00:00:03 Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to The Houndation's podcast. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and this episode is all about understanding dog food choices a little better. All right. I don't really want to do this podcast because dog food is like a weirdly touchy subject. We often feed something for a reason we deem good enough, and then only vary that program if the prices get too high. That's a bad way to look at it. Though it's very common and I'm not faulting anyone for it. I do think it is a good idea to learn about what dogs need for protein and fat and what ingredients are actually beneficial to dogs versus not, which is what this episode is all about. So buckle up, my little pup loving buttercups. When I was growing up in a little town in southeastern Minnesota, one of the things I hated most in life was that my mom forced my sister and I had to drink milk with dinner. I hated milk with a passion. I don't know why, other than maybe when you force a kid to do something, it makes that kid hate that something. It doesn't matter because she said it was full of the good stuff and we didn't have a choice. Oh, I hated it so much, but now I love milk. If I could get away with it, I'd drink milk and chocolate milk all the time. Do you know who else loves milk? Babies? That's who. I bet you didn't see that coming. Babies have an enzyme in their stomach called lactase. Several thousand years ago, that enzyme turned off in all babies once those babies started turning into adults. The need for milk to that point had been a youngster's game. Everyone then was lactose intolerant. But evolution isn't anything more than the constant testing of genetic mutations to see if something sticks and becomes beneficial. In fact, it's not even that. It's just that the mutations happen all the time and are mostly inconsequential when they aren't, and they jive with whatever happens in our environments at the time. Bloodlines change. Just as we artificially select for traits and bird dogs, the world naturally selects bloodlines in the wild. Some of those long dead babies who became adults didn't have their lactasee production and zymes shut off. That's it. They could keep drinking milk into adulthood without getting sick. And Mama Peterson was right about milk having some good stuff in it. Calcium, carbs, micronutrients, and a boatload of protein can do a body good, especially when food is hard to come by and survival is a real challenge. Milk is so beneficial to us on certain levels, and that's the reason ancient people figured out how to make cheese. Processing milk into cheese removes some of the lactose, which made it easier to digest. Our history is consistent with ancestors significant foods like honey, but cheese is up there too, even though it definitely doesn't serve everyone well to this day. The thing is that selective pressure to be able to consume milk through adulthood had a huge survival advantage. And if you think it wouldn't, go sit outside for the next seven days and try to scrounge up your own food from nature. Then have someone offer you a glass of milk and tell me if you would like to drink it or not. But it's not so simple, and it's where the story of our relationship to milk really takes a turn throughout history. In times of famine, especially of which there were many in Europe, people were probably very likely to drink raw milk as soon as it came out of the old spigot. To a lot of people, that would be a recipe for pants busting, shoot clean through a screen door diarrhea that was very likely to be deadly. But for the folks who still produce lac taste, they got the good of milk without urge to blow mud across the landscape. This is when the lactose intolerance thing diverged, and the people who could process milk made more babies than those who couldn't, at least in certain regions. Today, about thirty five percent of the world's population is lactose tolerant. They can drink milk, and they are primarily of European descent. Is there the advantage of drinking milk that there once was? Probably not in advanced countries, but in a lot of places. I bet you that there is still a strong selective pressure at play. We generally need to pasteurize our milk, at least most of us do. But that's a different story. In fact, it's a different story I could tell about that that involves a buddy of mine who is a former heroin addict who on a bet drinks some milk out of a recently deceased white tilt dough and let me tell you something, he went right back to the dark ages, diarrhea wise. And if you do something that dumb, you should ruin your boxers. I think enough about us silly humans slurping on cow and deer utters. What about our dogs. Well, there's a lot of misinformation out there about what dogs should eat and what they shouldn't. I'll say this before I get into it. I don't care what you feed your dog. That's on you. I think it's just a good idea to know what might be a better choice or not, or why we're making our choices. So I feed my labs Purina pro planed Sport because I always have. Well, actually that's not entirely true. They've eaten plenty of different dog foods over the years. But that's my standby because when I got my first real dog, I asked Tom doc and what to feed, and that's what he said. I know it's not exactly a research based decision, but over the years I've had plenty of time to interview veterinarians and canine nutrition specialists and generally it's just some of the smartest people in the dog world, and it has only reinforced my choice again, though, you do you. But let's start with something that people might point out about a dog food choice. Maybe it contains corn and rice. So let's start with corn. We know dogs come from wolves, right. Wolves aren't out there browsing their way through corn fields. They're out there eating the stuff that browses their way through cornfields. A wolf probably wouldn't do very well on a corn