Carbs Make Dogs Fat: The Evidence

Host Jennifer: Well, welcome back to another episode and today's topic. I would truly consider a cornerstone episode for feed your dog facts. And it's really exciting because we're going to be talking about the silent epidemic, killing dogs in America, specifically the link between carbohydrates and dog obesity. And what's important about that is this is actually the very topic that pushed my cohost, Dan Schulof to research and write a book for four years. 

So while I was in college, he was writing a book and in his book is called Dogs, Dog Food and Dogma. And if you have not read it yet, I really would highly recommend you add it to your list. It's very, in-depth, it's very facts oriented just like this podcast. So this is why we're modeling everything after facts. And especially as a doc owner, if you're truly wanting to know the cold, hard facts about what you're feeding your dogs.

So let's dive in, let's dive into the evidence around the how and the why behind carbs making dogs fat. And so I'm going to throw it over to our resident expert, our little science nerd, Dan, we're going to dive right in he Dan.

Host Dan: Hi. Yeah. It's the like this, this link between dietary carbohydrate and obesity or fattening or retention of fats issue. Yeah. Is a, is like you said, it's one of the, um, core ideas that's explored in my book. You know, it's not written as a textbook, it's written as general nonfiction where you, the reader  follows me along in an effort to try to understand these questions or these issues that feel like paradoxes. Like why are more than half of the dogs and cats in America today overweight or obese? Um, despite the fact that we spend more money on them than ever before in the history of the world, we know more about or obesity supposedly than at any other point in the history of the world, obesity is worse for them than a lifetime of smoking is for a person who cuts their lifespan short by like 20%. And yet half the dog, you know, it's just like it doesn't add up. It's a big paradox. How do you explain it? And like you said, at the end of the day where I come out on that issue is that dietary carbohydrate plays a larger, more significant role than the vast majority of the pet owning public and the veterinary community. Um, it says believes is willing to admit whatever, however you want to frame it. Yeah. It's a, it's a huge issue. And I do agree the, what I, as a non-science person, when I first got my hands on your book, I just love how you were able to just walk it through, like you said, in a very, you know, non-fiction way of, it's like stories of connecting all of the dots in a very scientific, but also in a very storied way. But I think I agree that the biggest thing it was a shocker to me is how much carbohydrate content is in today's dog food and why that matters. Yup. So, yeah, exactly. There are kind of a few building blocks that together make up the case against dietary carbohydrate. And one of them in the case against dietary carbohydrate, as a cause of the obesity epidemic among dogs and cats, I should say. And so one of those is the idea that modern day pet foods, um, generally contain far more dietary carbohydrate than had owners realize, uh, generally speaking and way more than, uh, your dog's ancestors ate for anything, except for like the last two seconds of their evolutionary history. Um, for the vast majority of their evolution as a canine species, they had zero carbohydrate, but these days, and I think you have a graphic you could pull up and show or buddy the percentage of nutrition found in the priciest fanciest. Most this is the healthy stuff, EST pet foods on the market. The percentage of that nutrition that comes from dietary carbohydrate is really high typically. Um, there's like a selection you can see on the screen right now. And these are the more, most expensive brands essentially. You know, you have these like premium bagged kibbles and you have what are phenomenally expensive, like direct to consumer, um, start-up brands like, you know, Sundays and spot and tango and all of them, you know, it's like, you're talking at the bare minimum. A third of the product is dietary carbohydrate. Um, and you would never, if you didn't look at the back of the bag, if you didn't look at the numbers, you never guessed that. Right? Because like everything that's on that is called out prominently on the labeling is meat is a Wolf is meat-based language is protein focused claims. And so you would be pretty reasonable in assuming that all these products are like mostly meat with a little bit of carbohydrates splashed in there, but they're not. Um, which is, uh, like I said, completely inconsistent with dog's evolutionary heritage. The reason that this even happens is like super interesting. If you're like a dog food nerd, not sure that that's, if there are any other people that are dog food nerds, it might just be me. But, um, the reason that it is hard, one of the key reasons why it's like, how wait, this doesn't seem, how could, how could this be? And people aren't aware of this, the regulations that govern the sale of pet food in the United States, don't require producers to tell the how much carbohydrate is in the products. So when you look at the numbers on the bag, the equivalent of I have my Coke, zero here, you could see if you were watching the video