18 MarEpisode 197 | Should your dog stop eating carbs? A conversation with dog food entrepeneur Daniel Schulof of Keto Natural Pet Foods
High-fat diets are popular right now in the human realm, but should your dog be "low carb" too? Annie speaks to Daniel Schulof, who left a career in law in order to help combat the canine obesity epidemic by getting people to stop feeding their dog food that is high in carbohydrates. He is the author of Dogs, Dog Food, and Dogma, and founder of a new company that makes low-carb dry food for dogs: Keto Natural. He and Annie discuss his journey into the world of pet food and chat about some of the myths and misconceptions about what dogs should be eating.
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Transcript:
Annie:
Keto eating is kind of all the rage right now. I feel like I was an early adopter. Six or seven years ago, I read on Reddit about something called keto chow because I am super lazy about eating. I don't like shopping for food. I don't like thinking about what I'm going to eat next. I don't like preparing food very much. And my favorite food is the food that just appears in front of me. And I thought, you know, if only I could find some kind of decent meal replacement that I didn't mind eating, that would be helpful.
Anyway, so I read about keto chow, how it was really delicious and it was made with heavy cream. And that if you were gonna use this as a meal replacement, you really needed to have a diet that was overall super, super high fat, low carb.
So that's sort of how I started to get interested in learning about ketosis and this way of eating and how this type of eating worked really well in conjunction with fasting. And I was sort of interested in that cause my natural rhythm has always been to only eat once or maybe twice a day. And I had thought that that was not a good thing, that I should be eating small meals all the time. But the more I read about high fat diets and ketosis, the more I realized it was okay if I only ate once a day and that eating fat does not make you fat.
When I first started to learn about this type of eating, I thought, Huh, well, if this is a way of eating that makes sense for humans, would it be so crazy to think that this might be a good way for dogs to eat, too? And I looked around a little bit online for information on this and for products. And I really didn't find anything.
But then the other day in my inbox, I got an email and the subject was Your Dog Wasn't Built to Eat Carbs: Podcast Guest Submission. It was someone suggesting I speak to Daniel Schulof who started a company that sells super low carb, dry dog food. So I wanted to learn more.
[music]
Daniel Schulof:
My name is Daniel Schulof, and I am at least somewhat notable in the dog ownership community for two reasons. One is I am the author of a 2016 book that's called Dogs, Dog Food, and Dogma, which is about the weird overlap between industry clinical veterinary practice and the scientific community in the world of companion animal nutrition.
And then secondly, I'm the founder of a company that makes dog food. I'm the founder of a company that's called Keto Natural Pet Foods. We're notable because we make kibble, but with the very low carbohydrate content previously only available in a raw diet.
Annie:
Is this book about the keto diet?
Daniel:
Well, it basically sprung from my journey down the rabbit hole surrounding the problem of obesity among pets in the western world. And my attempt to try to – I was, as I came to learn more and more about that issue, I grew increasingly skeptical of what I think of as the mainstream explanation for the problem of obesity among pets in the western world. And the book advances kind of two theses.
And one of 'em is that essentially carbohydrate is the devil when it comes to matters of body composition and obesity in dogs and cats. And so in that way, the company certainly sprung from my, as I developed that belief, we make a product that's consistent for other folks who are either persuaded by what I wrote in the book or who have come to that belief on their own.
Annie:
Is it about also the way people feed their dogs as opposed to what they're feeding their dogs? Is that any part of it?
Daniel:
Is the book about that, or is the problem of obesity? I don't really take a stand on or try to poke at any of the issues surrounding that. Do you mean, when you say the way people feed their dogs, do you mean like the time and frequency, that kind of thing, or are you referring to something else?
Annie:
Well, it sounds like your book, it's not so much about like the – I don't know, maybe we should talk about your book another time. Cause I feel like I'm not gonna ask good questions about it cause I haven't read it. But I'm interested to learn more. But why don't you just sort of tell me about how you first got interested in dog food at all. Your background is actually in law, is that right?
Daniel:
Yes. If you rewind the tape 12 years to 2010, I was practicing law in the city of Atlanta. I was a much younger man. In fact, I was a single man and I got my first – I was raised with dogs. My mother was a breeder of golden retrievers and always liked dogs. We often had a litter of Goldens running around. She wasn't like an industrial scale operation by any means, but she was a hobbyist. And so yeah, we often had puppies going around. We were popular kids because friends, people could always come over and hang out with our puppies.