heavy diet. Domesticated dogs are a different story, because, well they are domesticated. Twenty some thousand years of coevolution with mostly hairless apes who figured out how to make certain plants grow their food in abundance has spilled over into our four legged cohorts. They've been munching on corn a long time. And it's not just a filler. Corn is a cheap cereal grain that provides fat, carbs, fiber, vitamins, and other stuff. Not only can dogs eat corn and be just fine with it, you know, provided they aren't allergic, but they also glean beneficial nutrients from it. Their digestive systems can handle it, and that's really all there is to say. Now, are there better options for individual dogs, Probably maybe, But for feeding the world's pet population, it is a very good option to add to kibble. Now, what about rice. Humans have been cultivating and eating rice for a long time, especially in some of the places where our domestic dogs really started humming along the bloodlines we see today dogs can eat rice, and we often give our dogs white rice mixed with a little chicken or maybe some tuna when they are not doing very well. White rice is a bland process version of rice that is very easy to digest. Brown rice is a different story because it's not processed, but a can function like corn, complete with the carbohydrate boost. But carbs, as you probably know if you're a human who eats human type meals, you know they're a double edged sword. You can look at the ingredients breakdown of most commercially sold kibble and see that there will be two listed prominently. One is fat, which I'll get to, and the other is carbs. Overloading a dog with carbs is a good way to get the kind of dog that makes your veterinarian sigh when you walk in for some yearly vaccinations because they know they're going to have to have the overweight dog talk again and that once again it might not stick, and also might be taken as a personal insult, as if they suggested, I don't know, perhaps your mother was the kind of woman who would do shady, weird and probably illegal in Utah type of things beneath a bridge for a few dollars of spending cash. Strictly speaking, dogs probably don't need carbs in their diet. They could probably do without, but that's just not a great option for most people. Sugar, starches and fibers provide energy, help with gut health, and at least with complex carbs help regulate blood sugar levels. Growing dogs or dogs with a high energy output often do well with a diet that is at least twenty percent carbs. But what about fat? A lot of us have a weird relationship with fat in our food. If you're old enough, you probably remember the low fat crazin food human food. By the way, producers of food took out fat and sold that as a wonderful healthy option that tasted probably about like what I imagine moose poop tastes like, not good, So they put a bunch of sugar in it, so we'd eat it. And boy, was that a bad idea that we are still dealing with today. Fat is good for us. I had an editor at one of the magazines I used to work for who went on a caribou hunt one time, somewhere very far north in Canada. He said the local Inuit children would ask him about the bull he killed, and their first question wasn't how big were the antlers, but how fat was it. When you live at the top of the world, where the sun has a hard time doing much good for most of the year, you want a lot of fat in your diet because it's more fun to stay warm than freeze to death, and it's more fun to have energy than feel lethargic. Fat is a good thing for us, and it's good for our dogs. In dogs, it's a great source of energy. It makes food taste better, although I have labs so that's probably a non issue. It also does help the body absorb fat soluble vitamins better. That's a big one. Fat can reduce heat loss, store energy for later, and even help conduct nerve impulses. Then you have the fatty acids we hear so much about Omega sixes, Omega threes, and DHA. They all fit into this category. Dogs don't need a ton of fatty acids, but a small amount goes a long way toward overall health and brain development. They can help with coat and skin issues, reduce inflammation, and even promote proper development in the nervous system in the eyes. Fat and fatty acids are good for your dog, and, depending on energy level, output should, according to the Association of American Feed Control Officials, contain at least five percent crude fat for adult dogs and eight percent for puppies. Now keep in mind that is a bare minimum, though, and in working dogs is going to be much higher. The food I give my dogs contains twenty percent fat. That might seem like a lot, but we train pretty hard and we hunt pretty hard. If you monitor body condition and adjust feeding accordingly, it's not a matter of quibbling over the fat content, at least in my opinion. Fat and protein matter, of course. But what about some of the foods that are out there now that are organic or full of blueberries and spinach or whatever. Now I'm not going to say one way or another, but I promise you the pet food market is very interested in appealing to what we like about feeding dogs, sometimes to the detriment of what dogs actually need. If you eat a lot of steel cuts, oats, and blueberries and are very into organic food, you might very well lean in that direction for your dogs. And that's fine. Maybe there are a lot of companies that promote that type of food for dogs, But there is the issue of bioavailability and what dogs really need. Main ingredients that consist of something that used to walk around or swim around makes a lot of sense. Main ingredients that are something we would like to have for a healthy breakfast might not. So let me explain two things. The first is that I've worked in marketing in some capacities for a long time, oftentimes in the fishing market. Now, if you want to sell lures, you don't just sell something that looks like a frog or a minnow, you know the