feed of this, they have the nutrition facts, the FDA's nutrition facts panel for human use products, of course, dietary carbohydrate, total carbs, total sugars. These are like some of the first items on the list. And of course it's something that everyone should expect out of the food they're feeding their dog to. It should know how much is in there, but the, because these products as a whole contain much more carbohydrate than the producer wants you to believe they have linked like basically leaned on the regulators for long enough, um, that they crafted a regime where it's like, no, you don't have to tell you, just tell, tell us how much protein and fat is in there and that's sufficient. And so this stuff flies under the radar really easily. You gotta have. Yeah. The, the protein episode, we dive into like the guaranteed analysis, what that means. And that is exactly what Dan is talking about, where these pet food brands do not have to disclose in any shape or form how much carbohydrate content is within these foods. So literally this graphic, if you're watching the video, make sure it's in the show notes to see this graphic, but it's just sky high. You're looking at 35 plus on average, 40 to 50% carbohydrate content on these products. And these are products that, as Dan said, premium ultra premium, all their marketing is like human grade, you know, in the kitchen chunks of chicken, beef being shown lamb, especially of just as meat first. And it's, it's just simply not when you boil it down. Yeah. Like if we, if we use, like, I don't even know what, like the brand that's sold at like Walmart, or, you know, like, like the cheaper brands are even higher. Like these are not the like cherry picked worst offenders. These are like cherry pick to be recognizable brands that have the consumer perception of like very high quality. There's some of the most expensive ones. These have to be the best. And so it's just to show you the, like, this is something that's super pervasive. This is not, there are very few exceptions to this rule and the rule, you know, like one way, not within a pet food product, some of the things that occupy like the makeup, a lot of the mass don't contain any calories at all. Like there's some amount of water in there. There's some amount of fiber in there, like dietary fiber passes through the dog. It doesn't get digested. So there's no calorie content for it. But among the things that do contain calories, carbohydrate, fat, and protein carbohydrate in almost every case is the most prevalent nutrient in pet food. So it's like, when you say carbs are the backbone of the industry, it's a literal statement. That's like, that is by far. If you took all of the pet food in the United States and put it on one big scale, the vast majority of the nutrition in that product or in that collection of products comes from carbohydrate. It's the backbone of the industry. So that's kind of like the first building block is like, okay, let's establish that when it comes to how dogs in the United States are eating today, one of the most important things to acknowledge can't be denied is that carbohydrate is a really common thing. It's the most prevalent nutrient consumed and it's brand new to them as it on a species, on an evolutionary level. These guys have been consuming this nutrient at all for, you know, the, a blink of an eye or kind of, you know, like one heartbeat basically. So you've got these two facts. There's really weird food product that all of a sudden makes up like the whole market, which in my eyes is, this is like kind of the nature of like the, how the story went in. The book is like, I recognize those facts and it provided like, oh, there maybe there's something to this. This is like a new outlier. Like, uh, obesity is different from COVID in the sense that it isn't, um, communicable. It doesn't transmissible from like, it's not a contagious disease, right? So when you have an epidemic, something that's like super prevalent in our population, but it's not subject to being spread, um, you know, individual to individual because it's a contagion, it begs some kind of deeper, it's like a way to say an explanation. It's like, there's some kind of way in which all these animals, all these species have been thrust into something environmental where their genes in the environment are now like radically off base from one another. Right. And the fact that carbohydrate was never a part of the domestic dogs diet until very recently. And now it's the whole backbone of the diet that combined with the fact that we know that diet plays a big role in some way in body composition matters was to my eyes like, okay, that's a good, there's, there's something to explore here. Let's see if there's what, how to, what extent people have tested the theories that say that maybe this is to blame for this problem. And you do the research. And it turns out that people have, you know, I, I was working on my book, um, 2012 through 2016. And so like around that time, there was something of a like, revolution might be like too strong, a way to say it, but in the human nutrition community, there were sizable groups of really, um, legit people, people with big reputations who were, um, abandoning the notion that when it comes to getting fat and, or losing fat, that all calories are created equal. Um, you know, like th the notion that all calories