And so yeah, it instilled a certain degree of appreciation and love for dogs in me early enough. And, yeah, I got my first one that was my proper dog when I was a single guy working too long hours in the city of Atlanta. The dog that I got has now passed on recently-ish, but he was a quintessential male Rottweiler. Big dog, very intense dog, lot of drive. And the kind that needed a considerable amount of exercise and other energy relief in order to be like a polite member of society.
And I know very little about your area of expertise, training, but I was able to understand that exercising him regularly helped keep some of his less desirable impulses in check. And basically trying to understand how to do that well, because I was working such a busy schedule and I was so like all over the place, trying to learn how to do that more efficiently, kind of like led me to try to look at the scientific records surrounding that issue. What's the most efficient way and appropriate way to exercise a dog.
And that's what led me to the issue of obesity. And like just kind of was struck over the head with facts about the prevalence and seriousness of the problem of obesity and dogs. The two facts that I often quote are number one more than half the dogs in the country, right now are overweight or obese. So if you pick a dog at random, you're more likely to, you know, pick the next dog you see, it's more likely than not that that dog is overweight.
And number two, there's a body of evidence, well established, you know, folks have done these studies where they follow animals over the course of their entire lifetime. And they look at the impact of body composition on disease prevalence and overall life and health span.
And essentially what it comes out to show is that being moderately overweight, so not like colossally obese, but something that many people probably wouldn't even recognize that the animal is overweight, is worse for that animal's lifespan than an entire lifetime of smoking is for a person. Reduce the dog's lifespan on average, by more than, you know, on a percentage basis, than a lifetime of smoking is likely to shorten a human being's lifetime. So.
Annie:
Wow.
Daniel:
Deadly as smoking, but it's more than half the dogs in the country.
Annie:
That's really good news for smokers.
Daniel:
[laughs] That's ridiculous. Yeah. Well, so you learn that and you're like, oh my God, this is such a big problem. Why is this happening? And the explanation that I came to, came to understand as kind of the mainstream explanation is that pet owners are essentially loving our pets to death is like the phrase you see a lot. That either we're too lazy to give them the exercise that they need, or we're too weak willed and we can't stop ourselves from giving them fattening food products.
Annie:
I would also think it has something to do with the fact that we live in – so many dogs are living with people who have such excess, and while dogs in our home may not literally be living off of our garbage, that is traditionally what dogs have lived off of. And I don't know. I wonder if it has something to do with just excess waste. I mean, so much of dog food is just like made from waste of human food, but at a factory level.
Daniel:
Yeah.
Annie:
Anyway.
Daniel:
Yeah. That's a fair point.
Annie:
I guess it has like macro implications, I think, about, you know, there's too much garbage almost for the dogs to be eating and they're just eating it all up. And also like it's not as necessary to be fit in order for dogs to survive, right?
Daniel:
Yeah, they can get by. In the short run, there's very little need to, you know, there's certainly no need to scavenge or need to take down, you know, wild prey or anything like that.
Annie:
Right. So like evolution no longer is –
Daniel:
Is eating out the –
Annie:
Yeah. Well, same thing with people, right?
Daniel:
Yeah, alas, it is. However, and evolution plays a big part in my book. It's like basically the story that I tell begins – what I'm describing is how my thoughts devolved over the course of time when I was considering like, oh, wow. Maybe there's a story here that hasn't been told. And maybe I'm the guy to tell this story.
Because those explanations that I kept seeing over and over again didn't add up for me. It was just like that can't be, this is such a big deal. And it's so common. Are we really just like screwing this up? That kind of seems unlikely to me. And so, I basically spent four years trying to see if that stuff held water within the peer reviewed scientific record.
And so, the way that I tell the story of those four years begins in Yellowstone National Park, when I basically went up and lived with the biologists from the Yellowstone Wolf project, which is, you may know, is kind of the preeminent place for the study of wolves in their natural habitat in the United States right now.
And it's a really relevant part of the story because, as I'm sure you and your listeners already know, dogs and wolves, very genetically similar animals, animals that are in fact so similar that they can interbreed with one another, despite being two distinct species, which is almost the definitional impossibility, right? You talk to a lot of biologists and they'll say like, you know, back of envelope way to define a standalone species, is it like it can breed with other members of its same species. You can't breed an orangutan and a gorilla.
