212. What Does Holistic Mean?

0:00 What does holistic mean to you? I find this question so incredibly interesting. I try to remember to ask it as often as I can on the podcast to my guests. And I have some answers from some people, but I don't always remember to ask them. And what I did this year at Super Zoo. So we can talk a little bit about what Super Zoo is in a in a minute, but I asked just about everybody I came into contact with what holistic means to them. And the reason I did this is because we all kind of have a little bit of a different view, a little bit of a different idea of what holistic means to us.

0:41 I was actually pretty surprised that there was a common thread amongst almost everybody. Couple of them stood out, but there was kind of a common thread. And I wanted to put this together first. Let me say if there are any issues with the audio, we were on a very loud trade show floor. So I apologize for that. I promise it is worth it to listen through all of the everybody who answered this question. And I just want to say that I am so grateful for the community, for the healthy pet community, which by the way, Lauren with girls, Girls Gone Raw, she, she calls it crunchy.

1:26 So I think that's what we're going to do from here on out is that I'm going to try my best to remember to call it the crunchy pet community because I love that so much. But we, to me, I think integrative is the best approach. And but even to be integrative, we have to have a good understanding of what holistic means because we're pulling holistic in to allopathic and kind of combining them in really cool ways. Doctor Katie King is being one of the one of the most amazing vets I know, really doing incredible integrative work. But I want to present to you a bunch of people, not everybody I didn't get around to everybody. I wish I had gotten more, but it is what it is and what holistic means to them.

2:17 And then at the end, I have something a little interesting to tell you. Hi I'm Jamie Smith, I am the CEO

5:32 and Co founder of Innovative Pet Lab. And what holistic means to me is looking at the whole pet and the whole person, figuring out the root cause and guiding forces of treatment. Hey, this is Nicole with. Small batch. What is the definition of holistic? To me, I think holistic means really considering mind, body and spirit of the being at hand. If that is human or animal, how do we consider the needs of each of those major facets of their existence and take make decisions from their point of view?

6:19 Are we really considering the needs of that species? Are we looking at the individual's genetics? How do we combine nourishing mind with proper enrichment activities? Exposure to new environments? How do we look at nourishing the body? It is giving a species appropriate food. It is. Healing from the inside out and spiritually. How do we interface with all of the creatures on the planet? Our companion pets are the ones we spend the most time with, but as a brand, Small Batch puts so much care and concern into supporting farms that raise livestock with the most reverence for the animals they raise. Being considerate of all of the pieces of the puzzle when it comes to balance energetically on the planet, right? Everything and everyone is interconnected. So are all of our systems.

7:26 Can we take a little bit from each side of the coin, each side of the spectrum? Combine Eastern with Western. Forward. Thinking with traditional it's being open to finding a little bit of everything for each individual creature to best serve their needs. Hi, my name is Rita Hogan. I'm a clinical canine herbalist and holistic means to me really coming together to treat the whole body in like with a residence and frequency that improves every cellular structure in the body.

8:07 And I think the baseline is demanding better, being better than the status quo, making products and giving information that provides a basis for individuality as well as full body support. OK, so ladies, what does holistic mean to you? Well. Well, hi, I'm Carissa with Coco Therapy. I'm Carmina with Coco Therapy. Holistic to me means looking at the dog like whole totally. So you just don't like look at 1 issue like the ear or why they're itching.

8:49 You see their diet, you see their lifestyle. So you kind of look at the dog as a whole. And for me, it means happy long life because you're just not just addressing their health, their food. You're looking at their well-being, their mental state, emotional state, their stress level. And to me, it means trying to give them the happiest, longest life you possibly can. Thank you, lady. Hi my name is. Jeff Duray and I'm. Co-owner of Plug and Hound Pet Apothecary holistically minded pet store in Geneva, IL and what holistic means to me is. Whole food, very simple. Whole food was the way to go, so start there and everything else will fall in.