are equal for purposes of gaining or losing weight, it's just calories in and calories out. That notion has been a, of like the public's understanding of obesity since as long as I've been alive. Um, but like at the very beginning of the 21st century, folks started kind of pushing back on that there were like a series of big, you know, very, um, splashy books that got published concerning matters of human nutrition. That basically challenged that idea in the human world and the human domain. And, um, yeah, they gave rise to something of a cultural phenomenon. You know, you fast forward 10 years from that, like at the time I started my book, the keto diet, like nobody would have known what that meant. Like very few people had had a sense of like what that referred to, um, nowadays, if you go to your, a normal grocery store and you look at the magazines in the checkout aisle, they're referring to that as a headline item that like every housewife in America understands intuitively. I mean, so that's a very low carbohydrate diet, and it's because these kinds of books and these researchers are that I'm referring to publicize their work really well. And a lot of people found it compelling enough to try it. People who had, had struggled with their own weight for a long time, under a kind of calories in and calories out perspective, try basically eliminating carbohydrates from their diet and found it found a lot of success. And it became a big, you know, something that props up whole industries now that are consumer products with keto focus low-carb products. So everything from, you know, flowers for baking to sweeteners, Every, every grocery store aisle. I agree. And yeah, it definitely gave prominence to just that everyday language. So if you said like, oh, you know, I'm trying to Quito, whatever it's, it's, it's known for. Okay. Weight loss and health, like it's definitely had that connection. Yeah. Yeah. It's become, so, um, it's so much a part of the fabric of human focus, nutritional science, these days that there are kind of like sub domains within it. There are folks who believe that eating a very carbohydrate, restricted diet is the most efficacious way to lose body fat. There are other people who believe that it's like optimal for all forms of health that you read. This is how you should eat no matter what your health and nutrition goals are. There are some people that use it in, you know, are applying those kinds of principles in the diabetes treatment, like metabolic disorders, treatment domains. Um, but generally speaking, it was like those books and the scientists who had performed the studies that were being discussed in those books were kind of getting a lot of traction, right. As, at the same time that I was like, wondering why is it that so many dogs in the United States are overweight or obese? Right. And so to me, it was like, Ooh, this is an interesting thing. I wonder how much any of this holds and how much any of this is getting explored. And the reality is the vast, I mean, we'll go through the kind of, um, the metabolic nuts and bolts, the, like the understanding of like, what's going on. That's, that's this, what's this theory saying down at the cellular level, um, all that stuff like holds for dogs and cats really well, like basically works. No, there's no, um, it's not controversial at all. There's no scientist like veterinary nutritional scientists in the world who would disagree with any of the nuts and bolts concerning metabolism. Um, and it's all there. And like, there's all this scientific work that's like tested the theory. And it was just like, oh my God, like this all adds up perfectly. Uh, surely this is what is being taught in vet schools. And, you know, the second part of the book is like, no, it's not, what's being taught in vet schools. And why is that? And why is that a problem? And so, yeah, that's, that's where it all fits into the work that I've done. Yeah. So we also covered that in a podcast episode too. So there's a lot of, like, if you're interested in that part too, and you make sure you read the chapter or chapters on that book, but listen to that episode. But yeah. So it's it, the, it's such a black and white discovery of when you turn the carpet carbohydrate intake up on dogs, their weight goes up and yet it's still not as prominent in the dog food nutrition, as it is in like human nutrition field. Like, we, we all kind of know like, oh, you know, my friend went on keto and she lost 80 pounds, or what have you, it's still, isn't translating over to the dog food, especially I would say the kibble is, you know, the Yeah, kibble is exactly. It's like, you can make raw diets, freeze, dried diets without using much carbon. You don't have to not use carbohydrate, but it's easier to make those products without carbs. And then without kibble, without making kibble, without carbohydrate is hard. And it's not something that anybody set out to do until basically it's our company's house, but I digress. Um, Well, you always use the analogy where it's just like baking bread, where it's incredibly hard to pack together a bunch of meat and have it go through an extrusion process where it is this convenient, you know, kibble pieces and not have some type of binder and that, you know, so it's trying to balance that like delivery mechanism of a kibble form, but not try. And that's why these, in addition