But a dog and a Wolf obviously can breed together. They're so similar. Wolves, you see essentially zero, if you talk to the biologists at the Wolf project, zero of the chronic diseases that are so common among household pets, including obesity. And so there's this interesting evolutionary detective exercise that's like what has happened? What has changed in the environment that these two distinct species are living in that's causing this big phenotypical difference?
And you're right that excess is certainly a component of it, but there are plenty others as well. I think you're in New York City, right?
Annie:
Yeah.
Daniel:
Yeah. So lots of, I'm sure, folks that you're dealing with on a regular basis are living in apartments and are restricting the amount of movement. You know, the dog is obviously not moving around as much as a wolf in the wild. But the substantive nutritional content that they're taking in on a daily basis has changed dramatically as well.
A wolf essentially takes in 0% carbohydrate. Most dogs in the western world are taking in at least 40% of their calories from carbohydrates. It's a colossal difference. And it seems to me that it might be part of the explanation. And the further I went, basically, the more clear it became that, yeah, this is a central component of the explanation here.
Annie:
That dogs are eating diets that are too high in carbohydrates, and that the fix to that is therefore a diet that is…what?
Daniel:
So the way that I would phrase it is like this. There's a really, really well developed experimental record, peer-reviewed science, that shows that a calorie of carbohydrate is considerably more fattening for a dog than the same calorie of a different nutrient, such as protein or fat.
Same study has been done over and over again, where essentially the researchers take two distinct groups of dogs that are as matched as they can be. And they feed them exactly the same number of calories, and they give them exactly the same access to activity. The only thing that they do differently is they give one group more protein and less carbohydrate, and the other group less protein and more carbohydrate, but they give them exactly the same number of calories in, and exactly the same number of calories out.
And every time that experiment is conducted, the same thing happens. The dogs on the higher carbohydrate diet get fat and the dogs on the low carbohydrate diet don't get fat. And it's been done over and over again, and it's not some trivial immaterial difference. It's like colossal differences. The main, the biggest, most legit study that's been done in this space, you're talking about six times more fat gain over a three month period. And again, taking in exactly the same number of calories.
Annie:
So you, you learned about this. Were you already familiar with people going on keto-like diets? Very low carb, low protein, high fat diets, or moderate protein, high fat diets?
Daniel:
I think the way I would describe kind of like the environment surrounding that issue at the time. So you're talking about 2011 to 2015. And at that time, some of what I think of today as the leading kind of constitutional texts on this subject in the human world, human nutrition world had been published.
A guy you might be familiar with whose name is Gary Tobbs, he's a science journalist who brought a really rigorous background into the domain of human nutrition and wrote these massive books about the science of basically why people get fat. He literally wrote a book called Why We Get Fat. And his kind of magnum opus had already been written at that point, and I became familiar with it over the course of looking into this stuff. And I found it very persuasive.
It was before a time when, like the expression keto was something in the everyday parlance of like Joe Blow, you know what I mean? There weren't consumer products that were being framed as keto crackers or keto energy bars or whatever. The intellectual framework had been laid to some degree enough that it was persuasive to me. So that's kind of where it stood at that point.
Since then, obviously things have changed. Nowadays, I'm always – like, I’m shocked. There's basically one other dog food brand. I think there's something like 300 dog food companies in the United States. There's one other brand that's like leaning into being a low carb keto branded product. And it shocks me every morning I wake up that more people aren't like knocking off this concept.
Annie:
So you went from sort of being curious about your own dog and how to keep your dog healthy, to realizing that there's this obesity epidemic. And instead of going back to your life as a lawyer and feeding your dog a keto type diet or Googling, you know, how to feed a keto type diet, you decided to start a dry dog food company, is that right?
Daniel:
I left the job to write the book, basically. Like the more I went down the rabbit hole – it started off as just like personal notes. And then it became, maybe there's something here that could be an ebook that would be useful for somebody else as well. And then, like the further I went –
I alluded before, there's like kind of two main theses in the book. One is the scientific one that's like carbs’ the devil. The other one is that the reason that more people don't appreciate that already has this big, significant, like cultural, social explanation, which is essentially that there's a kind of information manipulation and bad faith going on, where essentially companies that rely heavily on protecting the idea that carbohydrate is perfectly healthy for dogs are playing a really gross and kind of scandalous role in shaping what the veterinary community believes about this issue and what the lay public believes about it.
Annie:
And what is their motivation?
Daniel:
Oh, like, why do they wanna use carbohydrates so heavily?
Annie:
Yeah. If that's really not what's best for our dogs, what's the argument on the other side, or the thing they're not stating, in your opinion?