9:38 Line Hi I am Maria Ringo I'm the co-owner of Carnivore. Carnivore is a wonderful pet food for dogs and cats. What does holistic mean to me? When I think of the word holistic, I think of how it is. It's so overused now on anything and everything. But honestly, what holistic is, is a basic, a basic being simple and natural and complete in the body. I wonder if that makes any sense. But that's what I think of when I think of holistic. It's so overused and it's such a commercialized word now that when I think of holistic, I think, oh, these people that don't tell the truth on their packaging. But what it really is is a consideration of the wholeness and the oneness of everything.

10:45 And that's not so easy to explain, but if you get it, you get it. It's a respect for the whole. So. We pull it all together when we are being holistic, when we are thinking of something holistically, we're trying to pull it all together, Consider all the parts, all the corners. That's what it actually means to me. Hi, my name is Billy Hookman. I am the Vice President of Nutrition and Communication for Green Juju and holistic to me is finding the baseline of health before you potentially need supplementation or medication. So we should be able to find a good health baseline with food based items. And then if you we need medicine or we need supplements later, then we move in that direction.

11:35 But I don't think you can find that baseline or start to improve health until you start with food and then move to that eventually so. Hi I'm Janine from project. Studs and what does? Holistic mean. To me, when I think of holistic, I think of more about a whole body meant of holistic instead of just about what we eat. And I'm very particular about what I eat, what I keep my dough, but I also think about the environment and what we put on our bodies and what we clean our house with. To me, it's all-encompassing about not only our food, but everything we use. Hi, I'm Alyssa from 4 Legger and I've been asked to give what the word holistic means to me.

12:20 And I would say my answer comes from a background in occupational therapy where we're a very holistic oriented therapeutic rehab part of the the therapy areas for humans. And so to me, holistic means that you consider the entire being and that you can't just separate out, for instance, with people, their work life from their self-care life from their leisure life. It's all part of who they are. And if one has a breakdown, then they all have a breakdown either indirectly or possibly directly too.

13:02 So with our animals, the same is true, so that if a dog has a gut problem, then they probably have a skin problem too. And it's important to try to get both of them resolved so that your your dog is as healthy as they can be as a complete being, not just as a part of whatever happens to be sick with them at the time. So very important to make that distinction because between our animals, just because I think we've gotten too much focused on treating symptoms and not really focusing on what the entire problem is and trying to address it from the underlying factor that's causing it in the first place. So there's my answer to holistic and I hope that's helpful. Thanks.

13:56 Hi, I'm Doctor Chris Bessent. I've been a veterinarian for gosh, 37 years now. I've treated 10s of thousands of veterinary patients and the question for me is what does holistic mean to me? Holistic means to me at its at its root is looking at the whole animal and that everything is interconnected. So if you have a particular issue, should you be changing their food? Should you be adding herbs? Should you be talking about lifestyle? Should you be, you know, changing something in their life that's predisposing them to whatever's going on with them? And so a holistic approach is looking at the whole animal and understanding how things are all interrelated. And one thing fixing one, just fixing the problem might not be the root of it that you need to fix the problem, but you also need to fix the reason why that problem would occur. And that makes it much more expansive, much more detailed than just the idea that holistic is good and that holistic is high quality kind of nuance or New Agey. It's it's not about that at all.

15:31 It's really about looking at the entire system. My name is Christopher Fox. I am a holistic bed tech. I own pocket hound pet apothecary and holistic to me means addressing the whole animal and looking at things as a whole. So instead of looking at, you know, one body system or the other, holistic to me is looking at the animal from from a larger frame of view and addressing everything as a whole. Hi, I'm Doctor Odette Souter, I'm a holistic veterinarian and I was asked to answer the question what holistic means to me, holistic, basically the word itself means whole, means everything.

16:15 So to me, holistic is really using everything that we have available. Obviously as much as possible, more natural things would be ideal, but it doesn't really exclude conventional medicine, conventional tools, because they are part of that too. And sometimes animals do need that for their quality of life. Basically knowing that they're in a lot of pain or if they need surgery or whatever they need, sometimes we need to use that. So holistic does not exclude conventional medicine in my, in my view, but certainly holistic also to me means really addressing the root cause, the foundation of things, and not just taking the 1 pill for an I'll and converting that to 1 supplement for an I'll approach because that's the same thinking.

