Why The Dog Food Industry Is Killing Your Pet

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1:02Welcome to the Unprocessed Truth. Today we have the dog nutritionist, otherwise known as Cam. Yeah. As your real name. The dog nutritionist works just perfect. There is only one. There's more than you think, but not that many. Not enough. So tell me, how did you become a dog nutritionist? What's your story? What got you into this? It's quite a long-winded story, as you can probably imagine. People don't just fall into becoming a dog nutritionist that easily. I had very much a normal job in the city until I was like 21 and got the opportunity to set up a dog running business with a friend of mine which just leapt to that opportunity because I couldn't really work in an office.

1:40I wasn't built for that commuting and went to do the dog running thing, had the best time. So what did you do? Did you just pick up people's dogs, go for a run, drop them back off? Yeah. Amazing. What a job. It was such a good job. It was going around all the expensive areas in London, picking up people's dogs and charging them far too much money to take their dogs for a run, but they seemed to pay it and the dogs had a great time. We had a great time. And, yeah, being that young and running around London was fun, but it wasn't the most sustainable of jobs, given the fact I was covering about 20 miles.

2:20Oh, wow. So you were running a lot. You must have been fit. I was very fit. But naturally, when you're looking after someone's pet, you become a bit of an authority to the owner around what their pet should be exposed to, whether it's food, training, just general parts of pet care. And that's how I kind of got interested in the nutrition part. Also, one of our runners who was a good friend of mine, he got cancer, stage four cancer. and we were like 24, you know, known each other for... He had stage 4 cancer. Stage 4 cancer at 24 and we were... I'd known him since he was 7 years old. And it was such a shock when you're that age, you think you're just like nothing.

3:05Yeah, you think you're invincible. Invincible. He had to go through chemotherapy in the standard kind of old-fashioned or just the standard procedures. but the doctors had prescribed him a diet that was like pasta donuts bread to fatten him up because he was going to lose a lot of weight and he was just like i think this is crazy and we talked a lot about it and then he went to see a nutritionist who put him on a completely different diet plan and he made an amazing recovery alongside the standard therapies but it really opened my eyes as to what we were feeding the dogs because the amount of kind of highly processed brown like meat biscuity or meat sludge based foods was pretty shocking and also like i had to pick up all their poos as well so as you can imagine i got an insight into digestive health bad food bad poo so that was how i got into the but so then i mean is there a qualification so So not really.

4:09It's extremely limited the amount of decent qualifications you can get. A large part of that is due to education within pet health is extremely limited. So you can get a veterinary degree. Within the veterinary degree, they do one module, one lesson on nutrition. And that nutrition module is sponsored by the big pet food companies who are owned by Mars, Nestle and Colgate. So they just kind of tell the vets what or which of their products they should recommend. The majority of my knowledge comes from I decided to go and help dog owners because I didn't feel like there was a voice there. They weren't being told the information they needed to keep their dog, one of their best friends, their family member healthy.

4:58And then I kind of had this responsibility around what I was recommending. So I put in the work into researching individual cases. And on a very general level, I felt very confident about what I was doing, which was I was taking dogs off of these highly processed food diets, putting them onto fresh foods, and they got healthier. It didn't really matter too much what issue they necessarily had. a diet that you recommend to a sick dog isn't vastly different to that of a diet you'd recommend to a healthy dog there are certain tweaks you'd make which i am far more aware of now than i was don't think you need a qualification to take dogs off an ultra processed food diet and on to a real food diet right it just in its basic principle will make the dog a lot healthier a hundred percent i think the issue becomes when you're working with dogs that have health issues owners are looking for that type of advice it becomes a little bit trickier but to be honest you're moving from such a poor base which is this dry meat biscuit meat sludge and just recommending okay here's some fresh meat fresh veggies it doesn't really need to be rocket science the reason why I wanted to have you on cam is because I watched a TED talk probably about 10 years ago before I I got my first dog, Misha, who's now nine and very healthy.

