221. Homemade vs. Commercial Dog Food: What You’re Getting Wrong with Dr. Susan Recker

0:00 Welcome back, pet parent. Since I started this podcast and I started having guests on, I created a list of like my I would love, love, love to have these guests on my show and I wish I had been able to find it for this recording with the move and everything. It's somewhere in a box, but I have been able to get a couple of those like, Oh my gosh, I would love to have these people on my podcast list. And today I have another one. I'm so excited. I have Doctor Susan Recker with us today. And first of all, let me just go ahead and invite you on. Thank you so much for being here. Doctor Recker, How the heck are you? Well. Thank you, Jessica, and thank you for the kind words. That's very sweet of you to say and I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for inviting me and I'm doing great. I'm ready to talk nutrition today. So you have done so many things and I know you kind of went through a journey like a lot of other veterinarians have. That's one of the things that I actually really love to talk about when I have a veterinarian on, is like, how did you go from your probably very conventional training in vet school to where you are now?

1:06 Yeah, yeah, it was a journey for sure. And it then the journey continues. Yeah, I definitely had a very conventional beginning. My education was very conventional, as it is for most of us. And I worked in conventional practice for the first, well, most of my career actually. But I didn't start to incorporate integrative things until probably, I don't know, but maybe like 10 years in. And so that happened because of a confluence of different factors. One of them was that I had children and as I was becoming very aware of and concerned about every little thing that went into or onto their little bodies, I started to look at nutrition pretty deeply for people. And then, you know, you'd think that would be an automatic obvious connection that the same is true for for animals, but it wasn't necessarily immediate.

1:57 But not too long into kind of really diving into human nutrition, I was like, well, wait a minute, I think this is probably pretty important for animals as well. And you know, as you kind of alluded to, conventional veterinary training and nutrition is very, very limited and very much skewed towards ultra processed foods. So feeding fresh foods was was kind of new and out-of-the-box and not something I was comfortable with right off the bat. But one of the other factors that came into play at the same time was in addition to considering considering nutrition, I was also starting to become kind of dissatisfied with treatment outcomes in my patients. You know, I would follow the algorithm, follow the book of what I was taught, right?

2:40 And, and what I was taught was, you know, if the animal has condition A and you do treatment B, the outcome will be C Well, that wasn't necessarily always true. And I was very frustrated with, OK, well, I did the treatment and they didn't get better. So what else is there? There's got to be something else. And so that started me to look at some other integrative modalities to try to incorporate into my treatment toolbox for my patients. And so around that time I became certified in veterinary spinal manipulation therapy, which in some states of the country you can call chiropractic for animals, but not in Wisconsin, where I became certified. Yeah, so so I have the the letter CVSMT after my name, which means certification and veterinary spinal manipulation therapy. And people are often times like, well, what does that mean? And I'm like chiropractic, but you can't say that out loud. So and so that that opened my eyes to a lot of other modalities as well.

3:35 And if, if you have any experience with human chiropractors, you know that oftentimes they are very focused on nutrition because that that treatment option very much appreciates and recognizes the connection between food and health or disease. And so that package together really kind of got me started with feeding fresh Food First in my own pets and then I saw obviously a huge change in them and that gave me the confidence to kind of branch out and start doing that with with my animal patients as well. That's amazing. Yes. And it's very interesting about the insight about chiropractors because you said that and I'm like, yeah, especially like in the past five years on social media that not all, but a lot of the doctors that are speaking out that have been speaking out and they're like, wait a second, We've been we've been doing this forever and you guys just haven't been listening to us.

4:30 I've. Been a chiropractor? Yeah, it's true. Yeah. So one of the things that people are more familiar with you on is the animal diet formulator and some of the collaborations that you have had in recent years with Doctor Karen Becker, Steve Brown. When you say you got interested in nutrition like that, that's a that's a journey in and of itself. I feel like I know and I'll just really quickly, I know people who have been listening for a while know like my story has been crazy with nutrition. I go back and forth a lot between, you know, I'll learn something and I'm like, Oh my gosh, this is so complicated.

5:12 And then I'll learn something else. Especially I, I just, I tend to always go back to Doctor Billinghurst because every time I like get in my head, I'll go listen to Doctor Billinghurst and I'm like, oh, no way. This is simple. I need to, I need to chill. So I go back and forth a lot. I I'm just curious, like to hear a little bit more about your journey with nutrition and animals and, and that roller that to me, it's a, it's a roller coaster. Yeah, yeah. And I agree with you. You know, I mean, in some ways it is complex. There are a lot of factors to consider if we're going to look at the total picture. But in other ways, it is simple, You know, I, I'm, I'm always hopeful that the message that I can convey is don't give up because it seems too complicated.

6:02 Anything that you can do towards putting more fresh food in the bowl is a plus. Now, I am a fan of complete and balanced because we do know that there are minimum nutrient requirements. And so my personal comfort level is I need to make sure that if I'm recommending a food to that somebody's going to feed to their animal. I am not going to be responsible for, for that animal having nutrient deficiencies. I'm just not because we know that they can be linked to disease. And I don't want to be, I want to, I want to help promote health. I don't in any way want to promote disease. And so for me, that means I have to be comfortable knowing it's going to meet all those nutrient requirements. But having said that, you know, if you're feeding, if you're at a place where you're feeding kibble, because that's what works for you or that's the only thing you know how to do or that's what you can afford, whatever, OK, great. But we can, we can add some fresh food to the bowl. And that's a good way to start and build your comfort level and get your pet acclimated, all those kinds of things. So that's kind of how I started with with my clients when I first started moving into nutrition. And then the more I learn, the more strategies I develop and the more I focus on different areas of nutrition and what's important.

