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Join Me and Dr. Marlene Siegel uncover the secrets to extending your beloved pet’s lifespan naturally. Discover actionable tips, diet strategies, and lifestyle changes that promote wellness and longevity in your furry companions.

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Your host, Nathan Crane, is a Certified Holistic Cancer Coach, Best-Selling Author, Inspirational Speaker, Cancer-Health Researcher and Educator, and 20X Award Winning Documentary Filmmaker with Over 15 Years in the Health Field.

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Audio Transcript

 

(This transcript was auto-generated so there may be some errors)

 

00:00:00:09 – 00:00:02:19
Dr. Marlene Siegel
No cat anymore. That’s gone.

00:00:03:01 – 00:00:03:24
Nathan Crane
What do you mean, your car’s gone?

00:00:04:23 – 00:00:05:21
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Eko died.

00:00:06:03 – 00:00:07:05
Nathan Crane
Oh, no.

00:00:07:23 – 00:00:32:20
Dr. Marlene Siegel
I died at 23. God bless them. Yeah, it was a very good session with a really fast so happened. It was way of a trip. And when I got back, the girl said, Oh, he hasn’t been eating so great. We were hand feeding him and Alyssa brought him home. He came out of the care very. He was falling over and he just went into, like an acute renal failure, liver failure.

00:00:32:20 – 00:00:52:10
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And I was treating him for the first 48 hours and then I palpate it. And he had a huge mass all of a sudden in his abdomen, which was probably a bleed because he had become anemic. So probably, I mean, just our coma or something, but because the mass was it there for days earlier? So it was probably a hematoma of something.

00:00:52:10 – 00:00:58:16
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And he just he let me know he was ready to transition. And I said, Buddy, we have that deal.

00:00:59:12 – 00:01:09:00
Nathan Crane
So yeah, 20, 23, that’s a long time. That’s what cats are like, seven years and humans nine years and humans. What is the cat to human ratio?

00:01:09:10 – 00:01:19:23
Dr. Marlene Siegel
They say there’s seven years to every pet and there’s a lot of variation in there, but they certainly have a shorter lifespan, but they really should live into their thirties. So we’re 30.

00:01:20:00 – 00:01:20:13
Nathan Crane
Something.

00:01:20:22 – 00:01:52:20
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Over. I mean, we’re supposed to live 120 vibrantly, vibrantly. And so here we are. We’re, you know, dying early at 120. And we’re we’re not making it to 120. We’re barely making it into our seventies with all kinds of decrepit going on. Right. And so it was the same thing. You know, they’re dying at a very young early age, which, you know, what’s sad is that we are conditioned to accept aging as a problem, as a an expect, a deterioration of the body.

00:01:53:06 – 00:02:11:03
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And so when we get older and we start to have things that are achy and breaking down and having issues with ourselves or our pets, it just becomes something that we go, okay, well, I’m going to go to the doctor. I’m going to get a pill for that instead of why am I aging? You know, the whole anti-aging thing.

00:02:11:03 – 00:02:33:03
Dr. Marlene Siegel
It’s an interesting concept because I studied with what is his name, Dr. Stephen Trubisky and years and years ago probably go back 30 plus years. He wrote a book called The Metabolic Plan. And what was fascinating in his work is that he all these people were talking about what causes aging. He said, no, I want to study what causes anti-aging.

00:02:33:03 – 00:02:55:23
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And this was 30, 40 years ago before it was popular. So he went out and actually live with the Aborigines out in Australia and he studied what they ate all day long and then when they got back to camp he would take his little pan out and his little burner and he would start to make his meal and the Aborigines he in his book he talks about they would gather around him and their eyes would get big.

00:02:56:02 – 00:03:26:02
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And he said, Well, what are you watching? And they would say, We’re waiting for you to explode because you can’t possibly put that much food in your body and not explode because they eat little, tiny 300 calorie meals throughout the day as they’re doing activity. And they couldn’t imagine somebody just eating this big meal at one time. And so in his quest for understanding what helps people live longer and healthier, he studied blue zones and he studied everything that came around.

00:03:26:02 – 00:03:36:24
Dr. Marlene Siegel
What does longevity really look like? And of course, it was reducing inflammation and eating foods that promoted wellness and biological activity so the right supplements, etc..

00:03:38:09 – 00:03:39:13
Nathan Crane
Who is this? Was his name.

00:03:40:08 – 00:04:04:14
Dr. Marlene Siegel
His name is Stephen Czarnecki. Doctor Stephen Trubisky and I met him through a company that I was involved with and he wrote a book called The Metabolic Plan, and I still have the book. It is like a little Bible for me. It just filled with wisdom and it was so simple. Like, that was my first introduction to How do we look at biology and just make it simple?

00:04:05:04 – 00:04:08:05
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And so that’s, that’s really cool.

00:04:08:05 – 00:04:45:06
Nathan Crane
Well, let me introduce you to folks who don’t know you. So this is Dr. Marlene SIEGEL. She is a very, very good friend of mine. She is on our board of directors at the Holistic Leadership Council. She is a 40 year plus experienced integrative veterinarian, I would say, and many would say one of if not the world’s leading integrative veterinarian, she integrates the best of all worlds when it comes to diet, lifestyle, leading edge technology to help all kinds of animals and especially working with, you know, dogs and cats.

00:04:45:06 – 00:05:09:03
Nathan Crane
But she has helped the horses and parrots and snakes and frogs, even your frog story of, you know, like basically helping a fry like some random frog you found that was like dying and like giving it surgery or something. You could tell that story. That was pretty fascinating. But but is the go to export expert when it comes to helping animals thrive?

00:05:09:03 – 00:05:40:15
Nathan Crane
And we’ve seen an explosion of cancers and other chronic diseases in our dogs and cats in the last 30 plus years that we’ve never seen before, just like we’re seeing in humans. Right. We see this explosion of chronic diseases in humans like we’ve never seen before. Cancer is almost at 50% of humans in the modernized world when 100 years ago was believed to be less than 1% 50 years ago or closer 70 years ago in the 1950s, it was only about 10% of people being diagnosed with cancer.

00:05:41:03 – 00:06:02:17
Nathan Crane
We’re seeing autoimmune diseases and diabetes explode at rates we’ve never seen before, and it’s the same in our pets. And so, Marlene, number one, thanks for coming on the podcast. So on we’re going to dove into this deeply with you about why are we seeing chronic diseases in our pets and animals that race we’ve never seen before? What is causing it?