6:22But in that study, it suggested that we were shortening dogs' lives anywhere from five to seven years, depending on the breed, because of the diet they're eating. So we are killing our dogs dramatically younger by buying just standard pet food. Do you agree with that? Five to seven years is a huge amount of time. There are different breeds that live for different ages. so it can depend on the type of dog you have smaller dogs will live a lot longer than larger dogs on a basic level how much does nutrition play a role in health i guess is the question that you're asking so if let's say an average dog lived to the age of 13 you're saying well they could have extended their life by 50 percent had they been eating fresh food what does that look like in human terms if you live to 60 eating just mcdonald's could you have lived to 90 eating fresh foods potentially yeah i mean the jury's out right we don't have the exact science there's tons of other variables involved for sure you know to me that was an eye-opening moment that made me go oh shit i'm never buying dog food it is so bad dog food like the majority of dog food is so bad that it would not surprise me at all if it was the case that an owner could extend their dog's life by around that that number of years there are so many other factors that dogs are exposed to that shorten their lifespan so i mean they're not necessarily nutrition related but they are one of the most over vaccinated species on the earth which is ludicrous and then if you add on to that breeding standards so that has also had a dramatic effect on life expectancy within dogs so we're seeing pedigree dogs go from just 10 years ago living to around i think it was somewhere around 13 to now being 11 so their average expectancy is dropped by a huge amount just in the last 10 years i saw a study the other day saying in the uk french bulldogs are living to around five to six years old just because of breeding nutrition and the other you know deworming vaccinations well so let's roll it back a little bit what's so bad with dog food then in simple terms it's the cheapest possible ingredients that they can put together a meat meal powdered meat the meat that they're powdering can be dead or diseased animals it can be zoo animals in certain cases when you get into the category of animal byproducts that can go into pet foods it gets a little bit dark as to what exactly those animals like a zebra died in the zoo and they're just like right off to the process and also in american dog foods they've found traces of the drug that they give to dogs to put them down in the foods they found traces of those drugs and a large part of the problem is just how bad animal byproduct processing is so when you go to a plant they're not exactly the cleanest of institutions but a lot of those meats that are not allowed to be consumed by humans can go into dog food so you've got the lowest quality meat how it's processed to then sit on a supermarket shelf for a year and a half is, well, it's cooked to within an inch of its life.

9:59They add a huge amount of preservatives and additives to the food. And then if you look at the actual healthy ingredients that they include, whether it be blueberries or vegetables, how much of that blueberry and vegetable survives being cooked at 300 degrees for four hours? Not a lot of it. So when most of us look at the ingredients label on the back of the pack, they'll see the additives list is like this long, enormous. And that's because dog food companies are required to meet a certain nutrition. And the way in which they do that is not through food ingredients. It's through these synthetic supplements, vitamins and minerals that they're adding to match that profile.

10:43So your dog is eating the lowest quality of ingredients in the most highly processed form. and they're getting actual vitamins, minerals and trace minerals just from synthetic supplements, which have also been exposed to that heat. It's like a human eating no whole foods in their diet, no fresh food, no vegetables, no meat. And then they're recommended to often not change your dog's food once they're settled on one. They tell us to eat a balanced and varied diet and then our dogs have to have the same brand for the rest of their life. It's just the game of marketing food products to people who are vulnerable.

11:23Dog owners are much like first-time mums, or they have that weight of responsibility to do the right thing for something that they don't fully comprehend yet, or they at least can't communicate with. So they put a lot of faith into brands, to certain pricing structures, and keywords on the pack. So like you see it all the time in human food, like natural or silly words that mean absolutely nothing. But to us, because we kind of know that they don't mean anything. But to the average person when they see healthy chicken dog food with a smiley dog on and it's really expensive, they don't look at the back of the pack and realise it only has 4 % chicken in it.

12:07And what's the rest of it? Well, it's like beet pulp, rice, potato, maize, corn. Like the cheapest stuff they can find, basically. You'll see things like derivatives of vegetable origin. Have you been to a dog food plant? Have you seen some of this stuff in action? No, I've never been. But it kind of looks like this enormous manufacturing facility. It doesn't look like a kitchen. But, you know, so, okay, let's be optimistic. Sure, there's some bad stuff. We have lots of bad stuff in the supermarket. We have lots of good. Are there better options out there in the supermarket that you would feed dogs?