7:13 So part of my nutrition journey and like you mentioned with Doctor Karen Becker and Steve Brown. So Karen Becker and I are besties, have been for 30 one years now. We met the first day of vet school orientation. We sat next to each other and became besties men and have been ever since. And so we have been great friends during that whole time. We didn't necessarily have a lot of professional collaboration until just the last few years. And that came about because I had the good fortune of living in the same neighborhood with Karen. We were literal next door neighbors and lo and behold, who was my other next door neighbor but Steve Brown. So I got to sit next to Steve at his mass of Excel spreadsheet, which is super intimidating and learn from him how he formulates.

7:59 And then I became associated with animal diet formulator. So ADF bought Steve's spreadsheet and converted it into a cloud based more intuitive program. So I look at Steve's Excel and I'm like, Oh yeah, too much, can't do it too, too crazy. But then the ADF version is something that my brain can can handle and makes it much more user friendly. So this whole kind of people find themselves on one of two sides sometimes the the wing at people and the spreadsheet people. And, and there is a lot of common ground there. If we, if we really stop to think about it, most of us who are in fresh feeding, no matter which side of that, of that spectrum we fall on, we just want to nourish our animals the best we can. That's our goal, both of us, right? And so the wing at people, I would say to them, I get it. You know, we don't spreadsheet our own food. However, when I did that for myself when I first started this journey, because I thought that was a valid point to bring up, like we don't spreadsheet for people. Why are we doing it for animals?

8:58 So I was like, okay, well, I'm in a spreadsheet for myself for a couple weeks and just see how it looks. Well, it was awful. And I think that I eat a pretty varied, diverse diet of Whole Foods. I don't eat a lot of processed food. I eat a wide variety of plants and animal products that are that are responsibly sourced. And I was like, I got this nailed. I'm going to be I'm going to have like, you know, Gold Star for me is what I'm going to see when I spreadsheet my own diet. Well, I did not. I had consistent nutrient deficiencies that even though I was eating a variety of foods, I wasn't necessarily nailing some of those deficiencies. And so that for me was the aha moment where if we're rotating foods for animals, but if we're rotating between foods that share the same nutrient deficiencies, that animal will always have those one or two or five nutrient deficiencies. And so that was the, the cue that for me said, OK, I fall more on the spreadsheet side because I need to know that I'm meeting all those requirements.

10:01 But the, the pitfall that's easy to fall into on that side is, is getting like super granular and going out to like 3 decimal places and being like, OK, well, I need .001 more milligrams of this to meet the nutrient requirement. OK, well, is that really, is that really like accurate? Because if I if I have two carrots, they're not going to have the exactly identical nutrient profile. There's going to be some natural nutrient variability. If I have one package of 9010 beef from the grocery store and another package from another store or even another package from the same store, they're not going to have the exact same nutrient profile. So that nutrient data that we use is a good starting point. But for me, it's also not like the Bible where I'm like, no, this has been 4 milligrams of zinc per 100 milligrams. Well, yeah, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but that's kind of a good ballpark for me to look at to have a starting point to to make sure that I'm meeting my goals. So I have no idea if I answer the question that you just asked me and I went off on a big tangent. Is OK, You're so, so brave to spreadsheet your own own meals. There is zero chance.

11:14 First of all, I don't think I would have like the bandwidth. I just be like, by the by the first night, I'd be like, Nope, this just isn't this isn't worth it at all. I think I could, I could do it much easier for my pets and I could myself. I just be like, no, I'm just not all that concerned like at. Well, I just have to, in the spirit of Full disclosure. So now I know that I have nutrient deficiencies. Did I do anything about it? No. I'm making sure that my animals have none. But if I am I making sure that I have none? Not all the time, no. So no, I know and it's it drives me up the wall because I feel like I do so much for me, like personally and not even talking about my animals. I do a lot for them too, but like for me, I feel like I do so much and I literally take because I, I am not one, I am not the girl to be eating organ meat, but I will take like desiccated organ supplements And I, I really try to be very particular about making sure that I'm getting these things in my body.

12:17 And, and I still, I still am struggling with some deficiencies and I'm like, how, how is this happening? It's driving me up the wall and I'm about to throw, throw in the towel. But yeah, you know, and to your point earlier, as someone who does, you know, I do work with clients with their dogs and their cats. It is a really weird like position to be in where an honest, I'm just going to be really honest because I tell my clients this all the time. Like it kind of depends on you as to where I'm going to go with how we're going to feed your pet. Because there is a part of me that feels like this obligation that everything has to be every bite that this animal has to eat, you know, needs to be AFCO complete and balanced and meet all minimum nutrient rate.