to cost-savings, but trying to make sure their kibble holds together. Yeah. The right diet is, you know, a different, a whole other category, but yeah, it's, it's just trying to translate that over. I was like, well, you know, dogs still need to eat very low carb for optimal health. Like that is the biggest thing. Um, but yeah, there, there certainly is. And I'm sure you went through that. I know you went through that, trying to develop your, your own kibble, your Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's hard. Like I said, it's hard to do. It's not, it doesn't the ingredients don't want to stick together unless you put starch in there. And so, uh, there's, there's plenty of, if it weren't for the nutritional problems that arise from feeding dogs, lots of carbohydrate, carbohydrate packed kibbles would be a fantastic product. You know what I mean? Like they're very inexpensive to produce. They provide the dog with all the nutritional content that it needs to stay alive, you know, like leave chronic disease development off the table for a minute, in terms of just like, you don't have to give it food from eight different sources and a vitamin and mineral daily supplement in order to prevent it from developing, like, you know, some kind of anemia or something like that. All of the nutritional needs in one meal shelf, stable, very inexpensive dogs love the taste. Obviously most dogs are like voracious eaters. Unfortunately it does have really serious health ramifications and the obesity and fattening one is like, there's none that are more serious than that. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So we have, uh, well, I want to get into the actual dog eats carbs. What happens in dog's body, because that is a really good factual basis of truly understanding, like you said, how you learn level. I am not a science person. So I think that we have explained it in a way that anyone can understand, because it truly kind of walks through almost Oregon to Oregon and the entire body process of truly how carbs affect dogs. And I do have another graphic here too, that we can walk through as well. But We're going to talk about, yeah, It's, I, I, it is science-y jargon a little bit, and there are things that are not every day words that we're going to have to refer to a little bit, but this is not complicated. Like anybody who has managed their own diabetes or has a pet that has diabetes, they're familiar with like all this jargon, all this language and all these concepts already. Um, so it's like, don't get intimidated by this stuff, but it's, I'll run through the basic nuts and bolts of it. Before I do that, the most important thing to note, this is not a matter of scientific debate. This is like black letter physiology for dogs and cats. You re you go pick up every veterinary nutrition textbook. And this pathway that's described here is all laid out there, all that for some inexplicable, you will find veterinary professionals who will say yes, all this happens. And then they'll turn mental gymnastics trying to explain why this doesn't actually cause greater fattening in the animals. And we'll get to that second part of this later in this conversation here, we're going to talk about how this works, what, you know, if it, if, if the idea is carbs, make dogs fat. Okay. Show me at a lower level. Why like how that is. Yeah. And then we're going to transition, we're going to talk about the scientific studies that have been done that show that it actually does happen. This, the feeding trials that have been done that like basically test this out, uh, over and over again. Okay. So the process though, right? Not, this is again, don't be intimidated. Basically. What happens is this dietary carbohydrates are a class of nutrients that are all composed of a single kind of molecule, vast majority composed of single kind of molecule glucose glucose. You can just think of as sugar. It is in a lot of ways is used synonymously with the word sugar. And there it's just like a, a very simple chain of it's very simple molecule. And when we hear the term complex carbohydrate, what we're referring to is a molecule. That's got lots of chain, like a long chain of individual glucose molecules, all linked together. Whereas if you hear about a simple carbohydrate, you're talking about just a couple of, of glucose or glucose in, uh, one of like a very small number of other kinds of molecules. Um, this is really important because when an animal dog cat or human ingest dietary carbohydrate, the carbohydrate molecule does not go through and into the blood. Doesn't get digested pulled out of the food and into the dog's body, until it is all broken down into individual molecules of glucose. That's like what the digestive process is, is goes in as either complex, simple, all kinds of different carbohydrates. And during digestion from the mouth down through the stomach and beyond gets broken down into all these individual molecules of glucose. That's the only way that it can be absorbed into the animal's body. So that is what happens. You'd have carbohydrate, rich mule mule meal, and, uh, your blood sugar, your dog's blood sugar, it's blood glucose. Like I said, it's like a synonymous term. Spikes goes up, you get this flood of glucose from the stomach into the bloodstream. All of the carbohydrate gets broken down into glucose and just gets pumped into