00:06:02:17 – 00:06:17:22
Nathan Crane
What do you believe is causing it? What does The Science Show? What’s causing it? And then what can people do about it with diet and lifestyle to help prevent these diseases in their pets, in their very loved ones. So welcome to the podcast and I’m happy to have you happy to have you here.

00:06:18:17 – 00:06:52:07
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Well, I’m so excited because this is an opportunity to reach so many and they don’t have to be pet guardians. I’m not making a distinction between a pet owner and a pet parent or guardian. Had a recent introduction to a client who, let’s just say, was not a very good fit for me. It was a person who I will now label as a pet owner because this gentleman, his philosophy was, Well, if I have a pet, I don’t want to change anything I’m doing.

00:06:52:07 – 00:07:13:06
Dr. Marlene Siegel
If it gets sick, if it dies, or if it gets cancer, I’ll just get another one. And he didn’t want to hear anything about what he was doing in the lifestyle of this animal that may be contributing to this animal’s issues. And I just thought that was a very interesting comment when he said, well, I’ve had dogs for 40 years and, you know, I’ve just taken them to the vet when they had a problem.

00:07:13:06 – 00:07:39:01
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And I get a pill and I go home and, you know, it gets better. It comes back. And I commented, Well, good for you if you’ve never had to encounter cancer in all the pets that you’ve had. And he said, Oh, I didn’t say that. All my dogs have died of cancer. And I just sat there and I went, Seriously, you’re not making a link between what you’re feeding these animals, the lifestyle that you’re providing for them, which is so not natural.

00:07:39:16 – 00:08:04:13
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And the fact that they’re all dying early of cancer and he was just so close minded, he gave me a one star review. So if you guys go on Google, you’ll see comments. And yes, dear Justin was a wonderful opportunity for me to one help really identify who my good clients are, who’s my avatar, who are the people that I’m really here to serve?

00:08:04:17 – 00:08:31:02
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Because it’s not everybody and not everybody wants to do what Nathan does. Not everybody wants to live a healthier lifestyle or eat organic or eat species appropriate or work out an exercise. It’s not for everybody, and that’s okay. We’re all here in our journey, on our path, in the right timing for everybody. But I’m here to be able to serve the pet own the pet people that are pet parents.

00:08:31:02 – 00:09:01:19
Dr. Marlene Siegel
They are pet guardians. They’re animals, are their family members. Those are the people that I want to serve. And these people are very interested in what can they do to help these animals live a longer, healthier life? Because just like we shouldn’t be going to the doctor all the time, our pets don’t need to be going to the vet all the time if we’re doing the things that support the body in the way the body was designed to be supported, then the body does its own thing.

00:09:01:19 – 00:09:27:05
Dr. Marlene Siegel
It works. It’s very functional. We just happen to live in a time where it’s so toxic everywhere around us. We can’t get away from it. We can’t get away from five G and the amount of EMF. We’re tied to cell phones and computers and routers and the things we can’t control outside the house and the amount of hormones, chemicals and pesticides that are being used in our environment that we have no control over.

00:09:27:20 – 00:09:51:09
Dr. Marlene Siegel
But the lesson there or the beauty is that the one thing we can control is our own behavior. We can control how we perceive the world. We can control how we react to things. We can control what we do within our own personal sphere. And we can make choices that help us to make healthier lifestyle choices for us.

00:09:51:09 – 00:10:19:22
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And our animals and Mother Earth. Because one of the things that you were mentioning in the opening introduction was the rates of chronic disease in our pet family and in our in our human family. But what we’re doing to the wildlife is horrid. Like there is a 35% reduction of all mammals on this planet. And that was a 42 year retrospective study that was done by the World Wildlife Association.

00:10:20:03 – 00:10:48:15
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And they went back statistically and measured those. It was between it ended in like 19 or the early the early 2000. It was a 42 year retrospective study. And they found these drastic numbers of reduction in wildlife, bird population, mammals. So we’re not just killing ourselves. We’re killing our planet. We’re killing the wildlife that’s on this planet through the behaviors that we’re doing unconsciously.

00:10:48:23 – 00:11:11:07
Dr. Marlene Siegel
But when we become more conscious through your work and my work and people start hearing some simple things like Are you using laundry detergents that are safer for the environment and safer for us? What that aren’t full of xeno estrogens and they’re out there. We just have to make the conscious decision to not go to the store and buy Tide.

00:11:11:17 – 00:11:36:19
Dr. Marlene Siegel
You know, it’s like we have to read the labels and see what is it that we’re really getting in our products that are touching our skin, that are going out into the earth after we use them, that are contaminating our water supply. It’s a really big deal, but it’s not overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be overwhelming. We just start with one action, implement that and then when you’re good, then go back and find another action.

00:11:38:03 – 00:12:04:05
Nathan Crane
Yeah, that’s that’s a great point. And you brought up a distinction in guardianship versus ownership that I think is pretty important. I just watched the the new film in theaters, the documentary called Christ Spirit Sea. And it was really good. And one of the things that they brought up in that film that speaks to this point is this idea of dominion, right?

00:12:04:05 – 00:12:28:09
Nathan Crane
That humans have been given dominion over animals over the planet. You know, it’s in the Bible. The word dominion comes up many times. And that’s one of the reasons that people believe, well, I can do what I want to animals. I can eat them, I can kill them, I can enslave them. I can do what I want to animals into the planet, because God has given us dominion, because the word dominion in our modern day is kind of like ownership ship.

00:12:28:09 – 00:13:03:09
Nathan Crane
It’s mine, right? This is my dominion. I can dominate. I’m a human being, you know, that’s my God given right. But when they talk to a language expert and sat down and went and this is all in the film I thought was really fascinating and went and looked up the ancient Hebrew word from the Bible that was translated to Dominion, the actual original meaning of the word that was in Hebrew, that was in the Bible actually means stewardship, which is the same as guardian or guardianship.

00:13:03:09 – 00:13:27:15
Nathan Crane
And so stewardship actually means responsibility. It doesn’t mean control over it doesn’t mean to dominate. It actually doesn’t mean dominion the way we use it today. It means to take care of to steward, to guardian, to look after. And so when we use that word in that original meaning in this case, with animals and with the planet, it changes everything, right?

00:13:27:15 – 00:13:50:12
Nathan Crane
It’s like, oh, no, these aren’t my animals to control and to dominate and to kill as I please. They’re actually I’m if we if we believe in that, you know, God given a right of stewardship of guardianship, then it’s actually our responsibility to look after them and I just thought that distinction was was was pretty incredible.