Daniel:
Yeah. So the reason why, the motivation, to answer that question, is a calorie of carbohydrate costs roughly 1/10th of the cost of a calorie of meat-based. The second though is, there's this phenomenon that you see over and over again in industry these days. These days, I mean, like over the past few centuries, where a business takes off because it's creating something that has what appears to be real usefulness.
And a really good example, in my eyes at least, is the cigarette industry making cigarettes out of tobacco. In that case, making this product makes people feel some degree of relaxation or stress release, or whatever. And there's no evidence at the time that the industry is growing into this dominant billion dollar thing that it's bad for health. And it's all going along just fine, and then some scientific work gets done, and some evidence starts to develop that, uh oh, this thing that became so popular is actually kind of bad for people.
And then it gets more and more significant. And by the time that body of evidence is very persuasive, you've got this colossal industry that's already developed that's built upon the notion that it's perfectly healthy. And you just don't turn that Titanic around quickly.
If you’re, you know, Hills pet nutrition, for example, and the backbone of your product line is 50% corn products, it is not easy to just be like, Oh, sorry, persuaded. This new study really convinced me that we need to change the price point for all our products and start making them entirely meat-based, instead. That's not how, in my experience, how business works. Instead, you get pushback for literally decades before folks roll over and record the reality of the situation.
Annie:
So tell me about then starting.
Daniel:
At the time I published the book in the fall of 2016, if you bought into the notion that I advocated for in the book, if you thought carbohydrate was bad for your dog and the animals should really take in protein and fat, you're kind of in a difficult spot. Because you could do one or two things and neither of them was a particularly good option.
You could feed the lowest carbohydrate kibble style product you could find. And in that case, you're probably talking about something that's about 30% dietary digestible carbohydrate, which is relatively low compared to plenty of other products, but it's still kind of a lot. It's like, you know, 9 times, 10 times as much as any wolf has ever taken in, in its life. Maybe more than that.
However, the other option is not great either. The other option is you're gonna feed either a raw or subsequently what's developed, this sub-sector in the industry makes this ‘fresh’ diet, so it's not raw, but it's also not kibble-ized. And those products – the way the kibble is made is sort of like baking meaty bread, basically. You mix a bunch of ingredients together and you heat 'em up and they break down. And the term of art is gelatinize, and it holds all the dough together, so that, once it gets hot enough, you've got a single cohesive nugget, like a biscuit or a bagel or whatever.
And you needed, or it was long believed you needed starch. You needed dietary carbohydrate in order to do that. That basically, like if you've ever tried to bake a loaf of bread without flour, the dough doesn't hold together, it just wants to fall apart. And so kibble is long believed to require that.
But if you're making a raw product, you're selling a raw product, you don't need to do that. And so it's the case that there are plenty of raw products, very low in carbohydrate content. So if you're a pet owner that believed the carbohydrate was bad, you could feed your dog one of those products. The issue of course is that calorie for calorie, they're hugely expensive as compared to kibble. Kibble is so inexpensive that there's just like a non-starter quality to the price point for a lot of raw products for people.
You know, if you have a small dog, plenty of dogs I imagine in apartments in New York City, it's one thing, the difference between, you know, 50 cents a day and $2.50 a a day, cause you're talking about literally five times as much. It's another – I have two St. Bernards. Okay. So it's like for me, that delta is between like 15 bucks a day and 60 bucks a day. It’s like a really big difference. And it's just like a complete non-starter.
None of those are great options for some people. And so I thought, you know, if we could make a kibble product but solve this issue of doing it without dietary carbohydrate, there'd be people that would be interested in that.
So yeah, we spent about a year trying to put that kind of thing together as something that, as a matter of like – you know, I’m doing the air quotes with my hands – “food engineering” had never really been done before. People kind of just assumed that you needed to use starch in order to get it to hold together. We found ways to make it happen using animal products that are basically certain tissues in animals' bodies that have a binding quality.
And yeah, we worked with formulators, nutritionists, really great manufacturing partner. It took about a year, and we were able to put something together that's less than 5% dietary carbohydrate.