the bloodstream. And that's where we see blood sugar levels rise. Um, the organs of your dog's body use different things for fuel, for metabolic fuel, to just continue doing the things that they do to keep your dog alive. Glucose is one of them. And there are some processes within your dog's body that will always use glucose, no matter what the animal eats, but if there's too much glucose in the bloodstream for a period of time, it's toxic, acutely, toxic, not like, okay, you do this. And eventually your animal is going to get somewhat fatter. Eventually it's going to develop a disease like this is what diabetes is, right? This is like when an animal's diabetic, it takes in, if it takes in a carbohydrate rich meal, it's blood sugar goes way up and it can't bring it back down. Those of us who have normally healthfully functioning, functioning bodies have a mechanism that brings glucose levels back down when they get really high. And that's through the use of the hormone insulin. So to recap, dietary carbohydrate goes in, becomes glucose. Glucose goes into the blood. When levels of glucose go very high, the body goes, aha. We got to get to bring these back into line or else like, you know, what's called a diabetic coma is what happens when an animal is like its blood sugar is too high for too long. You know, that's like, it's like acutely toxic. You will die of this. Um, the hormone insulin is secreted by the pancreas. When the body senses that the blood sugar levels are too high and insulin is this fantastic hormone that basically it's like an emergency response that just goes, there's too much glucose in the bloodstream. Let's do a whole bunch of different things to get that glucose out of the bloodstream and into places, or it could be safely stored. And so what it does is it like a whole cascade of different things happen within an animal's body starts metabolizing different nutrients than it would at a steady state. You start going to burn more glucose than fat tissue to power activity. Cause that's one way you can get it out of the bloodstream, right? It's like, okay, let's uh, let's start using this stuff up the other way is that there are places within your body and within your dog's body. And it's like, remarkable how much all this, this stuff is just like, all the parts are the same. All the like concepts that matter here are all the same in your body and in your daughter's body. Yeah. It's amazing. So another way, I mean, yeah, another way that it, like the insulin helps to get sugar out of your dog's bloodstream is it pushes it into tissues where it can be stored stably in the blood. It can be toxic, but there are some places in the body where you can bank it away. You can put it in there and you don't have to worry. You're no longer going to be risking going into a diabetic coma. One of them is muscle tissue. You can make the muscles soak like insulin basically helps muscles become like glucose sponges. And they can to some degree pull glucose in and store it in there in a substance called glycogen. But there's only, there's like a cap on that. We all have like muscle tissue. Doesn't expand just because we're adding more glycogen in there. There's kind of like a cap on the amount that can go in there and the other place. And this is the crux of the issue. The other place, the other kind of tissue that can store glucose in a stable manner is fat tissue. So, and the difference between fat tissue and muscle or like livers and matter place, um, is that you can store essentially an infinite amount of glucose in fat tissue, fat tissue will grow the cells. Fat cells will literally get better. Like it's like when you put, when insulin floods, the bloodstream and fat cells suck up more glucose than they otherwise would. They're literally getting fatter, like the literal process of fattening. And in the most literal way, you can, you can say it and they don't have the same kind of like restrictive capacity that like muscles have and that the liver has. And so what happens then is like I said, recap, one more time. Carbohydrate goes in, gets broken down into glucose glucose into the bloodstream body freaks out, pumps a bunch of the hormone insulin into the bloodstream, which pulls all the glucose glucose out of the bloodstream to a large degree and puts it into a bunch of places. But the bad place that it puts in is into fat tissue. It makes fat cells by absorbing glucose that much fatter, that is the process of fattening. Um, and that's basically, that's how it works. And um, when you don't have, when your insulin levels, aren't at the, those con, when, when you have lower insulin levels, you have basically, um, you have, you're more readily, uh, adapted to like keeping glucose levels low. And you don't this whole chain of events, this whole cascade like doesn't happen basically. And so the theory of like, well, wait a second. We seem to notice the carbohydrate seems to be associated with obesity is grounded in this kind of biochemical pathway. So that's kind of the, that's my attempt to explain it, to take this kind of science-y concept Chorus by Dan Shula. Yeah. You can, you know, there are smarter people than me who have written better books than mine, that lay all this out, but it's all in the human domain. It's like, I, there aren't any people that are smarter than me or written better books than me about the application