13:12 And then, but then there's this other part of me that's like, we're going to kill ourselves for trying to do this all the time, like at home DIY, not necessary. You know, we, we rely on commercial brands, which is something else I, I would love to touch on because you were one of the panelists in the inside scoop talking about all these different brands that, you know, they were asked to, to provide full nutrient profiles and all the things. So that, so that the inside scoop could give an overall rating of what they would love to see your pets eat or, you know, best food, quote UN quote, all the things. But if we're not relying on a commercial brand, which I think that series in and of itself, if anybody watched it or even heard about it, we kind of know that Hopefully if you get nothing else from that series, it's not to feed the same food over and over. It's not to feed the same brand over and over and over again, but to actually DIY food for your pet. Like you.

14:15 I feel like as a pet parent, you have to decide like, am I going to be that like completely anal, everything needs to be perfect person or am I going to be like, this is good and I'm going to do something different next week and that's going to be good and we're going to we're going to make this work. That said, when people do that, like more balance, balance overtime type model, What do you obviously it's going to be vastly different from person to person, from animal to animal. But what are some of those like really common deficiencies that that you see in dogs specifically when people are just like, I'm going to rotate through things week after week and hope for the best. SO in fresh food diets, I would say the most typical deficiencies would be, and I'm going to, I'm going to list a lot here because most, most of the time it's not all of these in, in any one person's plan, but the common threads that I see generally speaking, so magnesium, potassium, manganese, iodine, vitamin D, vitamin E, thiamine, choline, sometimes linoleic acid, if people are really like afraid of too many Omega sixes.

15:39 Sometimes they view the opposite way and their animals actually deficient. And then EPA DHA. So quite, quite a few common deficiencies, unfortunately. Yeah. And I being somebody and I want to talk more about the animal diet formulator in a minute, but being somebody that has like I have used the animal diet formulator for 2:00-ish years now, maybe a little bit more. I do notice a couple of those are really difficult to meet AFCO minimums with like manganese, vitamin E. Those are just some of the ones that I'm like, these are things that I'm like, that is like, where are we getting this from?

16:21 How is how is the average person making food at home for their pet? Like, how are we gonna do that if if we're using Whole Foods? Yeah, yeah. I'm currently I'm visualizing about 5 different rabbit trails that I would like to go down based on what you just said. So I'll pick a couple and you just interrupt me if if needed. The first thing is the data we're using impacts that too. So like if you're formulating using USDA ingredients, your recipes might always show as deficient in iodine and deficient in chloride and deficient in choline because a lot of times USDA does not give values for those. So even in ADF if you, if you plug those those ingredients in, but they're USDA ingredients, there is no value for, there's never a value for iodine. There's oftentimes not a value for choline. So the first thing I would say like if you're using ADF and you plug that in, you're like, I'm not, so I'm deficient in choline.

17:14 Well, look at your ingredients. Is there a choline value listed? If there isn't, are you truly deficient in choline? Maybe, maybe not. We don't know because we don't know what the choline level is of that particular ingredient. So that's one thing a Whole Foods recipes are really challenging to meet for less active animals. And most of our pets in the US are less active and we don't think they are because like for example, my own dog, I have a 5 year old golden retriever, we walk for about an hour a day. She's actually very inactive in terms of what category I would choose for her to formulate in based on the number of calories it takes for her to maintain her body weight. So people are like, yeah, I walk for an hour a day.

17:55 We're super active. Yeah, that's actually like super inactive in terms of formulation. And so that's the first thing is, you know, don't don't be offended by the activity level label that your pet falls into. It's not an indictment of you as a pet parent not providing enough activity. It's just based on what does that that calorie outlay actually look like in terms of their metabolic need. But the less active your pet, the fewer calories they need to maintain their body weight everyday, the more nutrients they need packed into that package of calories. So that leads me to the biggest can of worms that I'm going to maybe open here today, which is AFCO. AFCO, I just discovered this.

18:37 I'm, I'm currently writing an article for the Journal of Integrated Veterinary Therapies on nutrition for less active pets. And I did a deep dive into AFCO looking for what their calorie guidance is. Well, they don't give any, and that's a problem. The reason that's a problem is this. They set a nutrient profile. They're like, OK, here's the nutrient levels that have to be in this food to be complete and balanced. So let's just say I'll just make up numbers here. So let's say the nutrient profile says that you have to have 20 milligrams of zinc in every 1000 calories. Great, OK, we got it. At no point do they say, OK, so the dog has to eat this many calories to ensure that they get that amount of zinc. So like this 40 LB dog needs to eat 1000 calories and therefore consume 20 milligrams of zinc every day, complete and balanced for zinc. Great.

19:22 They don't say that. So they're like, Yep, put that much in the diet. Well, what if your dog is only eating 600 calories per day? Then they're not getting 20 milligrams of zinc per day, they're getting less. So there there needs to be a connection between not only how many, how much of every nutrient is in that diet, but how much of the diet is the animal actually eating. You can say that the diet is complete and balanced to AFCO, but if the animal is not eating the energy intake assumption, then they're not getting that full amount. So go ahead. Well, and that's very interesting and I know like we've talked about, we've been talking about this for a couple of years now I'll probably.

20:03 Certainly because of the work that you've been doing when as a veterinarian, but when veterinarians very, very often say, especially with cats say cut the amount that you're like, please buy this beautiful bag that is sitting behind my counter from whatever company is I probably learned from in cotton cotton veterinary school. Buy this beautiful bag and it says to feed a cup of food a day. But your cat is overweight because there is no enrichment in your home, so feed half of that. That is a huge problem. Huge, huge. Well, and and there's there's so many layers to the problem.