00:13:51:10 – 00:14:22:09
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Isn’t it interesting that I have this Justin guy that comes in and helps me to make that distinction? Literally, I ended that conversation after he gave me a one star review and I thought, Wow, I’m going to write a blog that helps to distinguish between a pet owner of the olden days and what that meant. And the pet guardian, which now you come and you tell me about that story and about stewardship.

00:14:22:09 – 00:14:48:04
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And that’s the word I usually do use. And I thought, where that’s two signs that I’m being told, yes, you are going to write this blog. So that’s just confirmation for me that this is an important topic. And it isn’t that what we did in the past was bad or wrong. It’s just that we’re we’re ascending, we’re opening our consciousness, we’re becoming more aware.

00:14:48:12 – 00:15:14:19
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And when you know better, you do better. That’s literally my motto. No better. Do better, right? So I don’t want people to feel like the things that they have done have been harmful or hurtful, even if the result was that now it’s our opportunity to know better through education and empowerment and knowledge is power. And once we know better, you can’t unsee it, you can’t unknow it, you can’t undo it.

00:15:14:20 – 00:15:41:01
Dr. Marlene Siegel
You just have to decide, am I going to use this information as an opportunity to behave better, make better choices, be more conscious of what my behavior is causing on Mother Earth and the animals that were around not just your own pets, but you’re the ones outside the birds and the bees and the wild animals. And so it’s a it’s a whole responsibility.

00:15:41:10 – 00:16:05:22
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And also, how do we behave with each other? Like we can be short fuze, we can be angry, we can be judgmental, we could be pointing fingers and blaming and shaming, and we could berate people like what this guy did to me. And that’s one choice. But we also have the choice on how do we receive it. So for me, I said, Well, I’m going to own that.

00:16:05:22 – 00:16:31:09
Dr. Marlene Siegel
This is a person who showed up to show me contrast, but what am I going to use that contrast for? And so I’m choosing to use that contrast to a educate pet parents on, you know, am I a good fit for you or, you know, what are you looking for in the health care of your pet? And also in my response, you know, I could have been angry.

00:16:31:09 – 00:16:37:08
Dr. Marlene Siegel
I could have taken it personal. But I realize that, first of all, this is a person who is extremely ignorant.

00:16:37:22 – 00:16:43:05
Nathan Crane
And you didn’t kick him out. Obviously, you didn’t kick him out right then said, get out of my office. Get out of here.

00:16:43:05 – 00:17:02:04
Dr. Marlene Siegel
It was thank God it was on the phone, the conversation. But, you know, when he came to pick up his dog, he was even abusive to my daughter who was checking him out and and she was so gracious as a 30 year old to say, if I did anything to offend you, I’m apologizing. And he he takes his back and says it’s not acceptable.

00:17:02:04 – 00:17:04:04
Dr. Marlene Siegel
I’m not going to accept your apology. It’s like.

00:17:04:04 – 00:17:07:06
Nathan Crane
Okay, yeah. Those people are just like it’s.

00:17:07:06 – 00:17:25:01
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Like she didn’t do anything wrong, right? She didn’t do anything wrong. She took the higher road to just to say, you know, she’s realizing that he’s angry and whatever he was going through, he was taking it out on us. And so I just offered compassion back. That doesn’t mean that you have to let people abuse you and harm you.

00:17:25:01 – 00:17:48:10
Dr. Marlene Siegel
I’m not implying that, but I am saying that it’s our choice on how we receive that. So my self-esteem and my belief systems are strong enough that if he has a different opinion, I can say it’s okay. You know, you’re entitled to your opinion. I’m entitled to mine. We don’t have to agree, but we don’t have to be harmful, hurtful and try to get the person as wrong.

00:17:48:18 – 00:18:12:03
Dr. Marlene Siegel
I’m just saying, you have your beliefs based on your experiences. God bless you. Go do it. If it works for you, great. Obviously it wasn’t because all his animals died of cancer. But. But I don’t have to make him feel bad or be bad. I don’t have to make him wrong. I can just allow myself the space to be who I am, knowing that I’m not harming anybody.

00:18:12:03 – 00:18:32:21
Dr. Marlene Siegel
I’m doing the best that I can with the information that I have. You know, ten years from now, my information may shift and I’m going to be open to that because I am always evolving, I’m always growing, I’m always learning. I’m always thinking about animals. Do you know they sense what’s going on around them and they adjust? Are cells do that?

00:18:33:01 – 00:19:02:06
Dr. Marlene Siegel
They take communication from what we’re experiencing, the neurochemicals that we produce when we’re happy and in gratitude versus we’re anger, shame, hurtful, bitter, we produce different neurochemicals. So we’re basically communicating to ourselves and our DNA and our microbiome what is happening in the outside lunar world. And so if we’re telling them all the time that there’s bad things happening, we’re in danger, well, then our cells are going to go into cell danger response mode.

00:19:02:06 – 00:19:22:02
Dr. Marlene Siegel
They’re going to close down. They’re going to stay in a high sympathetic, safe mode, hoping that whatever that danger out there is is going to go away and we can go back to thriving. But that period of time where we’re telling ourselves it’s a bad world out there, they’re hunkering down in the bunker, just trying to wait for the storm to pass.

00:19:22:11 – 00:19:39:18
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Do we want to stay there or do we want to shift into a state of gratitude and joy and love and compassion where it is a totally different vibrational state and the only state that we state parasympathetic and are able to heal and repair and regenerate.

00:19:40:19 – 00:20:07:13
Nathan Crane
100%. So I want to ask you about the current average lifespan of our cats and dogs versus their ideal, let’s say natural health lifespan, if they were healthy, lived a long, healthy life, what is what is that potential for cats and dogs? How long should they be living versus how long are they currently living in our modern day?

00:20:08:09 – 00:20:45:05
Dr. Marlene Siegel
I love that question, Nathan, and thank you for bringing it up. Our pets have statistically been shown to be able to live into their thirties mid to late 30 is with Vibrance. And then when I said it to start with Justin that he just blew up. That’s not true. Okay, dude, we’re done with our conversation. But no, they should be living into their thirties with health and vibrance pets currently are living statistically seven years shorter than they did 20 years ago.

00:20:45:17 – 00:21:08:13
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Now we’re going backwards with all the modern medicine, with all the advancements, with all the things that we know, why is it that the statistics show that our pets are living seven years shorter than they did 20 years ago? 20 years ago, it was common to see labs and golden retrievers and even small breed dogs that were living into their late teens, early twenties.

00:21:09:00 – 00:21:41:15
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And now it it’s rare. Most of these animals aren’t living past ten, and that’s because they’re coming down with these chronic degenerative diseases. But it’s also linked to the level of increase in toxins in the environment. So the body has six organs of elimination. We were literally in the dogs and cats do as well. And we were designed to be able to withstand stressors and toxins and be able to transmute some of these negative things, make them harmless and send them out the body.