Annie:
I'm not that knowledgeable about nutrition. it's just not something I've ever been that particularly interested in. However, five or six years ago or so, kind of early on before its keto seemed like a thing I, I kind of got into…it feels like embarrassing to admit, but like keto shakes, because I'm like so lazy about food, I was like, Oh, I can just drink this thing. And it's made with heavy cream? [laughs]
I've since, I think, improved my approach, but I found it made a lot of sense to me when I started learning about what a keto diet is and how it works. And maybe you can give a sort of little summary of that. And also I'm assuming from what I understand about keto, you can't sort of give a little bit of your food then, and some other kind of food. Cause ketosis, the dog's body is either in ketosis or not, I'm assuming as with humans, and that means that they need to be having under a certain amount of carbohydrates?
Daniel:
Yeah. So let me, lemme kinda run with this for a little bit. So keto diet refers to this substrate that's produced in the body, whether a dog or a human being, called ketone bodies. And basically these things, ketone bodies, are a source of metabolic fuel. And your body or your dog's body will produce more or less of them depending on a variety of conditions and circumstances.
One of them, as you noted, is the amount of dietary carbohydrate that's being consumed. And so very roughly speaking, the more carbohydrate that you eat, or your dog, the less ketone bodies will be produced. Okay. There are other factors as well. The amount of fat versus protein is relevant. The amount of overall calories taken in is relevant. The amount and type of activity is relevant. But really the main, the most impactful thing is if you can eliminate or drastically reduce the amount of carbohydrate intake, your body or your dog's body produce more ketone bodies.
Now we chose the keto prefix for our food not because – it's like we say this all over the website. It's like, if you are trying to put your dog into a maximally ketogenic state, if your belief is that what's good about the keto diet is being in ketosis. Ketosis is the state of producing a lot of ketones. And so if you believe that what you want to do is make yourself as maximally, or your dog, maximally ketonic as possible. You want to go beyond – number one, of course, you want to eliminate carbohydrate as much as possible, but there's more you can do.
And it's been shown to work in dogs as well. If you wanna make your dog produce more ketones, you can just give it some of this one kind of fat, medium chain triglycerides. They'll make more ketones.
The reason we use the keto prefix is kind of twofold. One is AFCO is this organization, a lot of your readers or listeners know, Association of American Feed Control Officials. And basically they're the folks that set the rules that matter for how you label dog food in the United States.
And one of the rules that's absolutely absurd, but that AFCO came out with something like six years ago, is if you make dog food in the United States, you are affirmatively prohibited from using the expression “low carbohydrate.” In addition, you're not allowed to disclose the total carbohydrate content in what's called the guaranteed analysis panel. The panel that's got the numbers on the bag, the equivalent of a nutrition facts. There are, you know, this number of calories per cup. There's this much protein. You are not at present allowed to give a total carbohydrate content.
And it wasn't very long ago that you couldn't reference any kind of carbohydrate at all in there. And it's still the case that nobody's allowed, or excuse me, nobody is required to disclose the amount of any kind of carbohydrate in their product. So if you are, like I was, trying to make a product whose main function, main feature at the selling point was that it was low in carbohydrate content, it was a puzzle for how to communicate that to the consumer. I couldn't say low carb. I couldn't identify the amount of total carbohydrate in the product. And so it, this was like –
Annie:
Why do they have these weird rules?
Daniel:
Well, you tell me why do you think they do?
Annie:
They want to support big corn? [laughing] I don’t know.
Daniel:
Well, not big corn, but they want – basically there are three very large pet food companies that play an inordinate role in influencing kind of how the scientific community and the regulatory community deals with pet food products. And all three of those companies have a very, very vested interest in hiding the ball about how much carbohydrate is really in them. And so the rules have evolved. This is the story I tell in my book, the rules have evolved to essentially make that very easy for them to hide that.
I should note the rules finally are changing. They've kind of come out of the relevant AFCO committee already. There's gonna be a really meaningful, really long overdue, but really good evolution in how pet food companies are gonna be required to disclose the nutritional content. And it's gonna start looking a lot more like the – you know, I've got my La Croix sitting next to me and it has the FDA's nutrition facts panel on it that includes, you know, it's got all this summary of the human nutrition info. It's gonna look a lot more like that. It's gonna include a total carbohydrate requirement.
But circa 2016 when I'm trying to make low carb kibble, that wasn't part of it. And so, like I said, keto wasn't a common enough part of the parlance for there to be an affirmative prohibition on that too. So we just snapped that up and basically, you know, relied on the fact that for most people, the common understanding of keto is low carb. And so that's why we use the keto prefix.