of these principles in the doggy world, because nobody else has has, for some reason, nobody else has written one. Um, but yeah, you can read about this same stuff in, in books written by guys like Gary Tobbs, um, is the famous science writer who kind of championed this concept. But yeah, that's the, how, that's the, how this, this all happens. I think it's important to mention the absolute bamboozlement that any dog parent goes through with managed train, to manage diabetes with their own dog. I cannot tell you how many times my dog Matty's, you know, blood sugars all over the board spiking, can't get it down more insulin, more insulin, try to feed her less food, try to feed her more food, more insulin. And it was all these adjustments and never once was new nutrition of the food that we were feeding, discuss never once was, as you said, this is so factually based in the physiology of the dog. And it's, it's just not translating to the vet office of, you know, when their blood sugar spikes, you know, we have to look at what they're eating and when they're eating and all these things, and it's, you know, I still feel like this frustration, I feel bamboozled that this was just never brought to me. And it was, and we are seeing now an easily, easily managed blood sugars with our dog by just reducing her behavior, carbohydrate content, truly like it was just, that felt that simple. Yeah. I mean the, you know, there's, uh, you have to be somewhat careful like what you, um, there, there are laws in the United States that prohibit folks who make pet food for making claims about disease, treatment or prevention. And they're very sensible of course, right? That you shouldn't be able to make, say like my dog food, cures COVID or whatever. Right. But it is unquestionably the case that if you all else being equal, if you reduce the amount of digestible carbohydrate that a dog consumes, you will reduce that dog's postprandial blood glucose and blood glucose is the root of the problem in diabetes, right? Like the whole reason the dog needs exogenous insulin is because it needs to manage its blood glucose. And so if the blood glucose levels are kept lower, you need less insulin to deal with it. And so it's not rocket science. That's what I mean. It's like for you, it's like once you, once you like, just start thinking this stuff through for yourself, it's just like, how isn't this just the most obvious solution in the world? Why, why aren't the pet food products that are prescribed for dogs with metabolic disorders like diabetes? Why aren't they just zero carbohydrate? Right. And it's like, there's just no good way to answer that question. There's no defensible way to answer that question. The only answers that exist are the kinds of like, you know, the second half of my book is like, just trying to explain this, like, how did what's taught come to be, what's taught why aren't vets just like, this is the most simple thing in the world. Why, why, how can you have a whole population of folks who just like are continuing to prescribe a 40% dietary carbohydrate diet for a dog with, with diabetes. And it's, you know, I mean the risk of spoiling the, uh, the, the take-home conclusion. I don't believe that it's like malice or use the word bamboozlement like, I don't think most clinically like vets in clinical practice are like, I know this isn't the right answer, but I'm going to do it anyway. Ha greedy, no, you know what I mean? Like that's not what it is, what it is. Is there are folks acting with intent, but they're the folks who have intentionally persuaded at the like educational level at the post, you know, at the professional educational level, um, those veterinarians to believe what they believe about matters of nutrition. And those folks are acting with bad intent, but folks who sponsor basically BS nutrition, seminars that preach things like 40% dietary carbohydrate diet for a dog with diabetes. Exactly. Exactly. We'll get into that more. Well, yeah, we can't do diabetes and obesity in one, in one, you know, I could barely cover obesity alone in a 300 page book, but we do have to do so if we'd done the, like how this works, how carbohydrates make you fat, you gotta hit all stuff like that stuff is I hope it's, it helps shed light for some folks, but really what matters is even if that's like, for some reason it's wrong, I will tell you, there is you cannot deny the body of evidence that shows that supports and shows in a really clean way, uh, evidence that carbohydrate makes dogs fat. So like that even if the, how is wrong, the, that it happens is undeniable. Basically. You could think about, if you, if you had 10 minutes, you walked away, you could construct the kind of experiment that you would need to do to test the theory that carbs make dogs fat. Right? And it's like, because it's so easy to construct, it's been done half a dozen different times. You take two groups of dogs, give them exactly the same number of calories. You know, dogs. Aren't like you and I, in the sense, you know, like we were saying about Kidwell before, it's very, a dog is pretty content eating the exact same thing every day, over and over again. And you can predict, you know, you're the one, uh, portioning out how much food he's going to eat. So it's pretty easy to control the number of calories that the animals are going to take in, in a laboratory setting. That's