00:21:41:20 – 00:22:05:21
Dr. Marlene Siegel
I mean, the liver does three phases of detoxification. It’s amazing what the body can do. But it was never designed to withstand the level, the burden of toxicity that we’re exposed to today. So it’s everywhere you turn, it’s all the foods that are processed and full of hormones, chemicals and GMOs and pesticides and and devoid of enzymes. It’s just dead food.

00:22:05:21 – 00:22:43:18
Dr. Marlene Siegel
It’s FRANKEN food that we’re feeding. And then the water over 85,000 toxins and tap water. And then it’s the air quality that we’re dealing with. And it’s the MF, it’s the mold. I live in Florida, so we have a lot of mold around here. And and then it’s the ants in our brain, you know, these automatic negative thoughts that are creating the neurochemicals that we talked about, and then everything that’s touching our skin, the products that we’re using from women’s makeup to shampoos and conditioners that we unconsciously are washing our babies and not realizing that we’re disrupting their entire endocrine system like we’re making them susceptible to diseases.

00:22:43:18 – 00:23:10:21
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And of course, we’re doing that to our pets as well. So we are inundating our body in such a way and then we’ve cut off the body’s mechanisms for repair. So we don’t have more medic stressors per se in our environmental. A Homedics stressor is a it’s a biological stress that is put on the body in order for the body to respond and be able to improve the body’s ability to endure.

00:23:11:00 – 00:23:38:22
Dr. Marlene Siegel
So one more medic stressor is extreme temperatures. Our ancestors and our pets ancestors, they didn’t live in a house where they could turn the heater on or turn the air conditioner on. They were subject to whatever the external environmental temperature was at. That ambient temperature was absolutely freezing. They got really, really cold. Not everybody survived on that. But those that they did were able to have adaptive things happen in their body.

00:23:38:22 – 00:23:58:16
Dr. Marlene Siegel
They made more antioxidants, whatever, and they they were able to endure. And then the next season, they were better adapted for that environment. And so we don’t see that anymore because we have such a controlled environment. Another one is activity, so high intensity activity is a more medic stressor. And think about what our our ancestors had to do.

00:23:58:16 – 00:24:20:08
Dr. Marlene Siegel
They had to run away from the sabertooth tiger or from the neighboring tribe that was trying to kill them or they had to fight back. Or they so they had these high intensity bouts of exercise are pets. Their ancestors had to hunt down their food. So that meant that if they were hungry, they had to go chase it down or hassle with it, kill it and eat it quickly.

00:24:20:08 – 00:24:36:23
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Before that, another predator came to eat them. So we don’t have that anymore. Dogs and cats, they walk over to their bowl, which, sadly for most pet parents don’t know better. But they leave food in the bowl all day long, so they leave this Franken food for the animal to graze on all day long. And that’s a bad thing.

00:24:38:01 – 00:24:52:10
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And then the other one is the whole idea of just calories all the time. Like if you look at the way wild animals eat aid at dawn and they eat at dusk, they don’t eat all day long. And so they have these long periods of fasting and now people starting to eat.

00:24:52:10 – 00:25:02:20
Nathan Crane
When they can. I mean, if it’s a if it’s a kano, a wild carnivore or a wild omnivore or a scavenger, they eat when they find food. Right.

00:25:02:20 – 00:25:04:01
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Like not they.

00:25:04:01 – 00:25:10:16
Nathan Crane
Don’t have a meal. It’s not a mealtime. It’s like, oh, we found food today. We might not eat for three days, you know? Yeah.

00:25:10:23 – 00:25:29:01
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Yeah. So they stuff themselves when feed when food is available. Absolutely. And but their motivation to hunt is going to be their hunger drive. And then they go back and they digest and they rest and they let the metabolism and all the processes that have to go on to break that food down, absorb it, assimilated and then excrete whatever is wasteful.

00:25:29:19 – 00:25:52:14
Dr. Marlene Siegel
But in in our modern society, we’re giving these animals food all the time, which is metabolically a bad thing to do. They never go into a state of autophagy and autophagy is where we literally are eating our dead and dying cells that are wearing out. Because we make we make billions of new cells every day to replace the ones that are dying.

00:25:52:14 – 00:26:18:19
Dr. Marlene Siegel
That’s the normal process. But when we have all these dead and dying cells that are not being taken care of, they’re not getting used up and recycled and then gotten rid of. Then you have even more toxins that are developing from your own cellular waste. So autophagy is really important to have the ability when there’s no calories coming in to use up all these dead and dying cells.

00:26:18:19 – 00:26:39:14
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Take the parts that are still functional and working, recycle that. And then you go back to a state of matter, which is the anabolic repairing and building and growing. So we do that. We’re supposed to be doing this cycling all the time through our natural lifestyle, but we just don’t live that natural lifestyle anymore. So we have to create it.

00:26:39:14 – 00:26:42:03
Dr. Marlene Siegel
We have to learn about it and then go back and recreate it.

00:26:43:16 – 00:27:04:10
Nathan Crane
Yeah, I like the Buddhist monks I studied with in San Diego for a number of years where they ate one meal a day. This is very common with Buddhists in Tibet or in. I’ve a doctor friend, Dr. Lodi in Thailand. And when he goes up to the temples as well, he says that usually one meal a day, right.

00:27:04:10 – 00:27:29:12
Nathan Crane
It’s they usually eat lunch and that’s it. They fast the rest of the time. And a lot of these a lot of the monks that he visits up in Thailand, for example, up in the mountains and the monasteries are he said, I’m doing testing, blood work and different kinds of work on these monks when I’m up there. And these are 70 and 80 year old monks that are they have the bodies of 35 year olds.

00:27:29:19 – 00:27:52:02
Nathan Crane
They’re strong, they’re fit, they’re healthy, they’re lean, they have energy like they don’t look like a 70 or 80 year old person. And these are people that eat usually one meal a day and they’re fasting the rest of the time. And, you know, that’s just that’s hard for us to think about in Western society because we’re used to eating all the time.

00:27:52:02 – 00:28:10:22
Nathan Crane
It’s also, you know, it is an easy thing to do if you agree that’s very healthy for and for for our animals, for our pets. Pets, our pets. Eat what we give them. Right. They’re not out generally hunting. They’re not I mean, unless you’re my dogs and we’re out running in the mountains and, you know, they’ll catch rabbits and things like that.