17:03 So holistic also means thinking in a way where you're basically looking at the body and how you can improve the function because anytime there's a, a symptom, it means something is not functioning quite the way it should. And so restoring that function then takes care of the, of the, the symptoms. So for me, holistic is really figuring out and asking the right questions. So what's happening first? Why is it happening? And then we can ask how do we fix it? So holistic is really about it's, it's a bit of a mindset, it's a bit of a approach to really understand what's going on that is causing the symptoms because symptoms are really just kind of the body's, you know, red light that comes on like in your car, you know, your check engine light.

17:56 So it's not, there's nothing wrong with the check engine light, right? You have to figure out what's going on or what's wrong underneath. So that's basically what holistic medicine means to me, is to really figure out what is going on, why is it happening, and then ask how we can fix it. I am the owner of Green Juju.

19:55 And to me, holistic means the whole picture of health. So it means what we're eating, the stress in their environment, the toxins in their environment, what materials we have around, a lot of things about the environment. And it means when something goes wrong, not looking at treating the symptoms, but treating the root. And where did that come from and how can we fix that from all the different angles? Hi Susan Recker with Animal Diet Formulator. And what holistic means to me is, is taking into account all of the. Factors and. Using all of the tools that are available. And that's going to be a different approach for every patient because every.

20:36 Patient has different. Needs and different circumstances. So holistic to me means maintaining an open mind and being open to learning and trying new things and evaluating the patient in front of me with all its own special circumstances. And not just the patient, but the the pet Nur that comes along with that patient because that's a big part of the picture as well. Hi, I'm Jay. I'm Jay. And together we are. We also don't trigger all the time. Don't say that. OK, this is she can edit.

21:16 She can edit. You'll edit, right? What does holistic mean to us? I think. Holistic with like WH holistic. Holistic means looking at everything from. A bigger. Perspective. Inside out, yeah, right. Like so, so holistic is like a unfortunately, it's like a, like a buzzword, right? Like it's, it's something that like people think is Boo Boo, but it's actually like, how about we look at the entire animal? How about we look at their environment, their their food, health, their diet, everything. How? About we look at all of this and we put it together and that is what we treat. That's the whole.

22:03 That's what we address. Yeah. Holistic. Big picture. So yeah, everybody, everybody, kind of almost everybody had a very similar idea, a very similar thread through everything. For me, holistic means taking into account the whole being, but not just the whole being, the whole of life. So the environment, energy, the whole of the planet. So we can actually take into account, you know, that cattle, that beef that we're feeding or that duck that we're feeding or whatever it is.

22:46 How was it raised as well? That matters so much because of the impact that we have on the planet, but not all, not just the impact that we have on the planet, but also that life force that we are feeding our pets, that we are feeding ourselves, right. When we think about us and, and being more holistic and the energy of that, not just like temperature or Chinese medicine energy, but like the energy energy, the vibrational energy that we are putting in our bodies, that we're putting in our pets bodies. And so the whole looking at the whole WHOLE, that's what holistic means to me. One of the things that Jessica, who is the practice manager at Integrative Vet Care, which is Doctor Katie Kangas's practice, said to me was it would be really cool if you could get to some of these people that we don't normally talk to Purina, Hills, whoever, and ask them what they think holistic means. And I found that to be so interesting. I didn't have time to do that at Super Zoo this year. I just literally the show, show ends and you're not allowed to be on the floor anymore.

24:01 But I what I did find online, I couldn't find Hills having anything about holistic in a in a Google search, but I did find Purina purina.com/articles/dog/health/nutritionslash/holistic versus natural dog food. So this is a blog that they have and it says the terms natural and holistic get used a lot in both the human and pet food industries. Most people how however, aren't familiar with the difference differences between holistic and natural dog food. So they're kind of saying that these terms which are not very clearly defined, if you go back to a an episode that I did not too terribly long ago with Isabel, we did some weekly pet roundups on some of the misleading claims and pet food and what is actually defined and what is not and holistic and natural or not or not, but they're not regulated equally.