a really hard thing with people. It's part of why there's debate around these issues in the human world. It's a lot harder to be like Jen track every calorie that you eat for the next month and report it back here. Like that's not, that's not something that people are very good at, but you could do it with dogs in a lab super easily. And so the experiment is take two dogs, measure the heck out of them before. You're like how I cut it. I didn't, I used the PG version, measure them to all holy heck. Um, before you start the experiment, figure out how much all of them weigh, figure out what percentage body fat they are before. Look at what their fasting, glucose, fasting, insulin, all that secondary stuff as well. Then go through a period of time when you feed them all exactly the same number of calories. But there's a difference in the diet. In the case of one group, we're going to feed it less carbohydrate, more protein, the other group, same exact number of calories, same lifestyle, okay. It's not like one group is exercising and one's groups, not all that's different is the amount of carbohydrate and protein. One group, you basically carbohydrates and proteins contain roughly the exact same, uh, amount of digestible caloric energy. They both like your, your dog will pull about three and a half calories worth of energy out of a gram of carbohydrate or a gram of protein. So you can just swap one for the other and you end up keeping the total calories the same. So if you're somebody who believes that all calories are created equal, when it comes to body fat, you should know exactly what's going to happen, should be able to predict exactly what's going to happen here. The dogs are consuming exactly the same number of calories. They're expending the exact same number of calories. They should wind up with exactly the same bodies. Like I said, the experiment has performed something like a half dozen times and never once has that happened. Every single time that it's been performed, the same thing happens. The dogs on the high carbohydrate diet get fat, the dogs on the lower carbohydrate, but the same number of calories diet, don't get fat over and over and over and over again. And it's not somewhat like, uh, you know, I obviously, I'm not sure if bringing it's literally the entire record. There's not one like counter-evidence piece and it's not like a marginal tiny little difference either. Like the biggest the study. I always like site, when I talk about this issue is 21 beagles in each group. Okay. Big group over follow them over three months. Look at changes in body composition. The dog's on the high carbohydrate, but the same number of calorie diet got six times fatter than the other group. The high Six times spatter, not like 6% or like 60%, like 600% fatter, like huge differences. Wow. And when you think about how all this impact, you know, that's three months and you think about a dog eating the same diet every day for its entire life. And, uh, yeah, you can just see where it goes. Um, I've never, I've talked to Everett. You know, I talked to everybody in the veterinary nutrition and like animal science, PhD communities. I've never once heard somebody come up with anything that resembles a defense, like a counter-argument to that never wants. And yet this is not something that's taught in a single veterinary program, excuse me, in the United States. And it's just insane. It's just like, it's, it's just very hard to, um, come to grips with, you know, it's just like you get, I get in fights about things with professional level people all the time, like DCM, like, oh my God, but you never, no one is ever like, oh no, Dan, you ignored this study. Or Dan, you left this part off the table. You're you're, mis-characterizing this you're cherry picking this there's no, there's just no retort. And it's the biggest, like sensitive such thing as like public health and the veterinary community, the obesity problem among dogs and cats is like the biggest problem. You know, it's worse than smoking. It's more common than not, you know, it's more than half the dogs in the countries. The it's the norm. And it's worse than the smoke Going down either. Right. That's right too. It's not any advances have been brought forward. It's not a shift in the pet food market. It's absolutely maintaining at the, I think it's 55% of dogs are obese and significantly obese. It's not, you know, uh, oh, that he put on a couple of pounds, but even a couple of pounds, when you think about like, I have 10 pound dogs, one pound adjustment or increase is detrimental to their health. It's 20 pounds of fat for me. You know what I mean? It's 13 pounds of fat for one of my big dogs that I like. I always record these. If, if you're never listening to our podcast before and you happen to be watching this on video for the first time, then you will have never seen me do this. But I, I like, I have these, I like to try to show my dogs. It's so hard to do because I can't turn it the right way, but I have to, I have two St. Bernards and they're big monsters. And so like a lot of these points about like, well, if a dog was the size of a human, this much fat, it's like, well, not, not in the case of my dogs. Like they are the size of humans, but Yeah, we, we, we live on two different ends of the scale, but, but yeah, it's to just get back to your point of the entire scientific