00:28:12:12 – 00:28:36:04
Nathan Crane
I don’t think I’ve caught in a squirrel yet, but I’ve seen them catch and eat rabbits and we’re pretty good rabbit hunters, actually. It’s pretty crazy. And they’re part lab, part German Shepherd. But unless your animals are out hunting wild all the time, like they eat what you give them, you know? So that’s the one thing that is in our control with our pets is what we feed them and how often we feed them.

00:28:36:16 – 00:29:07:08
Nathan Crane
And I never thought leaving food out all day long for our pet, you know, our pets was ever a good idea. I think cats, you know, are a little better than dogs about regulating. But I’ve also seen cats that are just so obese and overweight. I mean, dogs and cats today are so overweight is so crazy. I see people walking their dog and like you see them, you know, I’m like, this is a reflection of the diet and the modern lifestyle of modern Americans today.

00:29:07:08 – 00:29:08:01
Nathan Crane
It’s crazy.

00:29:08:24 – 00:29:31:17
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Yeah, it is. And so for any pet parent that’s out there listening right now, pause this conversation. Go get your kibble or canned food. And I’m going to teach you how to calculate the amount of sugar that’s in that food. So you start with 100, 100%, and then you subtract out the protein, you subtract out the fat, the moisture, and about 3 to 5% for ash.

00:29:32:04 – 00:29:59:13
Dr. Marlene Siegel
They will never put on the label the amount of carbohydrates in that diet, because if people saw it was 40 to 60% sugar, they wouldn’t spend the money for that. But that’s literally what we’re feeding these animals. The dogs are are carnivores. Cats are obligate carnivores. They literally have no dietary requirement for carbohydrates. And yet think about it, you’re feeding them 40 to 60% sugar with every bite of every meal of every day.

00:29:59:22 – 00:30:23:07
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Is there not any common sense why we would start seeing them have such severe problems? And obesity is huge, but we’re also a society that’s been trained on fast, cheap and convenient, and that’s how we have been duped into the lifestyles that we have today fast, cheap and convenient. So we go to the store, we buy something in a bag.

00:30:23:07 – 00:30:53:23
Dr. Marlene Siegel
It stays good for 30 days or longer. It can stay on the shelf for years and we don’t think twice about that. But that’s not what I would call a species appropriate diet. So people go, Well, why would pet companies be allowed to sell that if it’s not good for our pets? Well, why is there Wendy’s? Why is there McDonald’s is because we are run by a fast food industry, multi-trillion dollar industry that is also linked to the medical side.

00:30:53:23 – 00:31:25:12
Dr. Marlene Siegel
So as an example for Mars, the candy bar company bars, chocolate bars, you know that Mars, they own a ton of different pet foods. They own at least 12 different brands of over-the-counter pet foods. They also own prescription diets. They own veterinary hospitals. The. BANFIELD So you have your pet. You are going to a BANFIELD Hospital. You are feeding the foods that they recommend, which are all going to be from Mars.

00:31:25:12 – 00:31:57:06
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And then you keep coming back because your animal keeps having issues. You know, it’s one thing breaks down after another and then your pet finally gets a tissue that is more than what they can take care of. So then they send them to a referral center, which shockingly is owned by Mars. And then that center spends most of their money 10 to 15, $20,000 on specialty items, and they’re never treating the root cause of the disease.

00:31:58:07 – 00:32:03:22
Dr. Marlene Siegel
So quick story. I had a dog that I had to put a stomach for in. Now, this is his wild. This is dog.

00:32:04:05 – 00:32:22:23
Nathan Crane
Yeah. Now, I want to hear your story in a second, but I want to I want to show this to people because I didn’t know this. This is the Mars companies. Look at all these brands that they own. Many of what you were just talking about, not only the Mars bars, they own kind and then gum companies. And you go over it, they own dove, right?

00:32:22:23 – 00:32:42:17
Nathan Crane
You go over, you know, M&Ms. And then here’s your cat cat food. Whiskas Snickers pedigree is your dog food. Cat food, right? And Skittles like it’s all the toxic, terrible, you know. And then they have a kind bar, which is still not if you look at the kind bars, I think the process sugar on those is so high I don’t eat them.

00:32:42:17 – 00:33:03:13
Nathan Crane
But I remember seeing them. So it’s like every brand they have here is basically, you know, bounty dog. These are filled with all kinds of chemicals. Every single brand that’s here for humans and animals is basically filled with sugar, filled with toxins, filled with potential endocrine disruptors. And it’s all from the same company. That’s crazy.

00:33:04:14 – 00:33:27:24
Dr. Marlene Siegel
So they own. BANFIELD And then they also own Blue Pearl, which are the referral centers across the United States. How amazing is that? If I wanted to build a business model where I could keep all the business funneling all the way to the end of that pet’s life, they’ve done a wonderful job doing it, not a good job in the sense of the animals health, but they’ve done a great business model.

00:33:28:11 – 00:33:30:18
Nathan Crane
A great business model of creating, you know.

00:33:31:02 – 00:33:33:05
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Creating wealth and income that.

00:33:33:05 – 00:33:42:20
Nathan Crane
Makes people and animals sick, that keeps them sick, that keeps them coming back for more and keeps them going long enough just to keep getting sick and keep buying their products. I mean.

00:33:42:24 – 00:34:03:19
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Until until they run to the point where they say, I’m sorry, there’s nothing more that can be done. That’s insane. And then right now, fortunately, I my office is relatively near to a blue pearl. And a lot of the technicians and some of the doctors will slip these people, my phone number, and they’ll call me and I don’t save everything.

00:34:03:24 – 00:34:29:03
Dr. Marlene Siegel
But I always am able to add quality of life to these animals. But I have dozens and dozens of cases where they were told there’s nothing more that can be done. And these animals live years longer with quality of life, great life expectations, and they were told there was nothing else. So this is a company that doesn’t really focus on anything healthy.

00:34:29:09 – 00:34:46:19
Dr. Marlene Siegel
They don’t do ozone. They don’t do hyperbaric oxygen. They they don’t do anything to actually diagnose the root cause of the problem. So if it’s okay with you, I’d like to kind of unless you have another question I’d like to just mention for people what really causes disease.

00:34:47:00 – 00:34:52:08
Nathan Crane
Yeah, you had a case before I interrupted you. You had a story you wanted share. If you want to share that first.

00:34:52:09 – 00:35:10:11
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Yeah. Thank you for reminding me. So this one patient of mine was a kidney failure dog, and we needed to put a stomach tube in so the dog could be fed. And so I take the dog over to the hospital. The internist puts the stomach to bed, and I said, So what are your recommendations for how to feed this animal?