But like I'm somebody that believes that ketosis is kind of a side effect of a good diet, it's not the end goal. The carbohydrate is what's bad. It's not the ketosis that's good, in my estimation. When I look at the evidence, that doesn't feel very persuasive to me that you should try to put a dog in a maximally keto state, because there's something magical about ketones. It's that that's a good indicator the dog's eating the right kind of diet because it means it's taking in little carbohydrate. If that makes sense.
Annie:
Well, with people you like pee on a stick, right? To see if you're in ketosis. Do you sell sticks for people to put in their dog's pee?
Daniel:
I don't, I don't. You can get that blood test done from your vet, though. And I'm not sure if they can do it through urine. I'm pretty sure they can do it through urine. I just dunno if it's calibrated that way, but yeah, you can have that done.
Annie:
So are people saying they're seeing changes when they switch over to this food?
Daniel:
As for keto itself, that's not something that I really, I don't know, push. I don't think it's common that people get tested, but you can –
Annie:
No, no, I just mean using your food is what I mean.
Daniel:
Yeah. So here's what we get a lot of. And you can find this, you can test my summary of this by looking for yourself. We get customer feedback in the form of reviews on Amazon reviews, on our website, et cetera, from folks who use numbers, who are used to evaluating their dogs for one reason or another. And they're able to say things like when my dog was on this previous diet, here's relevant number one. When we switched 'em to Ketona for a month, here's the new number.
And particularly what you see it around is folks who have diabetic dogs. Their evaluation of their blood sugar and their insulin levels on a daily basis is like part of their lives. I don't know how much you know about diabetes, but basically what it is, is like the body loses the ability to process sugar. You take sugar in, and instead of it naturally going into tissues where it could be held in a stable form, it stays in the bloodstream, cause your body doesn't make enough of what's called insulin.
And so people whose dogs have diabetes are constantly monitoring blood sugar, trying to understand how much exogenous insulin they need to give the dog so it could do what its pancreas aren't doing naturally.
So like I said, those people are monitoring that kind of stuff all the time. And one of the things – you put a dog on a low carb diet, and instead of having blood sugar spikes throughout the day, they have low, steady blood sugar. They have low steady insulin as opposed to spiking and cycling insulin. And so you see those kind of numbers all over our reviews. It's like something, you know, I'm not – very sensibly, FDA doesn't allow me to say you know, my dog food cures COVID
Annie:
[laughs] I should hope so.
Daniel:
So I don't, I can't – like in order to go through and be able to say my food is better for diabetes than the standard of care, which is like a 40% carbohydrate product, I need to go through the equivalent of basically getting a new vaccine approved, regulatory. That's not something I can say, but I would encourage – if any of your listeners feel skeptical about that notion, I'd encourage you to go take a look at our reviews. Cause it's consistent every single time.
Annie:
So with Ketona – did I say it right?
Daniel:
Yeah. Yeah. That's right.
Annie:
Are people, I mean, do you suggest this be solely what they feed their dog, or?
Daniel:
Yes. Yep. It’s a complete and balanced, so that's basically the main AFCO certification. If you can demonstrate that your product contains X amount of protein, X amount of all the various vitamins, nutrients, you can market it as what's called a complete and balanced pet food. Which is a AFCOs way of saying that's the only thing your dog needs nutritionally. If you feed it just that, it's not gonna get a deficiency, disease, anything like that. And yes, our products meet that specification.
Annie:
But what if, you know, you want to also be feeding your dog something that's not dry, what do you suggest?
Daniel:
It depends what you're trying to do, I guess. There are plenty of – I'd put it this way. If I was gonna feed my dog a raw diet. If it was financially, if somebody bought my company and I was in a different financial position than I'm in right now, all of a sudden I could spend $100 a day feeding my dogs exactly what I think of as the gold standard.
The way that I would frame it is this: Raw, zero carbohydrate. So all meat, commercially prepared, complete and balanced product. Those are the things that I think – like there are…raw pet foods have been around a minute, right? Like they're not just brand new, they've been around for decades. And what it seems to me that what advocates of raw diets latched onto about the raw diet, that was so good was the rawness of it. I don't believe that the evidence really supports that notion.
Annie:
Right. There's I think there is some evidence actually, that cooking food in some cases might actually make certain things more, what do they call it?
Daniel:
Bioavailable.
Annie:
Bioavailable. Thank you. Yeah.
Daniel:
I mean, look, it's pretty marginal. Let's put it that way. It's pretty marginal, all that stuff. It's like there might be, somebody could maybe put together an argument and show me like, okay, there's this little bit of a difference, but it's pretty marginal. But one thing that you really do see is a lot of raw diets are zero carbohydrate. And so in that way, they're better.