12:45Pre-made dog food in the supermarket doesn't really exist. What about the frozen stuff? Part of the issue with the frozen stuff is that they are required to be put into a separate freezer to human foods because of that meat quality issue. So you don't often see pre-made frozen foods in supermarkets. they have started doing them in a few places you just need to be careful because there's a particular brand that labels itself as fresh food it's just processed food that they whack in the fridge right so there's no regulation on the word fresh so just by putting it in the fridge you can call it fresh even though it's not yeah so they they get these lovely fridges and they call themselves fresh pets i've seen them yeah we can name and shame it's fine yeah it's just not good quality food so most of the time you're not going to find good fresh pre-made dog foods in the supermarket it is so easy to just make your own dog food where do you think the system is broken then because you mentioned veterinary groups and the studies they go on are funded by the dog food producers and you know as a new dog owner i can remember i knew nothing about dogs i didn't have them when i was growing up you know you go to the vet you have your vaccinations you get told this and they usually show you a food brand that's in the thing and go, yeah, this is good dog food.

14:09What's happening there? Because most of us don't know. There's certainly information failure somewhere in this line of picking up a dog from a breeder or rescuing a dog to taking it home, feeding your pet. I personally think that starts with the way in which vets are educated. There is literally just no training in nutrition at veterinary college. so when an owner goes into the vets and asks for advice they can't really give any and the training that they do get being from these big companies means it's hugely biased it's like they get purina pamphlets and it's like this is the vet's choice this is the vet's choice so it's healthy because it's the vet but the vet didn't do any nutrition education these companies also have partnerships all over the world with breeders so they'll give the food to the breeders at cost price they'll then provide puppy packages and pouches to give to new owners that have all this information about nutrition so owners are seeing these authorities within dogs breeders veterinarians feeding this low quality food recommending it to them and therefore they're comfortable putting their faith in these authorities that they've made the right decision so I think it's hard because you don't just want to say blanket don't trust your vet because it's just at some point you're very likely going to need to trust your vet if something goes wrong with your dog but when it comes to nutrition advice within the pet food industry there isn't really much good advice going and owners just need to be aware of that give me some of the issues that we see outside of obviously the early death rate we've talked about but you know obesity rates in dogs, cancer rates in dogs.

15:58What are you seeing? Cancer affects dogs more than any other species on the planet, even ourselves. More than humans? More than humans. That is incredibly troublesome. Obesity, the numbers kind of fluctuate. Apparently it's one in two dogs in the UK, but that does change. One in two? One in two dogs over the age of 10 will get cancer. One in two will get cancer, one in two are obese. Yeah. That's scary. The number of allergies that's massively increasing, but we don't really have figures on that. But if you look at just kind of the top 20 issues, health issues suffered by dogs, you could probably point to around maybe 16 of them which are connected to diet.

16:39It depends on the breed, obviously, but that's scary because obviously the TED Talk I was referring to was Rodney Habib. If anyone wants to go watch it, it's phenomenal. But I actually hadn't considered, like I was just thinking about my dog's longevity but actually what you're saying is there's way more to this than longevity it's actually how they're living their life today with one in two potentially getting cancer and one in two being obese which is wild what do you think the main causes people are not necessarily as aware as they should be around how much food affects the strength of one's immune system on a on a very general level and how much your immune system or your dog's immune system does to prevent inflammatory issues and degenerative disease.

17:29So that could be arthritis, it could be kidney disease. But cancer as well, right? Like the immune system's function is not just to stop you from getting a cold. It fundamentally every day is going around your body. And if there's cells that are malfunctioning, replicating in a way they shouldn't, the immune system goes, cleans that up. So the theory is everyone will have some form of cancer in their life, but your immune system goes and deals with it and gets rid of it. And that's what you're saying the process is we're kind of interrupting. We're not nourishing their gut microbiome like we should be.

18:04Therefore, their immune system isn't working efficiently. And that is leading to a major decline in the health of dogs. I mean, it is so sad, right? Because they're our best friend. They're part of the family. So what are you trying to do to raise awareness? I'm trying to get the unprocessed truth like yourself out there in docks. And it's just maybe 10 years, 15 years behind where human nutrition is. So there's a lot more work to be done. And in terms of the amount of people that are in this space, it's a lot less than human nutritionists. So I'm just trying to get the message out there to as many people.