00:35:10:11 – 00:35:35:14
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Because now it’s going through a stomach tube, a small report. You have to take a little more care. And he brings out this can. And I look at the can, it’s like equivalent to the human. Sure. And the first ingredient is high fructose corn sirup. Now, I am trusting that anybody that is listening to this podcast knows that high fructose corn sirup is the unhealthiest type of sugar.

00:35:35:14 – 00:36:01:13
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Ever, ever, ever. And here they are, a referral hospital that are treating, doing chemotherapy, radiation on cancer patients, charging $10,000 and up. And then when they send that pet home for nutrition, because they’re not the high fructose corn sirup ingredient. And I looked at him and I went, are you kidding me? High fructose corn sirup. And he did this.

00:36:01:17 – 00:36:13:08
Dr. Marlene Siegel
He shrugged his shoulders and just went, yeah, you know, didn’t apologize, didn’t act like he thought there was anything wrong with that. That’s what he’s being told to do, because Mars that’s that’s their motto so.

00:36:13:16 – 00:36:41:13
Nathan Crane
Well, and you have these buzzwords today, too, that veterinarians are piggybacking on, as well as conventional doctors, conventional medical doctors as well. But another example of that is here in Jacksonville, I was looking for an integrative of a veterinarian or holistic veterinarian, and they had it advertised on their website. They were using terms like holistic and integrative and so I went in and took my dogs in and met with them.

00:36:41:13 – 00:37:13:20
Nathan Crane
And the first thing I do when I’m in a place like that is I go and look at all the products they’re selling on their shelves. Yeah, okay. These guys are health minded. They should be selling some really clean stuff all their shelves from treats to food to you name. It was all the process kibble crap with process ingredients hot you know sugar added in you know all the crap that that when I’ve learned from you over the years like you do not give that to your animals and that’s all they were selling so I was red flag number one.

00:37:14:04 – 00:37:28:09
Nathan Crane
Red flag number two was when I was talking to them about different kinds of medication and things like that. And I was talking to her and I was like, well, what do you use for, you know, flea treatment for your dogs? And I was talking to the veterinarian there and, you know, fleas, fleas and ticks are big deal here in Florida.

00:37:28:09 – 00:37:46:24
Nathan Crane
And so it’s like I’m trying to do everything naturally I can for my dogs. I don’t put poisons on them, but they also kind of suffer with the fleas and the ticks. And so, you know, I’m talking to her and she recommends this, you know, this it’s a chemical. It’s a pretty toxic chemical. And I go, well, aren’t you concerned at all about the side effects?

00:37:46:24 – 00:38:17:23
Nathan Crane
And she got all defensive live and she was like, no. And people just think what they want to think about it, but it doesn’t really matter. And she had this weird rant about it, and I was just like, Okay, this person clearly is not holistic minded. It’s not mentioned anything about diet. You know, when I mentioned and I pulled up the list of known side effects from that drug and listed like endocrine disruptor and like all kinds of issues, she literally left the room and didn’t come back in, sent her assistant in.

00:38:17:23 – 00:38:37:20
Nathan Crane
And then I was just like I was like, okay, we’re done here. You know, it was just and but I found out she used the term holistic or integrative because they used one therapy that was an alternative therapy, a cam therapy that was basically like it was like a red light therapy or something. I’m like, this is why you guys call yourself holistic or integrative.

00:38:37:20 – 00:38:53:13
Nathan Crane
This is insane. But you have to be careful out there because people are piggybacking on these. They use them as bad buzzwords. Where you and I know you know this is this is a lifestyle. This is you look at every aspect of your own health. You’re looking at every aspect of your pet’s health.

00:38:54:16 – 00:39:13:03
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Absolutely. Well, you teed up the part that I wanted to go into next, and that is to really understand the biology of your pet and where it goes wrong. So I’m going to make it uber simple for everybody there is that three things I’m going to talk about. There’s actually a fourth, but there’s three things that cause disease.

00:39:13:11 – 00:39:36:17
Dr. Marlene Siegel
So keep in mind, there’s no disease. That’s a word that’s made up. Disease is when the body is not in balance. We’ve done things that cause the body to no longer have the ability to balance itself in a more homeostatic environment because it now it can’t repair itself. So the three things that cause disease, number one, is a deficiency of a central nutrients.

00:39:37:02 – 00:40:06:02
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Now, this is so fascinating to me that our bodies are ridiculously equipped with being able to take food sources in carbohydrates, proteins, whatever fats, and repurpose them. Like we break it down to its molecular individual unit and then we put it back together again and we can recreate almost everything that the body needs through that, except for the essential vitamins, minerals, fatty acids and amino acids.

00:40:06:02 – 00:40:31:09
Dr. Marlene Siegel
So we hope God designed us to be humbled enough that we need to take care of Mother Earth and the food that we’re eating so that we have these essential nutrients. So, number one, a lack of essential nutrients. Well, not a surprise that we know that our food is not being grown in regenerative farming conditions. And so a lot of the food that is being grown is grown on nutrient depleted soils.

00:40:31:17 – 00:40:54:15
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And if those nutrients are depleted in the plant, whatever is eating that plant is going to be nutrient depleted and it goes onward. So our carnivores are the end result of whatever they’re eating. So not a surprise. We do testing on all of our patients, even our young patients. And I’m finding nutrient deficiencies, things like copper, calcium, selenium, zinc, manganese, magnesium.

00:40:55:06 – 00:41:21:07
Dr. Marlene Siegel
They’re nutrient deficient under one year of age if they’re eating processed foods. And I’m testing for that. So this is no longer my opinion. I’ve got data to support this and when I fix the nutrient deficiency in the next part. So we’re going to talk about their symptoms away. So remember, a symptom is just the body saying, knock, knock, knock, I’m trying to get your attention and please pay attention to me.

00:41:22:17 – 00:41:43:08
Dr. Marlene Siegel
We wouldn’t unplug the dash light in our car when it comes on and say, Look, my problems got in my car. We take the car in and we find out why the light is on. A symptom is simply the light coming on in the body saying, I’m trying to get your attention and if we address it earlier on, we do a whole lot better than if we wait until it’s end stage.

00:41:43:15 – 00:42:02:17
Nathan Crane
So if you go to a normal veterinarian, they’re basically going to they’re not going to usually test for nutritional deficiencies and they’re usually going to they’re usually going to prescribe a drug to mask a symptom. Exactly the same model that we have for conventional medicine for people.

00:42:03:16 – 00:42:25:18
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Yeah, it’s name it, blame it and then come up with a pharmaceutical solution. But that’s also from the suppression. If you guys don’t anything else away from this podcast know that symptom suppression is the worst thing you can do now, if you have a situation where you need to suppress a symptom short term. Absolutely. But don’t stop there.