25:11 So natural is defined as existing in or caused by nature, not made or caused by humankind. Therefore, a natural dog food implies that the products within are derived from nature and not manufactured by humans. However, USDA, I'm sorry, the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA does not have a legal definition for natural human or pet products. However, AFCO does have a more specific definition as it relates to pet food. A feed or ingredient derives solely from plant, animal or mind sources, either in its unprocessed state or having been subject to physical processing, heat processing, rendering, purification, extraction, hydrolysis, enzyme molysis, or fermentation, but not having been produced or subjected to a chemically synthetic process, and not containing containing any additives or processing aids that are chemically synthetic, except in amounts as might occur unavoidably in good manufacturing practices.

26:17 So per Apco's guidelines, according to this Purina blog, natural dog food products can include in synthetic sources or essential amino acids, vitamins or minerals. That's not how I would want it to be. But that is unfortunately kind of how pet food is. It's it's kind of up for how do you understand it? And a company as big as Purina is absolutely going to get away with whatever they want. What is holistic dog food? Again, according to this Purina blog, holistic is defined generally as characterized by comprehensive comprehension of the parts of something as intimately interconnected and explicably. Let me start that over.

27:00 My goodness. Holistic is defined generally as quote characterized by comprehension of the parts of something as intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole. End Quote. Oh boy, that's a legalese way of saying. Looking at the whole, the medical definition is quote, characterized by the treatment of the whole person, taking into account mental and social factors rather than just the symptom of a disease. Not too shabby. Purina a holistic Continuing on the blog, holistic sounds like a good thing, but it's meaningless when it comes to dog food.

27:45 There's no legal definition for holistic dog food. It's also not regulated by the FDA, AFCO, or the USDA, which regulates organic products. In the pet food industry, holistic is a marketing term used to imply whole body health. Since there's no legal definition of the term, it's used freely without any regulation or oversight. If a dog food label claims it's both natural and holistic, only the word natural has any meaning. So you know, it's it's a pretty short blog that Purina has out, but I actually like the content that's in it. They're just giving the facts though. They are saying that natural can have as much synthetics as they want to put in it, but that actually is true based on the AFCO definition that it can at at.

28:35 So AFCO says is if it's unavoidable in good manufacturing practices. So Purina can take that and say, well, these are our good manufacturing practices. So AFCO kind of leaves it open, and that's kind of the point to let these manufacturers do what they want. Otherwise, I think it's a pretty decent blog, I think. Well, I think it's a good blog anyway, because peering is saying, look, this is how we interpret it, and so this is what we're doing. So they're being at least transparent about it, but I did want to include that because it was about all I could find online for some of these big pet food manufacturers and talking about holistic in general. And I wanted to kind of just put that out there to you guys.

29:17 So I hope this was helpful and I kind of hope more than anything above and beyond anything else we talked about, one of the things that I'm just so passionate about asking people to consider is that, you know, when we when we ask for natural, when we ask for holistic, when we are going back to the earth and saying, I am bringing myself or my pet back to you to help me get back into homeostasis, to be one with the earth again and to use more holistic practices in our pet parenting and maybe managing disease, whatever it is we're doing, we have to get out of the mindset of a pill for every I'll, we have to get out of the idea that, you know, something hurts and we're going to take a pill and it's immediately going to feel better or very quickly going to feel better.

30:18 Because when we are bringing the body back into homeostasis and we are trying to reconnect with how our body should naturally work with the earth, it takes time. And we just have to get out of that mindset that that that pharmacological, just take something. This is going to be quick and easy mindset because that's just not the way it is with natural stuff. Now, if we start proactively with natural stuff, then yeah, it can be great. But when we're already in a disease process, it can be kind of difficult and take time and take trial and error. But at the end, it is so, so worth it. And then again, we can use things integratively as needed to help us get through things that are really, really tough. So if you have questions about that, if you're dealing with something with your pet and you're like, I don't know what to do anymore or, or maybe you're not there think and that would be amazing and you just want to start being more proactive, naturally reach out to me because I absolutely still do one-on-one consultations.

31:30 I am in the process of building a a new website for all of that. So you know, I I'm going to absolutely update you when I have that new website ready. But in the meantime, you can still go to jessicalfisher.com. Check the show notes, it's all there. And again, I want to say thank you to Legacy Biome for being a partner for this podcast, and thank you guys so much for being here. Until next week, give your pets some extra love for me.