18:42Get your dog's fresh foods. Don't be scared around your dog's diet. because of that weight of responsibility that people feel over their dog, they're not exactly eager to start making simple meals for themselves because they put the pressure on themselves that, God, if I screw this up, my dog is going to be really sick. And that is just not the case at all. Because there is a very fear-based thing around that you touch on that's super important because I've talked about it before. I've said, look, I cook food for my dog. I'm not buying dog food. and then people are like, oh, but how do you know that's a balanced, complete meal, right?

19:18So it's like, oh, I don't know. I don't know what a dog should eat. Not going to do it. We kind of outsource it to the dog food companies. But is it really that complicated? Not at all. The dog food companies want you to believe that it is extremely complicated and that you need to fulfil these nutrition requirements, which are absurdly complex. If you look at the dogs that live the longest, so there's like Bobby, the 31-year-old. 31. 31 year old dog. Epic. That lived in some village in Portugal somewhere, just chilling, eating chicken and veg most days. The diet didn't look anything like these complete diets that owners are getting recommended or told rather, they need to achieve this standard.

20:05Your dog is like you, you have quite a large remit to kind of play with when it comes to making your own diet. And that means you have a large amount of room for mistake as well. If you can get certain pillars right within their diet, they're more meat eaters than us humans, so they need more meat. They need a calcium source occasionally because they evolve from bone eating carnivores, wolves eat bone, predecessor species to wolves. They love a bone. Love a bone, give the dog a bone, a raw bone. Owners need to be careful with the size of bones that they give their dog and for it not to be cooked, etc.

20:45But if they can give meat, a bit of calcium once or twice a week and an occasional bit of organ meat, their dogs can be super healthy, even chucking a bit of fish occasionally, even better. Dogs are scavengers, scavengers originally, right? So it wouldn't have been that they got consistent meals all the time. No. scavenging opportunistic carnivores don't get consistent meals all the time and one thing they definitely don't do is eat frequently so overfeeding dogs in terms of frequency is a huge driver of that obesity and potentially the cancer because like you said the immune system is activated more when they're not in a state of digestion but how many times a day should a dog once just once one main meal and you can give a few treats and things like that there was a study called the dog aging project 35 000 dogs in the study they found that dogs fed one meal a day were less likely to get cancer kidney disease liver disease suffer from urinary disorders neurological conditions pancreatic problems metabolic diseases pretty sure most people do like breakfast and dinner don't they they should implement at least the intermittent fasting routine for a human which is either skip breakfast or skip dinner so breakfast and lunch or lunch and dinner if your dog's a major foodie because different dog breeds have or some have this genetic predisposition to be hungry all the time so you want to kind of work with dogs like that you don't want them to be miserable yeah so feed them two meals but like shorten the window a bit so lunch and dinner or breakfast and dinner but not yeah all three throughout the day for sure But I mean, arguably, if you feed them one meal a day, it's probably going to be a bit cheaper.

22:28Cooking your own dog food is presumably more expensive, I think most people would imagine. You know, what do you say to that? How do we approach this from not only a health perspective, but also like an accessibility, affordability point of view for people? I mean, it's really tricky telling someone, if you don't spend this money on your dog's nutrition, you are the one that's personally liable for their sickness in the future. Well, you'll pay the vet bill. You're not just paying the vet bill, but you are responsible for this living thing that is going to get sick and potentially die at 50 % less of the age they should be living to based on your decision.

23:15That's kind of like the harshest reality of that choice. I think that was an interesting thing out of the TED Talk. You didn't have to be absolutist about this. The dogs that lived the shortest ate purely ultra-processed food, dog food. But actually dogs could get those years back and live longer by just adding some fresh, real food. From as little as 20 % of their diet coming from fresh, natural foods, they can get some health benefits from that. You could crack an egg in your dog's bowl. If you don't eat the stem of your broccoli, you can just grate that in. If you don't eat the top of your carrot, you can chuck that in.

23:55There are so many things that... The leftover veg after chopping the end bits, you can just make it affordable. Food waste is one of the biggest contributors to environmental change or CO2 emissions in the food industry as a whole because we throw so much of it away. So actually, just those leftovers or whatever. Could you feed your dog leftovers? like if you make a 100 you need to watch out for onions chives and salt so not too salty but just focus on the meat yeah the meat is the best and a bit of veg whack that into their bowls but also on the price point this is the thing i love about the supermarket the most is the most nutrient dense food in there is still the cheapest which is liver yeah right and it's there no one likes the taste of it no one eats it enough but your dogs love it you know so i you know i cook my own food for my dog as i say but i mix it up one week i'll just do it with minced beef the next week i'll get lamb's liver then i might get some kidneys or whatever and it's cheap two three quid for 500 grams of meat yeah i've got a small dog so it lasts about five to six days yeah to be fair my local butcher does dog food which is pre-feased frozen rolls of like all the offcuts, heart, liver, whatever, they just can't sell.