00:42:25:23 – 00:42:47:24
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Find out what the root cause the problem is. We call it bio regulatory medicine, because you really understand the biology. So number one is nutrient deficiencies. Number two are toxicity. He’s right. So we already talked about the food, the water, the environment, all these toxins that are just inundating and overwhelming the system. And these six organs of elimination can no longer keep up.

00:42:48:06 – 00:43:02:16
Dr. Marlene Siegel
So what does it do? It says, okay, well, if I can’t get rid of it, I’m going to store it in the fat or I’m going to store it in a tissue, or I’m going to store it in the far shore, which is all the glue between the cells. So these are extremely important to understand. So what do we do?

00:43:02:16 – 00:43:44:13
Dr. Marlene Siegel
We test for toxins and we identify at least the major metal toxins, which are very prevalent. And I find on average that all of our pet patients have 4 to 6 heavy metals in toxic levels. They’re running around and they’re alive, but they’re not thriving. And then they’re coming down with diseases that are not necessarily directly related. Like I can’t say when you have mercury toxicity, you’re going to have this symptom it doesn’t always correlate but but we still see cobalt lead, antimony, mercury.

00:43:44:18 – 00:44:10:05
Dr. Marlene Siegel
There are so many that are out there that we are oblivious to. And it’s in the food, it’s on the water. We really have to start becoming more aware. So we’ve covered two things that cause disease deficiency and toxicity. Number three is mitochondrial dysfunction and it’s a big topic within itself. But the mitochondria are the little bacteria that have become part of us.

00:44:10:05 – 00:44:34:08
Dr. Marlene Siegel
They live inside of our cells and there’s gazillions of them and they produce energy. So most people know your mitochondria produce energy, but they also so are the signature of what DNA expression should look like. So they are communicating with the microbiome, who is picking up all those signals that we are creating through nerve chemicals from our feelings.

00:44:34:18 – 00:45:13:05
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And they’re having this discussion that occurs through the fascia. They’re transmitting information back and forth through redox signaling, basically like a cell tower that passes a message on and on and on and on to get to the end user. It’s the same exact system, but it’s happening inside our bodies, inside of our cells. And when that communication gets disrupted, something happens where the signal doesn’t get back to the main tower because we’re in cell data response mode or because the toxins have taken over or because the fascia has gotten sluggish and there’s barriers in there because there’s no structured water.

00:45:13:17 – 00:45:43:08
Dr. Marlene Siegel
The fascia is structured water. All the water in our cells is structured. So when that is under ruptured, then the fourth phase of water collapses and a ton of metabolic derangements occur. So number one, deficiency toxicity, mitochondrial dysfunction. And then the fourth thing is actually emotions because we’re all disease. There are emotions that are trapped and creating another dimension to that illness.

00:45:44:14 – 00:46:07:09
Dr. Marlene Siegel
So now everybody can go out and diagnose their animal when they’re sick they’re going to have a deficiency and or a toxicity. Usually it’s a combination. There’s some level of mitochondrial dysfunction and there’s an emotional attachment. But if you just took care of the first three, have your pets tested for deficiencies, have them tested for toxicities, and then am I supporting that mitochondria?

00:46:07:09 – 00:46:47:19
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And there’s tons of literature out there on things that we can do to support the mitochondria oxygen. We need oxygen for people. We need to breathe properly for animals. Also, they need to be able to breathe properly and that’s through exercise and not being frozen in fear and not being restricted. We just think about happens when we’re fearful, we hold our breath, we crunch in, we close in our diaphragm no longer moves properly because you’re just locked into this closed down position and our pets in training to our energy, what we’re going through that they don’t know why it’s a stressful environment out there.

00:46:47:19 – 00:47:03:12
Dr. Marlene Siegel
They don’t know what the danger is. They just know my pet parent is in high sympathetic telling. There might be something horrible going on. I’m going to go into entrapment and be highly parasympathetic, highly sympathetic with them because there’s something bad about to happen. So make sense.

00:47:03:24 – 00:47:25:10
Nathan Crane
Makes perfect sense. I want to I want to take a few minutes and ask you some just quick like rapid response questions like, you know, 1/2 and 5/2 answers and just jot these down for people and then we can take some time and go into the nuances of some of them afterwards, if needed. Some everything has nuance, right?

00:47:25:10 – 00:47:45:13
Nathan Crane
But at least for general, general information for people, I think there’s some really important questions people have so far, which is number one, the ideal amount of feeding times. We should feed our pets once a day, twice a day and three times a day. Five times a day.

00:47:45:13 – 00:48:12:10
Dr. Marlene Siegel
So depending on age, because babies, puppies are going to have to eat more frequently, they don’t have the ability to store glycogen in their liver. So just like any baby would eat more frequently, they do need to eat every 2 to 3 hours, especially small breeds. But that’s you know, that’s just because of the glycogen storage is that until more 6 to 9 months of age and then large breed dogs, it might be out to a year because they’re still growing.

00:48:12:15 – 00:48:34:05
Dr. Marlene Siegel
But when they quit growing, they’re they’re not really gaining weight anymore. Their physical size is stabilized. So somewhere between six months in a year, then they should go down to weaning into either once or twice a day. Twice a day is nice because it gives you the metabolic flexibility. And then when you’re eating, they’re not begging because they’re smelling food.

00:48:34:05 – 00:48:55:05
Dr. Marlene Siegel
They’re they become conditioned to eating just like we do. You know, so many people, they’re hungry because it’s breakfast. They’re hungry because it’s lunch, because it’s dinner. We shouldn’t have to be committed to eating at those times of the day. But I think people could relate to that. Well, the animals get conditioned to eating at regular times as well, and but they are metabolically conditioned to eating at dawn and dusk.

00:48:55:05 – 00:49:01:05
Dr. Marlene Siegel
That’s what their innate intelligence tells them to do. HUNT At dawn and dusk.

00:49:01:05 – 00:49:01:22
Nathan Crane
So it’s like.

00:49:02:01 – 00:49:02:03
Dr. Marlene Siegel
You.

00:49:02:03 – 00:49:04:13
Nathan Crane
Recommend ideally, like morning.

00:49:04:19 – 00:49:07:07
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Ideally, twice a day. Twice a day. Yeah.

00:49:07:20 – 00:49:11:16
Nathan Crane
Morning and evening. What’s the latest on Tiger?