record proves and has continued to prove that you increase them out of carb, dietary carbohydrate, you increase the amount of fat in the dog. And, you know, back to the beginning of the podcast, you said that it's equivalent to a lifetime of smoking. So it's just, you know, I think, I think a lot of times we say these things and it's just kind of not glossed over, but it's like, okay, wow, no, that's the kernel of a lifetime of smoking. Yeah. It's a really horrible thing. Like, think about if you like what it would be for your shot to know, you know, your, you love your pet. Like you love your child and it's like, your, your child is going to be a lifelong smoker. You, oh, it's a huge deal. Yeah. And I, and I think the other thing too, to just round up that point and, and we'll just, you know, kind of talk about some other resources people can look to, you know, to read onto this, but it's, we want our dogs to live the longest healthiest life. And we, this is such what I feel is an easy in our grasp at arms length change that we can do for it to help our dogs live the longest healthiest life. And it's just, yeah, it's just beyond frustrating. When you look at all these top brands, it doesn't, you know, like you said, these, these top categories of ultra premium high expense brands are still this high, high amount, 40, 50% carbohydrate. And it's, it's just, it's detrimental to a dog's health. Yep. So we're not even covering, I mean, like we're covering one aspect of it. Like we could do a whole show on diabetes and this exact same way, you know, For sure the two part, or we can only cover so much. We do not want this to be a two-hour podcast by, by definition. So yeah, this is definitely the part, one of how carbs make dogs fat and we have covered the evidence. So this is all about fats, all about science and the two biggest resources. I'll make sure everything's in the show. Notes is one really getting a copy, Dan, who then puts it as a free download on his website. I'll make sure to include the link of his book, dog, stock, food and dogma, and also on Dan's companies, a taquito, natural. They, I love how they have a science page. And that is all this evidence that Dan has touched upon. Again, we're just covering obesity in this episode, but it's all the other topics related to this issue. So there, if you are I true science nerd and you were like, I want to see the actual scientific record, a lot of this stuff. I mean, everything is linked. It's so nicely laid out. So I'll make sure to include those in the show notes, but two really great resources. Again, if you're the read every single line of information, you want to understand the true details behind something, go for it. It's all there. It's important if you, Yes. If you are somebody who like keeps up with the academic record regarding human nutrition matters, and you just, haven't kind of gone through that exercise and the doggy world, you will already know a lot about this because like in the human worlds, this is a subject of like serious debate, lively debate. Like, you know, there are the diet wars between kind of ideological camps of the old school. All calories are created equal perspective and the kind of newer carbs make you fat perspective and people, and they're bloody on intellectual platform, you know, on platforms like Twitter, where you see like a public feud over this stuff, big debate and in contrast in the veterinary world. So what I mean to say, I guess, is like, you can learn a ton about this stuff. By going to the human side, you can learn the arguments against and in favor of, and like that stuff's all out there. And what's a shame is in the veterinary community where the evidence is literally stronger than in the human world. It's like, you can't get intelligent engagement on the issue. You just get people that are just like, I can't say that I've been taught one thing. They're not conversant in the record. Um, and yeah, so it's not, hasn't even, it's, that's, what's most frustrating to me, frankly, is just like you can't, it's not even at the point where you can have an intelligent discussion. It's just, um, you, you kind of like are speaking to, uh, an empty room. Yeah. And we're are our, door's always open as we like to say, in terms of, if you want us to speak to a particular study, a certain topic related to this, any like please, or, or you have an opposition, a question, anything like that, like please email us at work. We're always open. It's just, hello. It featured, feed your talk facts.com. And we, you know, we're, we get in a lot of, you know, responses of like, Hey, can you review this dog food? Or why have these science episodes also are very important to us of if we're one, if you need us to cover some something specific. So anyway, we're open for debate as well, friendly, friendly debate of course, professional debate. So this was, yeah, this was, again, I do to this, those two parts. I think we, 100% will focus next time on diabetes, which is such a huge, huge topic. Um, when a personal significance for me as well, but yeah, a lot of science in this, but that's what we're covering. This is the cornerstone of like learn the mechanics and learn the why the how, and then we can start to kind of build off from there for dog nutrition. So that is it for this episode. All right. Good stuff, John. Good to talk to you. Yup. Until next time.