things that fish like to eat. You sell things in wild colors with all kinds of extra components that make it look cool as hell. Now, I have bought almost a million dollars of fishing tackle in the last six months, so I'm not immune to this issue. I just know that a lot of stuff on the racks at your local shield store is designed to catch your eye and not necessarily the eye of a five pound small mouth. This exists in the dog food world too, and it can be powerful marketing strategy. Think about this one. Byproducts? What are they? They don't sound appealing to us. But even though I eat wild game like it's my job, which I guess it kind of is, I don't eat the heart and liver of the deer that I shoot. I save them for the psychos who do. Organ meat just does not jive with me. I hate the texture and I just can't stand it. It's like the adult version of that fricking glass of milk on the table every night when I was seven. Canine's, on the other hand, love themselves some organ meat. There's a reason wolves go to the guts first, and the biggest, baddest alpha in the pack tends to get the liver to himself because it's beneficial as hell. Animal by products is a tricky term though, because does it mean chicken livers or chicken beaks? One is good for your dog, the other probably isn't. It just keeps getting confusing about what ingredients are good for our dogs or not. One thing I think about a lot on this topic is bioavailability, because a food can be chalk full of something that is good for us our dogs, but we're not really able to absorb them, or they aren't. It just passes on through and doesn't give the benefit of whatever it's supposed to do for humans. A great example is spinach. Spinach is a super food in a lot of ways. You might notice that it is full of iron, which was made in the stars at one point and is now in our bodies and actually does us good unless it gets into our bodies via an iron sword or maybe a fence post. That is bad. But tiny quantities are essential, and boy does spinach have a lot of iron. Unfortunately, almost all of that iron is unavailable to us. We aren't built to extract it from those dark green leaves, and so while it's prominent on the micronutrients list, it doesn't matter. You can eat a truckload of spinach or a steak and you're about to get the same amount of iron. Are you getting confused? Me too? A lot of people do when it comes to properly feeding our dogs. Some go the wraw, which is gained in popularity lately, because it makes a lot of sense when you consider that while dogs are omnivores, there isn't a husky out there who is going to eat a Caesar salad over a piece of chicken. But my kids would also eat ice cream for every meal if I would let them, and that would not be good long term. A raw diet seems like the right choice since dogs were wolves and wolves eat a pretty consistent raw diet of animals, but wolves didn't ride or die with us for thousands of years eating animals and eventually parts of plants. The raw diet can overlook that reality, although some people view a raw diet as one that allows for raw meat, vegetables, fruit, and even bones. So again, it's not so cut and dry and can be a way better choice if you expand it a little bit. Now, what can happen on a raw diet depends on whether you're buying frozen food from someone or trying to create it yourself. The frozen options tend to be safer because they cut down in the likelihood of bad pathogens and parasites getting into pups. Home options aren't so safe. Sometimes can also lead to imbalances and nutrition and sometimes tape worms, round worms, salmonella, and other bad actors. This is not to say a raw diet can't be the right choice. Dogs are individuals just like us. I can intermit and fast no problem after years of doing it. But if my wife doesn't eat breakfast, she's not that fun to be around. Some people thrive on a vegan diet, where someone like me would probably not survive a week. Whatever you feed your dog, think about your choices. Are they high energy or not? Does your dog get a lot of exercise and mental stimulation or is it more like a potato that just rolls around your house looking for belly scratches and any food molecules that might have made it to the floor. What is their body condition like? How about their energy level? What about their stool? Health is a moving target in dogs, and a huge component of that is matching our individual dogs with the right food that gives them what they need to be good to go. The marketing speak, you know, it appear to our good nature, but it's just just a part of the game. It really boils down to you observing your dog and understanding what is happening to them physically, while also listening to your vet who while you might get offended by what they say, you can bet your ass they know better about dog health than you and they have your dog's best interest in mind. Think about that and think about coming back next week, because I'm going to talk about dog pause and not only how they're cool as hell, but they are also something we should understand as dog owners. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been The Houndation's podcast. If you haven't got your fix on good content, which, let's face it, we're all just consuming content all the freaking time. Now, Mediator has a lot of options for you. I know you're aware of this feed because you're listening here, but have you ever given this Country Life, the really cool podcasts full of intro resting stories from Brent Reeves? Have you given that a listen? How about Clay's Bear Grease podcast. How about some of the new mediat podcasts that are dropping. Maybe you need a recipe, maybe you want to read some articles about upland hunting. Whatever the mediator dot com has you covered. And as always, I just want to say thank you so much for listening and for all your support. I mean this from the bottom of my heart. Every one of us here at Meat Eatter truly appreciates that, so thank you.