20:45 First of all, the bag says feed a cup a day. Is that necessarily tied to the level the food was formulated at? Nope, because AFCO doesn't require that either because they don't set and energy intake guidelines so they don't require that. The feeding directions reflect that. So first of all, we're behind the 8 ball there. The amount that it says on the bag doesn't necessarily provide all the needed nutrients because they can set the feeding guidelines at whatever they want. Then the next thing is that the activity levels and it's, yeah, most indoor kitties don't get a ton of of structured activity. But even if they did, even if you're playing with your cat for an hour a day and they're, you know, running zoomies and you've got those cool shelves on your wall and they can like, you know, traverse your whole house up at ceiling height, you've made like a awesome jungle gym for them.

21:34 They're probably still not eating at the energy intake assumption set by NRC, who was the one that actually set those nutrient levels that AFCO bases off of their calorie recommendation is super, super high. And it actually aligns more closely to today's pets that would maybe like an outdoor barn cat in Minnesota in the winter. That kind of calorie intake is what those nutrient levels are really set for. Yeah. It's. Such a huge difference because you're burning so many more calories to stay warm in Minnesota in the wind. Oh my goodness. That's crazy. No wonder all of our cats are fat. Exactly, exactly. And to your point then when, when, and I was guilty of this too, we'll just feed less, keep feeding less until you see weight loss. Well, lots of micronutrient deficiencies happen. But for cats in particular, what happens is protein deficiency. And you know, we've all seen those, those older kiddies who are just wasting away and they have like no muscle mass on their little limbs anymore.

22:33 But the, the other important muscle we have to think about is the heart. The heart is muscle. And so when we're not supplying protein, we are really leaving those animals at risk for a lot of bad things to happen, heart disease, frailty, all sorts of stuff. That is, we're not doing them any favors by just feeding less of an inappropriately formulated food for that activity level. Yeah, yeah. What, what, what, what do you think? What do you, I mean, I'm you probably don't have the answer and that's totally fine, but what do you think? What is what is your train of thought on like what we should be doing? There needs to be a revolution. I mean, like big is what needs to happen. Like, you know, I so don't get me wrong, I'm glad we have AFCO. I'm glad we have something like if there were no guidelines at all, that would not be good.

23:24 But what we have is not adequate and it is not serving today's pets there. There are a very small percentage of dogs and cats in the US whose intake energy intake level actually aligns with the intake assumption of AFCO. So for those dogs doing 3 hours of agility a day or those cats who live in the barn in Minnesota, Afco's got you covered. For the other 99% of animals in the US, it's not enough. And so there needs to be guidance for commercial companies to properly formulate for these less active animals to make sure that they're getting their. So NRC set metabolic requirements.

24:05 If you look at the body weight of an animal, you, you then calculate their metabolic body weight and NRC says, OK, they may need this many milligrams of this nutrient per metabolic body weight, doesn't matter what their activity level is, but that's how much they need. Those caloric profiles are based on that. But again, they're based on super high activity level assumption. So let's make some new caloric profiles that are more suited to less active pets. So that's what needs to happen on an individual pet level. If you are making your own food, you can do that. You can formulate an ADF or in another tool by setting that activity level much lower and generating the nutrient profile according to that metabolic need. It is possible to do you're you're not going to get there by winging it though, because like we were mentioning, a lot of whole food sources are not that nutrient dense in terms of amount of nutrient per calorie.

24:57 That's where we run into problems like vitamin E Vitamin E is a fat soluble vitamin, so it's found in higher fat foods. So if we're going to add enough of that food to meet the vitamin E requirement, we have now added a ton of fat calories which then dilutes out all the other nutrients if we look at them on a per thousand K Cal basis. So yeah, there are a lot of factors at play here in terms of why aren't I meeting these nutrient requirements. Those are some of the reasons. So I mean, I get why people are like, I'm just going to wing it with my tongue. I get it. I get it as a veterinarian. What are some of the signs, some of the more obvious signs that a pet parent could actually see physically in their dog if their dog is undernourished?

25:46 That is such a tricky question for a couple reasons. 1 is that there's very little research in this area. There's very little research to say what are the ramifications of long term chronic nutrient deficiencies. Like for example, in less active animals, we know what they are for growth. Like if you don't provide enough nutrients during growth phases, there's some pretty, pretty obvious signs of disease and inappropriate development in adult animals. It's often times much more insidious and you're not going to see it from a couple of months or a couple of years even of feeding nutrient deficient diets. But if we look at the rise of chronic degenerative disease in our pets, how much of that is tied to chronic nutrient deficiencies?

26:28 I don't know the answer to that, but I think it's an important question that we need to be asking. And from my perspective, if we can take that off the table as a cause, why wouldn't we? Like if, if chronic protein deficiency is, is contributing to heart disease or if chronic phosphorus excess is contributing to kidney disease, why wouldn't we take those things off the table and get the nutrients lined up where they should be? And then we can look at, OK, well, if we're still having disease now, where's it coming from and what can we do to address it? But if we know there are gaps, my school of thought says I'm going to fill those first. And I think, again, not being a veterinarian, I could be totally wrong about this, but I think it's even harder to see these things in our cats. And I think part of that is we, I mean, we talk about it all the time, but realistically in a home, it's still difficult for people to not to look at their cat and say this is a completely, totally different species from my dog and not look at them and treat them the same way. Yeah, yeah.