25:18They blend it up, freeze it into these tubes. And it's five pounds for a kilo of like this solid frozen slab of meat. And if you're going to buy a kilogram of pre-made dog food, it's going to cost you more than five pounds. So all you need to do is take what that butcher's provided, which is a high quality, great source of meat, mix in some fruits and veggies, cook it if you want, And you've pretty much got a meal. OK, so this is another point. Raw dog food versus cooked dog food. It honestly does not matter. The point is that the hot, fresh whole foods are the thing that matters. And then the dog world is really quite strange.

25:58We have these kind of factions of owners that are balanced trainers versus reward-based or you're cooked or raw. Carnivores, but in the dog world. It really is. So, I mean, raw is arguably more natural. No animal can cook. Yeah, fair point. But, I mean, my dog's a Cavapook, small breed. Tried her on raw and basically had to take her to the vet because she was vomiting up blood. And I was like, oh, my God, what's going on? And he was like, yeah, she probably can't handle raw food. Potentially, it could have been that there was some bad bacteria that just didn't agree with her gut microbiome batch.

26:37There was bone in it as well. If the bones were too big for her, it could have maybe caused a little bit of trauma within her gut. Okay, so what are you feeding... You've got a dog, though. Yeah, I love. So what are you feeding her? She gets raw food, a mixture of meat, organ, bone, and vegetables, and fruit. Very simple. It's probably about five or six different ingredients. The one most people know is like butternut box, right? Is that good dog food? I don't think so, no. Everyone thought that's like human-grade, healthy dog food. It looks like meat and vegetables. It does look like it. They have a load of lentils in their food.

27:14And from what I understand, they sous vide their food. So I'm not, I'm just, I would never feed my dog a food that's been cooked in plastic. But what's the problem with lentils and carrots? It's just, they're more filler ingredients. Like your dog isn't going to be able to properly break down lentils. so a lot of people who feed their dog button-up box will find the lentils when they package their dog's lovely poo and put it into a bin. And carrots are great, but just in the quantities that I think button-up box use them, it's too much. So they're around 60 % meat, which is pretty good. Ideally, it would be 75, the sweet spot for a healthy dog, but it's more just the issue with how they go about preparing the food, which I have a problem with.

27:59But I mean, that's something that sucks for everybody, right? Because even like the Uncle Ben's rice in a plastic pouch is pasteurised and it's to lock, you know, kill the bacteria. They cook it in the plastic bag to sterilise it and make sure nothing gets in. So it's, that is a whole scary world of microplastics. It is a scary, scary world. We can't get into this, this is a whole nother top of a conversation. No, the closer you look with the magnifying glass. It's worrying. You spend so much time researching food that it becomes easy to find more and more problems with it. Let's get into some of the kind of classic dog myths that dog parents might be worried about in terms of like, okay, dogs and chocolate, what's the deal?

28:43Because my dog has eaten chocolate. Dogs and chocolate, tell me about it. Tell me about it. I mean, honestly, like it happens, right? We all have chocolate at home. I eat chocolate all the time. And the dogs love it. They go mad for it. And if you drop a piece on the floor, it's gone in a second. but how worried should we be? There is actually an amazing website which will tell you, if you know what chocolate your dog has eaten and roughly how much, it will tell you the likelihood of them getting poisoned. Oh, really? And basically, the darker the chocolate, the worse it is for your dog. The more dangerous.

29:14So if they get into a little pot of cocoa, go to the vets. It's so funny because you get people on my videos, I make these videos being like, don't feed your dog chocolate, it's poisonous. And then someone will go, but I've been feeding my dog chocolate for years, and they're absolutely fine. And then everyone else will be like, you're killing your dog, that's crazy. The truth is kind of somewhere in the middle, like chocolate isn't going to kill your dog if it's just not over-consumed and not too dark, but it can be dangerous. So it's very individual cases rather than blanket. Like I say, a lot of those owners will feel such a weight of responsibility to just do the right thing, they immediately go to the vet, and that is okay unless you're getting your dog's stomach pumped.

