Make American Pets Healthy Again

Our animals have been sounding the alarm for the last decade or more.

Our health is declining as a country and our pet's health is right behind it - or rather in front of it. In many ways, our dogs and cats have been "the canaries in the coal mine” with rates of chronic disease conditions sky-rocketing in the past 20 years, mirroring the rates in humans.

CANCER: 1 in 3 dogs will develop cancer. Cancer is the leading cause of death in 47% of dogs and 32% of cats.

ENDOCRINE DISEASE: Cushing’s and pancreatitis, 2 diseases I rarely saw in veterinary school are at epidemic proportions. Cushing’s disease was so rare, I remember all the vet students being called down to clinics to see “the Cushing’s dog” so we could recognize the disease. This was in 1995. Now we are seeing Cushing’s and atypical Cushing’s as a regular occurrence.

1 in 300 pets will be diagnosed with diabetes, the majority Type II diabetes. It is particularly prevalent in cats, who are obligate carnivores, fed high starch, high carb ultra-processed foods. If caught early, just as in humans, it can be reversed by cutting sugars and carbohydrates out of the diet.

GASTROINTESTINAL DISEASE: Again, pancreatitis was relatively rare. I am now seeing 2-year-old dogs, barely adults, with severe pancreatitis. They are living with severe acid reflux, vomiting, and liquid diarrhea and are forced to eat extremely limited ingredient diets. Surprise! the pet food companies are offering the solution in hydrolyzed protein diets, some made out of hydrolyzed chicken feathers.

A group on social media sounded the alarm last January on an epidemic of gastrointestinal disease, that also included seizures and bleeding to death in extreme cases. It matched the outbreak of hemorrhagic gastroenteritis (HGE) I was seeing locally. The only thing that fit the patterns was dietary: all the cases were on highly processed petfood.

Even up to a week ago, a case was reported by a breeder who had 2 litters of puppies housed right next to each other, separated by a chain link fence. One litter was fed the remaining kibble from an old bag of food. The other litter was fed dinner from a newly opened bag of kibble. In the morning, the litter fed from the new bag were all found dead. The other litter of puppies was just fine.

Thousands of reports were filed with the FDA during 2024. They claimed to have received 1.300 between November 15, 2023 and April 15, 2024. Out of those, only 107 contained adequate information for follow-up per the FDA. In the latest edition of the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, the FDA confirms safety of Purina pet foods. They essentially came out and said, "Nothing to see here."

ANXIETY: Anxiety and behavioral problems are at an all-time high with our dogs. I suspect that many of the anxiety problems are related to the high starch, high carb, high sugar diets these dogs are on. It is giving them sugar spikes and then drops in blood sugar making them “ hangry”.

In addition, many of these dogs have severe inflammatory bowel disease. IBD leads to malabsorption of nutrients. Combine this with the nutrient-poor kibble and some of these dogs are literally starving for nutrients to feed their bodies. No wonder they are anxious! Many times, I can get them on a good diet and they eventually calm down. I have had clients call me worried because their dog is finally napping during the day.

Treatment and Prevention

The good news is that many of these chronic disease states can both be treated and prevented with nutrition, along with some help from the plant kingdom.

If you notice, many of these chronic diseases end in the suffix -ITIS. “-ITIS” is a suffix borrowed from Greek to mean INFLAMMATION. Pancreatitis is inflammation of the pancreas. Gastroenteritis is inflammation of the intestines. Long-standing inflammation in the body can ultimately lead to cancer.

What brings about inflammation? In very general terms, inflammation is the immune system’s response to an irritant or foreign body or substance. This can be anything from a splinter in your finger, bacteria/viral pathogens, or foreign substances the body does not recognize, i.e. chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, preservatives, appetite stimulants, or even chemically synthesized vitamins.

There are many such things in our food supply these days. Glyphosate is one of them that has become ubiquitous and is now showing up in the urine and blood of most Americans. All of these chemicals are even more concentrated, the more processed the food becomes. Kibble is one of the most highly processed forms of pet food.

To make this personal, I purchased a box of organic raspberries a couple of weeks ago. When I poured them out into the colander to wash them, they looked like someone had taken a spray paint can and sprayed them with red paint, not doing a very good job at it, missing the undersides which were pure white. I promptly returned them to Whole Foods.

I client of mine reported buying oranges and when she peeled them and put a segment in her mouth, her whole mouth swelled up, inflamed, and covered in blisters that took weeks to resolve. When she returned them she was told they were getting a lot of returns on fruit.

So what exactly are they doing to our fruit!?! Let me know if you have similar stories.

What is interesting is that if I can convince the animal’s human caretakers to switch foods and get them on a clean, species-specific minimally processed food, we can reverse many of these conditions.

This is why my number one food choice is Solutions Pet Products. They have their own regenerative, sustainable farms where they source their meat. They also use the age-old magical preservative method of fermentation to both preserve the meat and provide super-food healing capacity to their products. I have personally witnessed it reverse severe cases of Cushing’s and extend the lives of cancer patients by years.

Now, more than ever, we need to stand up and demand a healthy, sustainable food supply.

Support your local farmers.

Support leaders that are speaking up about our health and our pet’s health which translates into the health of this planet.

As Hippocrates said, “Let food be thy medicine.”

#makeamericahealthyagain