27:34 And so I know I keep giving kind of vague answers to this, but I don't know how to do it any differently. If there's anything that that isn't right. Like if you look at your Kitty and you don't think my cat looks like the picture of health. I mean, you know, she's she's lean and well muscled and shiny coat and she's got bright eyes and she's got tons of energy. If any of those things are not true, I, I can't tell you for sure that there's a nutrient deficiency, but I would sure look at it. You know, like if the, if the, if your cat's itchy or has hair loss or is shedding a lot or just has kind of a dry coat, or if they, if your Kitty looks like a middle-aged man with a beer gut, like spindly legs and big belly.

28:19 You know, something probably nutritionally not ideal if your kitty's just not as, as active, if they're reluctant to, to be jumping up and down or they're not doing the things that they normally do. Or if you see any GI signs like is there vomiting? Is there diarrhea or Constipation? Huge problem in cats. Is there a change in, in their eating habits or their drinking habits? Like any of these things, anything that's different or if you picture a totally healthy cat in your brain and your Kitty does not look like that, I think it's just worth asking the question, is there something that isn't optimal? Maybe there's not, you know, like there's there's a wide range of what's normal and maybe your Kitty is just built in a way that's not what you would conjure up in your mind as that ideal.

29:08 But I just think it's worth asking that question. Is there something that is not being addressed or something that could be optimized to help my cat or my dog? Yeah, I actually, I told myself over the past handful of years I'm not not doing cats again. For a while I've had there. There's such a big commitment to me, even though Jay and Adrian yell at me every time I say this. They are much harder than dogs. They are much harder than dogs. And I have just like all of my cats have been they're, they're, they're seniors, they're older. I just lost my 17 year old. I have 216 year olds right now. And I'm like, no more cats.

29:50 Well, the universe said, ha ha, try again. I was on my way driving EU Haul back from Texas and stopped for a little pit stop. And this little kitten was like, Nope, you're my family now. And I know, right? I, you know, my cats that I have now the 1st 7:00-ish years of their life, 6-7 years because I, I started with my dogs before I moved over to my cats to try to get them on better foods, get them healthier, remove all the chemicals, all the things. So the first like 6-7 years of their life, they really were raised conventionally. They got every single vaccine as soon as the card said it was time.

30:36 They I, I was in Virginia for most of their early life, so they were dewormed quarterly. It I mean, like I did all the things they were on, you know, three different types of Royal Canin food, because that's what my vet said what they needed to be on. I did. I thought I was like the best pet parent in the world, right? Cringe now, but. But you were according to what you knew at that time, right? Like you were the best pet parent in the world working with what you had. You were. True, true. I I do cringe now, but this little kitten I do like as much as I'm like, man, why am I starting over with a kitten?

31:17 I at least now I'm like, this is going to be kind of cool to see how he's going to grow up to see the differences in health outcomes and quality of life. Knowing what I know now and starting him from like literally, I will tell. We were in like what I would consider a food desert where we stopped, where we found him. There were first, there was zero chance I was going to like a big box pet store, but there were no indie pet stores around. Only grocery store I could find was a Food Lion. So I'm like the best of the worst and you know, feeding this kitten ground beef from the grocery store, I'm like, what else do I do?

31:59 Right? I'm not going to put kibble in his mouth. So he's been great so far. He is just loving life on. I have in the three, not even 3 weeks I've had him, he has tried like 5 different brands of commercial raw foods. Like we're going to get him on like the best I can can possibly do. And so like this is, I will say, as far as cats go, I'm really, really like crossing my fingers on this one that that we're going to see much better health outcomes. Because with my previous cats, I definitely felt it even with the two that I still have now, like I'm seeing what I did to them in the first almost half of their life coming to like I'm seeing the outcomes of that later in, in life where some people may not connect those dots. And maybe I'm over connecting dots, I don't know. But like, to me, I'm seeing what all this has done, done to them. And so cats.

33:04 Yeah, cats. Well, I'm really glad that the cat distribution system saw fit to bring you a new Kitty. Apparently, apparently. OK, so the animal Diet Formulator, ADF, we've talked about it a little bit here and there already, but can you just kind of give me an overview for people who are not at all familiar? They're like, what the heck are you talking about? What? What is this? Yeah. So Animal Diet Formulator is formulation software to formulate complete balanced diets for dogs and cats. We're geared primarily towards fresh food, but we do have some commercial users that that can make kibble using our formulation software.

33:46 That's really not our our thrust or our focus. So we have a lot of commercial companies that make fresh food using our formulation software. We have a professional tier where veterinarians and nutritionists use our software to make recipes for their clients. And we have an individual tier for individual pet parents who want to make complete and balanced diets for their dogs and cats. And you can formulate to AFCO, to Fetty F and to NRC. So you can choose which one of those nutrient profile standards you want to use. Again, I'll make a plug for formulating to Fetty F because you can choose an activity level there and generate the appropriate nutrient profile based on that activity level. Feti F, just like NRC gives minimum metabolic requirements.

