was exposed. Maybe he fought it off. It's less than 5 % who are bitten by a Lyme positive test or tick will actually develop Lyme disease. But, you know, everybody gets scared. Does the immune system too?

1:28:51Gary Brecka:Yeah. Everybody gets scared into, oh, you have to vaccinate against Lyme. And I'm like, what about the other dozen tick-borne diseases? the big thing is we have to keep them from getting tick bites so let's just check the dog approach it from a different direction and like I said a good immune system like I have seven outdoor barn cats go down in the woods all the time come you know they play with mice and bunnies and all kinds of things we have deer in our back field if I pull off two ticks a year from seven cats that's a lot wow like they just don't get them They don't get them because they don't taste good.

1:29:31Gary Brecka:They don't taste good. So there's a lot to be said for that. So I'm trying to think if there's any other books. Oh, I have one called Unleashed about dog parks. I have a friend who, John Sarver, who owns Gyms for Dogs, and he designs dog parks and he's built about 2 ,000 in the US. Has he really? Wow. And he's really big into the fact that our dogs are very social and need to socialize. but a good dog park is good and a bad dog park is not good. So he asked me if I would write a book that he could give away to people going to dog parks to kind of say - Yeah, because there's several right around here where I live.

1:30:10Yeah, and they may be good, they may be bad. A dog park is not a chain link fence in a field.

1:30:17Gary Brecka:That's what most dog parks are. Exactly. So a good dog park is going to have a clean water source that's not, you know, where they're sharing a bowl. It's going to have pieces of equipment for the dogs to play on and be active with where they can get multiple levels and climb. And just like a playground for kids, we need toys for the dogs. We need good ingress and egress so that we're not losing dogs. And we need to have separate areas for aggressive dogs. We need to separate the small dogs from the big dogs. So dog parks can be very good. So I wrote that book for him. and now I am rewriting my very first book because I go back and read it now 12 years later and there are some things in there that I said that I'm like, ah, I can't believe I said that.

1:31:06Wish I'd reframed that, right. So I'm like, I need to rewrite this one because I really, really want, it's a great book and it's funny, I remember one of my clients, she had a dog with Cushing's disease and she had bought my book or I gave her a copy when it first came out and this was like a year and a half later and her dog had Cushing's and she'd been coming to me and we'd been working on stuff and treating everything naturally. And she took a trip and she decided that she would read my book on the trip and she's reading out loud to her husband as he's driving and she got to the chapter on Cushing's disease and she was like, oh my gosh, all those questions I've been torturing this poor veterinarian with, they're all in the book.

1:31:49So, you know, that's the goal is we want to educate people And that's our social media and our website is just chock full of information.

1:31:58Gary Brecka:I'll link all that in the show notes. Because we want to empower pet parents. We want you to be able to make good choices and to avoid making toxic choices. Wow. Dr. Morgan, this has been amazing. I know this is going to resonate so well with my audience. And again, the parallels between what we have going on in our food supply and the pet food supply we have going on in our medical system and the pet's medical system, the parallels are just stark and astounding. But pet parents really are empowered to change the entire trajectory of their pet's lives. They are. And they have the resources. We're seeing that change in the pet food industry.

1:32:38Gary Brecka:That's good. We're seeing it in the whole food industry too. Mars and Purina and Hills have all come out with gently cooked fresh foods. That's what they're calling it. After the last 50 years of saying, that's horrible, that's gonna poison your pets. All of a sudden, they now came out with it. Unfortunately, they're using really subpar ingredients and they're charging a lot of money, but they finally got on the bandwagon and said, oh, that little piece of the pet food market is growing rapidly. We better get on board. Yeah. And so, kudos. You're not saying it's all about the money, are you? Oh.

1:33:14Gary Brecka:How dare you? How dare I? Yeah. Yeah, private equity buying up veterinary clinics. You know, it might be about the money. We can go down that rabbit hole in the next podcast. Yeah, that's a biggie. That's a big one. I can see your antenna going up. So Dr. Morgan, I end every one of my podcasts by asking all my guests the same question. And there's no right or wrong answer to this question, but what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? Oh man. I should say, what does it mean to you to be an ultimate pet? But I feel like that would be the first time I've ever asked that one. I love that answer.

1:33:49And to be an ultimate human for me is to honor my God-given talents and to honor that God charged us with dominion over the animals. Wow. And for me, my ultimate goal is to care for those animals in a way that honors them and their lives and we don't do any harm. So that's my goal. And I've spent a lot of years talking about it and I'm gonna continue talking about it because I think we need to make changes.

1:34:26Gary Brecka:Well, of all of the guests that we have had on our podcasts, we have the most number of VIPs waiting to ask you questions in our VIP chat. So if you are interested in becoming a VIP, go over to the ultimatehuman.com forward slash VIP where we do private podcasts with our guests and you can ask them questions directly. But I really hope that you enjoyed this podcast. I have so many notes and takeaways from this. I hope you do too. We'll link all of the subjects, the books, and the guides that she referred to on the podcast. We'll link those in the show notes for you. Until next time, that's just science.