But you don't have to make your raw diet zero carbohydrate. That's kind of the key thing, is a lot of folks will go, I feed raw and it's like, yeah, but what that means. You could be products that are colosally different from one another. It could be 40% carbohydrate or zero, could be 40% protein or 20% protein, big differences. So it's not just, like all raw diets are not created equal. So you gotta look under the hood at the nutritional content.
But like I said, for my money, gold standard, funding – if convenience and budget are no issue whatsoever, then yeah. Commercially prepared, complete and balanced raw, zero carbohydrate, all meat. That's what I recommend.
Annie:
What about people who are listening and are into this idea, but worried about factory farming and meat consumption? Some people don't want to feed their dogs meat at all, vegetarian, vegan, they prefer others. I've had clients – there's like a cricket-based?
Daniel:
Yeah, I think I thought about that. And you know, as long as we can be successful, I believe that someday we'll start offering that as an option to our customers too. I didn't believe that like at the time we were starting the company that we could come out of the blocks with that. Cause it just, I think it's a tough pitch to people emotionally. But to respond –
Annie:
To feed your dog bugs?
Daniel:
Yeah, yeah. That there's an instinctual disgust response that governs some of your buying behavior. Some I mean, look, I'm not saying that it's appropriate or if there's anything wrong or right about it. I'm just saying like, it was my judgment that if we started with that, we might not have gotten off the ground.
And so, but if I agree with you that that might be, cause to answer your question, like for folks that are concerned about issues like factory farming and sustainability and how the pet food industry fits within that, that's a pickle for sure. Because I will tell you right now that there's, look, nobody's researched the pet food industry more than I have. There are not kibble companies that are producing family farm produced meat products. Everything is taking place at an industrial scale. And it's not the case that it's sustainable. Period.
There are differences in marketability. There are some brands that make it appear that, like, our stuff feels very wholesome. I think those folks are based.
Annie:
They have a picture of a farmer on the bag?
Daniel:
That’s what I mean.
Annie:
That doesn't mean anything?
Daniel:
Yeah, that type of thing. And so, yeah, to me, that is a legit pickle. Given the amount of number of pets that live in the United States right now. And given the nutritional realities, I'm just telling you what the nutritional science says. There is legit tension between sustainability and optimal nutrition. And so at the moment, right now, you kind of gotta make some choices. You gotta weigh priorities. There's not something that is the perfect answer on both of those issues.
Other than, you can make diets yourself, I guess is kind of the best way at present to sort of square the circle. Like if you buy meat that you feel good about, you know, you can buy store bought meat where you feel pretty good about how it's produced and how it's sourced. And you can combine that with other ingredients to make the appropriate nutritional profile for your pet. Then that might be a way to go about doing it.
It's a challenging process cause it's like, it's not just as simple as giving your dog a chicken breast every day. You will give your animal deficiency diseases if it doesn't take in certain micronutrients in the right quantities.
Long term, I tend to agree with you that I think it's something like that, that insects might be a way to like bring those two things together because they certainly do have the appropriate nutritional content. You know, crickets or black fly larva or whatever don't contain any carbohydrate. So yeah, might well be. We'll, you know, watch this space over the next 10 years.
Annie:
Is it possible to have a keto diet that is vegetarian? I mean, I know –
Daniel:
Conceptually, it's not impossible. You gotta do a lot of work. You gotta do a lot of work. You probably know this, one of the differences between plant-based proteins and animal-based proteins, right, is that the amino acid content tends to be quite different. Amino acids are this class of nutrients that make up proteins. And there's several different amino acids.
And so when your veterinarian or your doctor talks about the completeness of a protein, they're referring to what the amino acid content is. How much of the various amino acids are contained in the protein. And it's the case that there are certain amino acids that you just don't find in animal or excuse me, in plant-based protein. Particularly, the quintessential example is what's called taurine. Taurine is a kind of amino acid that you can't find in plant-based protein.
And so, if you do that, basically, there are companies out there right now that are making zero meat pet foods, that are marketed to folks who believe in the efficacy of that, either nutritionally or ethically. And they're able to engineer a nutritional profile that meets AFCOs requirements. It just gives me pause. You know what I mean?