34:27 So that's why we're able to do that there. Feti F doesn't even acknowledge that's a thing. So if you choose to formulate in AFCO, then what you get is Afco's one and only adult profile, Afco's one and only growth profile. There is no customization for activity levels with AFCO. So for most people listening, if you're considering using ADF to make your your animals diet, I would strongly recommend choosing Feti F to formulate in there. So the formulation software where we'll help you make that complete and balanced diet, it'll offer you suggestions if you're like, oh gosh, so I'm deficient in magnesium. How do I add that? The software has tools that will suggest ingredients, whole food or supplements to help you make that that diet complete and balanced. So I know a lot of different people use the ADF software. One of the things that I thought was really cool when I saw you at Super Jutsu a couple months ago, you had actually put together a presentation for Indy pet stores to use it alongside commercially available diets.

35:30 Because there are a good number so far of these smaller fresh food companies that are like, yeah, please, here you go. Like we, we want this information out there. We want to be transparent with our customers and we want people to have fun with it and add things to it and make their pets bowl even better, which I think is great. But that's I don't know if you want to elaborate or what I just said. Yeah, yeah. And that that is one way to mitigate some of the problem that we talked about earlier with foods, commercial foods being formulated to AFCO and not always being appropriate for less active pets in ADF. We have entered as ingredients commercial foods, as many as we can get a complete nutritional analysis for. And so let me just say shout out to those companies who just put it right out on their website who are totally transparent and they're like, yeah, this is what's in our food. We believe that you deserve to know what you're feeding your dog or your cat.

36:30 Here are the nutrients they're getting. But there are some companies that don't do that, but they have provided us a complete nutritional analysis when we've requested it. And so for foods where we have a nutrient analysis, we have entered them into ADF as ingredients. So if you have an individual subscription, you could go in and create a recipe where one of your ingredients would be a commercial complete and balanced AFCO food. You would put that in. And then when if you're using Fatty F and you're set on the appropriate activity level, you can see what the deficiencies might be for your less active dog or cat. And then you can use ADF to suggest other ingredients that would fill those gaps. And they might be other commercial products like in the video that I put together for Super Zoo, I had used a complete and balanced air dried food, I think it was. And there was a deficiency in, I want to say it was potassium. And then I used a commercial fresh greens blend to fill that potassium need.

37:28 And there was a deficiency in I think maybe tryptophan and amino acid. And I used some freeze dried beef heart to fill that deficiency. So you don't have to totally home make or cook your your animals food. You can can put together a combination of commercial products if that's what's better for you to make sure that you're filling those gaps. And it can be a hybrid. So maybe you're, you're feeding a commercial food. You look in ADF, you see the deficiencies and you're like, well deficient in choline. I'm going to add an egg yolk. OK, well, there you go. You know you can, you can do a balance of commercial plus additions from your kitchen to make sure that that food is totally meeting the needs of your animal. So you have a lot of options depending on what works for you.

38:12 I love that. And I just want to quickly run through, you talked earlier about how if you're using just a USDA typical value, you might not have a complete nutrient profile just because the USDA doesn't provide it. And that is when you are using a commercial food that gives you that full nutrient profile like you don't, you don't have that, but like because they're testing which is not inexpensive to do. Yeah. Well, and that's, that's a good point. Not all companies are testing their food. Some are and some aren't. So the complete nutritional analysis that they give us might be from tested data or it might be from formulated data.

38:58 And so we're using whatever the company is providing as here's what represents our food. And so that's up to the company to determine how they want to represent their food. Now in an ideal world, yeah, they would be doing nutrient testing on their food and not just once, because anyone test is not necessarily representative, but it would be a compilation of four or five or ten tests over a period of time that would give a more representative look at that. But like you said, that's that's expensive. So if we can at least have some idea of what nutrients and are in the food, whether that's formulated or from one test, that's certainly better than just guessing. And there are a number of companies out there that say give some line a hooey, like we can't divulge that it's proprietary. Well, yeah, nutrients aren't proprietary. I'm sorry, your formula might be. And we don't need your formula to put it in. We just need to know what the nutrient levels are. Yeah, that makes so much sense.

39:54 One of the other things that I often forget but is in the animal diet formulator or sometimes are notes. On ingredients, and I think that's kind of a cool thing that that you guys do that people don't necessarily have to remember everything all the time. So are there, are there ingredients, maybe just a handful that you're like, yeah, you could use this, but I wouldn't want you to use this? In terms of nutrition or or data or. In terms in terms of like, yeah, this food may fill in some gaps for you, but like I wouldn't really love for you to feed it to your dog or cat.

40:35 Well, yeah, what I mean without, without throwing specific products or brands under the bus. I, if I read an ingredient label and it's all meat meals and synthetic amino acids and a whole line of synthetic vitamins, minerals, very little in the way of recognizable food. Like if, if, if you were able to see every ingredient laid out in that food and not a single one of them are something that you would look at and be like, I could pick that up and put that in my mouth. Like none of it on the label is food. Does it meet the essential nutrient requirements? Sure. But is that something that I would consider ideal?

41:16 No. And the reason for that is the reason I, I believe in fresh food is that I think the the matrix in which those nutrients are delivered matters. Yes, one of those foods like I just described has the appropriate levels of calcium and magnesium and iodine and vitamin E and tryptophan. They're all in there, meets all the criteria, checks all the boxes. But do those nutrients in isolation behave the same way in the body as they do if we're giving them as amino acids coming from meat and magnesium coming from seeds or vegetables? Yeah, I'm, I'm just not convinced they do. And I think there's a lot about nutrition that we don't know yet. And sometimes we talk about the dark matter of nutrition. So like all those essential nutrients we know that dogs and cats need, that's great.