29:57It's just not necessary. What are some of the common things you see dog owners do wrong aside from the food or like ingredients? You mentioned onions can be tricky. Like is there anything we need to call out? Aside from the ingredients, it's just the overfeeding. The frequency of feeding is such a big issue. That's the biggest problem. Yeah, I reckon. Just feed your dog one meal a day or two meals within that six-hour window if they're a Labrador or a Beagle or any of the other breeds who are just genetically hungry all the time, retrievers. But then how do you know how much to feed them? Because I think that's a lot of people's worry is, oh my God, are they still hungry?

30:37I mean, dogs always pretend like they're hungry and bark whenever there's food around. Like you can't avoid... The scavenging opportunistic carnivore is always opportunistic. It's ready. Yeah. It's ready for a bite of your sandwich, your chocolate bar, whatever, right? So how do you know how much to feed? Because there are obviously feeding guides and stuff, but it's confusing. Your dog is athletic. You are feeding them the right amount. If they are chubby, you are overfeeding them. We use something called the body conditions score in dogs, which will literally just show you a shape of your dog, varying degrees of width, effectively, to these dogs.

31:12It's a bird's eye view down. And if your dog is kind of square and not in at the hips, they're chubby. If you can just feel more fat than you should, then feed them less. So it's really that simple? Once you've decided to feed them fresh food, which you know is kind of balanced in terms of the protein, fat and carbs, then just feed them less or more depending on how athletic they look. Are all dogs athletic though? Because between breeds, some are more bonkers than others. or is it really that just every dog should love to run outside? Every dog should have definition in their hips. Okay. So they should come slightly in at the hips and if they're not, that's where they stuck their shirt on the hips.

31:57Shirtly, always on the hips. A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips. Precisely. Okay, so it's that simple. That's how you would judge how much you feed your dog. Yeah. It's a crazy topic actually. I'm really fascinated by it because obviously you know me, I've done so many videos about people's health, but I don't do much on dogs and pets, but I'm passionate about it. It is a problem. And obviously I've already taken steps and feed my own dog food, but you criticised my food. I did. You did. I was one of the haters. You were one of the haters when I talked about the dog food I put out there.

32:34I'm curious. Well, and listen, firstly, I'm open to the debate and conversation. I'm always open to learn. So just for those who didn't see that, tell me about it. What was I doing wrong and how do I fix it? From what I can remember of the recipe, it was a little bit more simple. You boiled the beef and then you put it in the sweet potato. It was just all in one pan. Really simple. I can't be bothered with two pans. I'm just putting it all together. If someone fed that recipe to their dog every single day, there's a chance the dog could be healthy. There's also a chance you're missing something.

33:05and you could have made one or two very small tweaks to that recipe which would have made it a sustainable meal for a dog to eat for pretty much their whole life they'd obviously need a bit of variety here and there but if you'd made those one or two tweaks i would have been like that's perfect so what were the tweaks i think if you included a bit of organ meat and a calcium source those two those two things i would have been like so you're getting all the vitamins from the organs and then the calcium but it's tricky you know the feeding requirements are something that kind of blurs the lines as to what dog owners should really be doing but if you look at so many case studies of dogs if you just give them similar meals to what you are doing they're going to be perfectly healthy anyway what about like omega-3 for joints or glucosamine for dogs you get now which has crushed up shells right because a lot of dogs have joint issues what do you think about those two things fish oils are dodgy i think a lot of them in the pet space because it's not the same stuff we're buying for our fish oil consumption no they've done studies on the quality of fish oils in the pet space and found a considerable amount of them are rancid oxidized have a load of heavy metals in it.

34:23So I think it's better just buying your dog a tin of sardines in water and giving them a couple of those every week because it's food as well as a supplement, so you're not double spending money. One meal a day, but what about snacking, treat culture? We love to give our dogs a treat. It's like, oh, they've got to have a treat. They've been so good. Sit, treat, there you go. Is that a good idea? I think that if you are feeding your dog fresh food, you can treat a dog with whatever, as long as it's not too frequently. So the treat is the bargaining chip of a dog's life. If they do something good for you, you give them a treat or you're rewarding them.