Cause that's stuff, like if you don't take in a complete amino acid profile, there are real documented repercussions of that. And you are kind of rolling today. You're basically saying I trust that these people engineered it to be just like mother nature required. And that just gives me, that's the kind of thing that I like to have like several generations of evidence on, rather than being like, I'm gonna throw my dog into that in generation number one. That scares me.
Happened over and over again in the United States where it's like people say, oh, I'm making something that’s perfectly healthy. And then 30 years later we realize, oops, now we have the evidence it's bad.
Annie:
Would you say that what you've done is change the proportions of the ingredients so that it's very low in carbohydrates, or is it that your food contains ingredients that you're not gonna find in other dog foods?
Daniel:
So it's a little of both. It's not the case that we have any magic ingredients that I would say. There's not nothing that I've got access to that nobody else in the pet food industry has access to. But the process that we use to basically get the kibble to adhere together does rely on some things that are kind of – they weren't obvious to us when we were trying to solve this puzzle in the first instance.
But the bigger thing, and that's really just a matter of, like I said, food engineering, like if you wanted to just make kibble dust, all you would have to do is change the proportion of existing ingredients, right? You could just very easily make something that like ours is 50% protein, 5% carbohydrate, but the challenge you would have if you didn't use some novel stuff is getting it to hold together. So the novel stuff helps it hold together.
But the vast majority of the difference is, yeah, we just use more chicken and less tubers and cereal grains. We just scale it way down.
Annie:
Where can people get your food? Is it available at major pet stores?
Daniel:
Not major pet stores, unless you use that term loosely enough to include online retailers. We sell through major online retailers. We're not making any effort yet to be in brick and mortar stores, which is just sort of a function of how pet food consumers tended to shop at the time we founded the company. COVID came along not long after we founded it. And it just, our ambition is to one day make that expansion. But right now there's a lot of runway for growth for us without having to worry about that.
And there are some advantages too. It's just sort of like, I can react directly to what my consumers want if I'm selling only online. Whereas selling through stores is really kind of clunky and leaves me pretty far away from them. So, yep. Just online.
Annie:
Cause I just, I searched at chewy.com, and I see a company called Smart Dogs Eat Low Carb and one called Keto Foundations, or Keto pet foods.
Daniel:
Yep. Chewy is a… we have an ongoing little bit of a like skirmish with them. We have sold on their platform in the past and at the present moment, we're not doing it. If you're into our product and you only buy through Chewy, you can sign up for our email list or something like that. And you'll be the first to know if we can work out our differences.
But the present, if you like getting it shipped directly to your door, which is what we typically do, you get it through Amazon, you can buy it through us directly. And we're in the process of getting up and going on Petco as well. And so it's not hard to get, if you live in the continental United States, we'll put it on your door and doorstep in like 48 hours.
Annie:
Great. Well, anything that we didn't talk about that you think we should cover?
Daniel:
I mean, look, we could talk about the content of the book till the cows come home. We could talk about [inaudible] ECM, which is something I've done a great deal of work on. I don't know if that means anything to you. There's a FDA kerfuffle surrounding the issue of whether grain-free pet foods produce the rare cardiac disease, dilated cardiomyopathy, DCM. And sometimes when I do these kinds of interviews, folks want to talk about that a lot.
It's a big subject. I'd encourage – we probably would need to do a whole episode, so. As far as what we've been talking about, you've done it, pulled everything that I know out of me, I think. Good job.
Annie:
[laughs] Yeah. I mean grain free. Well, is your food grain free?
Daniel:
Yeah, it is. Not that I believe there's anything particularly good – for my money, the evidence doesn't show that grains are a special kind of particularly bad carbohydrate, that replacing, say corn with potato, in the same quantities, if I'm gonna use the same amount of carbohydrate, a calorie of carbohydrate from potato is quite similar to a calorie of carbohydrate from corn. And there's, doesn't deserve to be a whole sector of the industry that's grain free, because there’s nothing inherently better about it.
However, I do vehemently believe that the kerfuffle over grain-free diets and DCM involves outright fraud, that it was a manufactured issue. And so, yeah, like I said, we by happenstance are caught up in it because we don't use grain in the product. It's not like a selling point of the product.
[music]
Annie:
You can get Keto Natural dog food at ketonaturalpetfoods.com. And you can use the code podcast20 for 20% off your order. As always, if you like this podcast, make sure to subscribe on iTunes, leave a review, give us a five star rating, tell your friends, and support us by booking a training session at schoolforthedogs.com or shopping at storeforthedogs.com.