42:04 I'm willing to bet there are other things they need that we don't know about yet. And if we're feeding foods, I believe the chances that we'll be delivering those other mystery things that we don't know they need yet are higher than if we're feeding a food that is just a compilation of synthetic essential nutrients that meets just those ones that are listed in AFCO and nothing else. Yeah. No, that makes total sense. I mentioned earlier and I don't want obviously you to like go into people need to go to the inside scoop to see what all of that is about. There was a whole series, I think was it the second annual one that they had done this past year on. They were rating basically a bunch of different commercial food brands.

42:48 Course some brands didn't participate. Other brands were like, yes, here, here's everything. I want you to look at it, Tell me what's going on, which was really cool. And I don't again want you to like go through all of that. People need to go to the inside scoop to see that. But I have a lightning round that maybe people could kind of get an idea of what your experience was going through that process that I would love for you to just quickly or as quickly as you would like, answer just a few questions. So what do you feel in a commercial food? What is the most overrated pet food claim? Overrated pet food claim. Probably natural. What does that mean?

43:28 No one knows? Yeah, nobody knows. Nobody knows. What is, in your opinion, the most underrated whole food to add to a commercial diet? As part of the commercial formulation like the company would put it in or pet parent adding it on top. Oh, I like both. Let's do both. OK, OK, let's see. So most nutritional bang for the buck that a company might add. Boy, I'm torn. There's so many. I'm going to, I'm going to focus on protein as a major group and I really like heart. Heart. Sometimes people think of it as an organ, which it is, but it's muscle. So I count it in my brain as muscle meat and it's tends to be very nutrient dense. So I'm a big fan of Heart.

44:16 So if a pet parent just is feeding whatever they're able to feed at the time, but what do you think as a Topper would have the most thing for their buck? If I have to pick one, I'm going to go sardines. And the reason I'm going to go sardines is the EPA and DHA. So even if if you're feeding a say a kibble and maybe there is salmon oil or some other EPADHA source in that kibble, chances are very good by the time you get to the bottom of the bag that that EPA and DHA is rancid. And so then it's no longer having the same benefits. So if we can add fresh EPA and DHA and I don't mean that you have to go catch your own sardines like you can use canned sardines, but that's still going to be fresher EPA and DHA.

44:59 If you open that can that morning and put a sardine on top of the bowl, that is going to be much more biologically beneficial to the dog or cat than eating rancid salmon oil at the the bottom of the kibble lag. OK. So excluding equality omega-3, because that's what you just talked about. What what it is one supplement that you're like, yes, add this. To the food, in terms of being beneficial to the largest number of animals, I would have to say digestive enzymes, that the ability to make digestive enzymes decreases with age and there are very few animals or people who wouldn't derive some benefit from digestive enzymes. Is there a supplement that you feel like a lot of people use that you're like play stop?

45:45 Gosh, I don't know that it's super common, but the one that always makes me cringe a little bit is just a vitamin mineral supplement because oftentimes it's added without knowledge of what's in the base diet. So then we can add end up with actually nutrient excesses, which can be toxic. So that's my least favorite thing to see is when people are like, I'm, I'm feeding this and then I'm giving this, this and this, including this vitamin mineral supplement. Yeah, Well, and you, you kind of touched on this a moment ago with the bottom of the bag of kibble, but I had Judah Vital on the podcast and he did like a Omega-3 for Dummies course on the podcast. And he had it has it so drilled into my brain that if you are, if you are for me, if you're supplementing an Omega-3 and it is in a pump, that it's very quickly going to go rancid. And he's like, if you're feeding a rancid fish oil, you'd do much better to not feed a fish oil.

46:42 And I'm like, so that is such a pet peeve of mine anymore. Like please stop feeding rancid fats. Yeah, that's a good point. Rancid fats are are worse than no fats and fats are important. Like I'm not. I'm certainly not saying don't feed fats. I'm just saying don't feed rancid fats. Right. Yeah, Yeah, OK. What is your hill you're going to die on when it comes to nutrition for dogs and cats? I mean, I think it's going to be what I said earlier when I said there needs to be a revolution. We need to be providing adequate nutrition to less active dogs and cats, which is all of our dogs and cats. It really is, isn't. It really is.

47:22 Yeah. I, I'm also very have become very passionate about in that revolution. I feel like in the animal diet formulator, I think is in its own way doing this or trying to do this. But I feel like we need different nutrient requirements for those companies that are using synthetic premixes and fresh whole food companies that are like we're using none or very minimal synthetic additives. That's to me is a totally different ball game. It is, unfortunately, we don't have any data. Like there's no, there's no established, there's no studies that say, OK, you need this much magnesium if it's synthetic, but you need this much of its natural.

48:09 No one knows what those numbers are. Yeah, but that would be amazing because, because like you, I bet they're different numbers. I can only all of the code like you talked about all of the like Co nutrients that are in real food and things that we don't even know about that we, I don't know, maybe in 100 years we might know about more things, but we just don't. We don't know it all because we're not God. Yeah, exactly. Oh my goodness. Is there anything I didn't touch on that you're like, no, I want to talk about this? Gosh, you touched on everything. That the one thing that I just occurred to me, I didn't really mention much. I alluded to it when I said cats and Constipation is a big problem. Fiber.

48:51 I just, I guess that's another hill I'll die on. Like fiber, super important and everybody needs fiber. Even our obligate carnivore kitties, they still need fiber. There's a lot of cats walking around out there functionally constipated all the time because they don't get enough fiber. Moisture is the other part of that. Those two things go hand in hand, but fiber is a big one. Yeah, No, I agree. And I think I honestly don't know what is or isn't in the ADF in this regard because I just have never used it this way. But so many people feed like fur and feathers and I don't know if that's in the ADF as far as like nutrients, but but that is something that I think people, the average pet parent may overlook.

49:34 DIY raw feeders generally are not going to overlook that, but it is it can be a really important component, especially in an obligate carnivores diet. For sure, for sure. So there is not data for that in ADF because we have not found any. If anyone has tested fur and feathers for nutrients, we would love to have that data and we will totally put it in ADF. And so that's an important part. But the other piece of this is so the fiber is important. That's that's insoluble fiber that you're talking about that bulks up the stool and helps with elimination. Soluble fiber, fermentable fiber is also incredibly important to feed those gut microbes and so that we're not getting from the fur and the feathers. So you can be feeding a whole prey diet that is still deficient in the right balance of fibers. So sometimes I'll hear people say that like you'll kill your dog or your cat if you're feeding vegetables or fruits and that's just not true.

50:29 The only way that we get some of those beneficial polyphenols is from plants. So if we're not introducing plants into the diet, we're missing out on a whole host of bio active polyphenols and other things that have really powerful effects in the body in terms of preventing cancer or being protective for organ function or helping detox or just assisting with basic metabolistic functions. We get those from plant polyphenols. And so plants are not the enemy, but we can incorporate them within the framework of what's biological appropriate for that cat or dog. So I can make a recipe for a dog and one for a cat that are very similar, just that the Kitty version is going to have smaller amounts of all of those same fruits and veggies and seeds that I put into the dog recipe.

51:17 Now I know even like my cats they if I bring some cat grass out they're all over it. They will go out if they go outside, which my 1 cat has decided. He has figured out how to, he's figured out how to get outside. He goes, he goes for the grass. He's like, yeah, I want some grass. My cat will hunt a roasted asparagus off the the pan every time. And, you know, I mean, she gets super excited about it too. She'll she'll grab it and then she'll run off with it in her mouth and she makes that sound like I have just come back from a successful kill. You know, she's like, and I'm like, yeah, you got an asparagus, didn't you? And she'll that's. Adorable. That is adorable. Oh my gosh.

51:58 Yeah. My our new kitten, his name is Camden. He is in that learning stage. He's learning a lot from the other older cats around him, but he is still very like you give him a treat, especially like a high value. I don't know what in my house is in high value. Honestly. I'm like between the, the duck treats and the, the like wild boar tree, like what in my house is on high value. But he is just like he's, he's so tiny and ferocious and he will get it and he growls and he will swat at you and just like he's like all in on the treats on the floor.

52:38 Oh my gosh, buddy, we need to teach you some manners for sure. I love it. I love it. I love that growl that's like, this is mine, I got on this. It's adorable. Anyway. Kittens are the best. So I know, right, OK. So in general, the ADF could be for anybody whether you are formulating and you consult right for commercial food formulators. And for individuals. So a lot of what I do at ADF is consultation for individuals and for veterinarians and for commercial companies, yeah. That's amazing, but really it's for just about anybody, from a pet parent just wanting to feed their own individual pet all the way up through a company trying to feed a population exactly of animals. That's amazing.

53:31 I love it. So people can go to animaldietformulator.com. That's it. Check it out. Yeah, yeah. Is there anything else that you want to plug? Do you have like I know you said you have the CIBT podcast you do and. Yeah. So, yeah, so CIBT, the original podcast there is the integrative veterinarian and Doctor Neil Civila hosts that and he interviews veterinarians who do anything in the integrative animal health space. And my podcast is kind of the spin off of that and it's called the Integrative Animal Health Collective. So I'm interviewing not veterinarians, but anyone else in the animal health world who's doing something in the integrative space.

54:12 So it's semi regular approximately it's released approximately 1 to 2 * a month. And it's we're fairly new. I think we have maybe 10 episodes so far. So more to come. Yay. Well, I appreciate everything you do and all of the education that you have out there, everything you participate in because this is a, it's important Again, I, I go through these phases of like, I'm pulling my hair out. This is so complicated and like this is easy so. Me too girl, me too. I definitely can find myself getting in the weeds in the in the animal diet formulator, but I appreciate it nonetheless. So thank you so much for being here. I can't wait to to see you in person again and just excited for everything you have going on. Thank you so much for having me and thank you for everything you're doing.

55:06 And yeah, looking forward to seeing you again. Awesome. Well, thank you for being here, Doctor Wrecker, everybody listening. Thank you for being here for this conversation. I just want to say how much I appreciate you, especially this year has been a tough one. But yeah, we're going to keep going. We're going to keep doing all the things with all the incredible guests coming up throughout the rest of the year. And give your pets some extra love from me and from Doctor Susan Wrecker this week. I'll talk to you next week.