00:49:11:16 – 00:49:31:24
Dr. Marlene Siegel
You know, Dark. So I would say if you’re in a time zone where it gets dark at 6:00 or 8:00, but somewhere in that zone is a good time for them to eat. It also is a great time to observe their behavior because in many animals, the first sign of illness may actually be that they walk away from the bowl or they don’t eat.

00:49:33:03 – 00:49:35:22
Nathan Crane
They’re sick. They’re not feeling well. Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen that.

00:49:37:05 – 00:49:57:24
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And then that. Then you can use the intermittent fasting by skipping one meal once in a while for cats. Do consult somebody who understands this because you don’t want to starve a cat. But cutting down to one day a week, burying it around where they eat one meal, then that actually does give them some metabolic resilience.

00:49:58:08 – 00:50:13:19
Nathan Crane
Okay, now in terms of quantity, what is the ideal kind of feeding per pound of body weight for a dog or a cat? If you’re going to you’re not going to leave food out all day long for your animals, right? Because you want them to live healthy in and a long life. And we’ll get into what types of food in a minute.

00:50:14:03 – 00:50:23:04
Nathan Crane
But if you’re going to feed them, you know, sometime in the morning, sometime in the early evening, you know, what? What is that prescription per kind of pound of body weight?

00:50:24:15 – 00:50:47:22
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Well, that question only really comes up when you’re talking about processed foods. So can we switch the question into what should they be eating first and then come back? Because we can calculate what their metabolic needs are when it comes to eating a raw diet where they’re eating a diet that’s based on meat, fat, bone and organ meat.

00:50:48:10 – 00:51:03:00
Dr. Marlene Siegel
That one I could answer. But when you’re dealing with processed foods, the amount of carbohydrate is going to vary from one product to another. The amount of toxic load is going to vary, and so it changes that animal’s metabolism.

00:51:03:07 – 00:51:10:23
Nathan Crane
Okay, let’s come back to that. And I want to get to the the ideal diet in a moment. Okay. The Mother Rapidfire questions are quick exercise.

00:51:11:05 – 00:51:20:04
Dr. Marlene Siegel
But let me give you let me give you the short answer to your question, though. The short answer is way under what is on the bag. Never feed what’s on the well.

00:51:21:05 – 00:51:34:04
Nathan Crane
So the idea here is that people are going to stop feeding kibble and dried food and processed foods to your animal because you want to live a long, healthy life. But if you continue doing that, you’re saying less amounts than what’s recommended on the bag.

00:51:34:18 – 00:51:54:16
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Yes. Yeah. What they say on the bag is always exceedingly higher than what they metabolically need. So when I have an obese pet comes in, the parent goes, oh, but down the bag it said to feed 4 to 6 cups, you know, then we can know that it does depend a little bit on their activity level, their age, how many calories they’re actually burning.

00:51:54:16 – 00:52:04:23
Dr. Marlene Siegel
But the easy answer is if you’re going to feed a kibble or canned food, go way under what they are recommending and then watch the pet’s body weight if they start losing too much weight, you know, you need to come up.

00:52:05:06 – 00:52:25:23
Nathan Crane
Yeah. If you’re seeing three or, you know, two or three or four rib showing. Right. Like that’s a bad sign. They’re probably getting underway. Yeah. Versus if you can kind of see one of the right kind of you don’t want a rib pack, right? You can kind of see one of the ribs when they’re breathing in or something, but they don’t have excessive fat and they’re not excessively skinny.

00:52:26:07 – 00:52:32:19
Dr. Marlene Siegel
They’re probably the Kellogg’s pitch an inch. No. Oh, you’re too young, Nathan.

00:52:32:20 – 00:52:37:05
Nathan Crane
I Don’t know about I mean, I don’t think I ever had Kellogg’s that much.

00:52:37:20 – 00:52:47:21
Dr. Marlene Siegel
They had a big one of their advertisements was Can you pinch an inch? And if you did pinch an inch, then you were overweight and you could eat Kellogg’s cereal and that was going to make you lose weight. But oh.

00:52:47:21 – 00:52:53:08
Nathan Crane
My God, I stopped watching TV when I was like 15, so I probably missed those commercials.

00:52:53:08 – 00:52:54:09
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Yeah, that was pretty bad.

00:52:55:11 – 00:53:01:04
Nathan Crane
Okay, so exercise. What, like ideal amount of exercise.

00:53:01:04 – 00:53:21:17
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Again, it’s going to be somewhat age related and it’s going to be condition related. So if you have an older cat or a dog that has osteoarthritis, you’re not going to be able to do the same amount of exercise. So there is some discretion that needs to happen, but everybody should exercise every day and that might look like taking a trotting walk.

00:53:21:17 – 00:53:42:00
Dr. Marlene Siegel
If your pet is in condition to do that, obviously you’re looking at the temperature outside. You’re not going to do this at noon in Florida during the summer. But swimming is a great exercise. I like encouraging people to get their animals into doing agility work so that they’re getting some exercise, walking around the block to go poo. That’s not exercise.

00:53:42:05 – 00:53:59:01
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Walking to the food bowl every day, that’s not exercise. We’re talking about really getting the heart rate up and using those muscles. I have a lot of people that use a trampoline to get some of the lymphatic movement, so they bounce on the trampoline with the kids and they have that animal bouncing as well. So that’s kind of good, but.

00:54:00:04 – 00:54:02:16
Nathan Crane
Putting a dog on a trampoline and bouncing really.

00:54:03:12 – 00:54:06:10
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Slightly bouncy, we’re not setting them into the sky, but.

00:54:06:17 – 00:54:09:18
Nathan Crane
I’m like, I’m like, someone’s going to get hurt. And that scenario.

00:54:09:18 – 00:54:15:19
Dr. Marlene Siegel
That the walls are up around it, but you’re just bouncing now that their muscles are contracting because.

00:54:15:20 – 00:54:19:21
Nathan Crane
They don’t you’re not spiking them up there. They’re staying on the trampoline, but.

00:54:20:04 – 00:54:44:00
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Pretty much they might come off a like an inch or two. But the whole point is to get that kind of rebounding exercise for their lymphatic system. So just like our lymphatic system, there is doesn’t have a pump either. So we need that movement, the muscle contraction. So for animals, maybe that can’t go out and do high intensity exercise or running the rebounders, a nice way to get that in there.

00:54:44:06 – 00:54:54:18
Dr. Marlene Siegel
But obviously with much care and discretion. So I think that answered it. It’s yes, know what your abilities are and the temperature and etc..

00:54:55:00 – 00:55:14:03
Nathan Crane
That they’re older. You know, obviously walking is probably a great thing, right? If they can’t run anymore, walking might be a great thing. But but a walking to go poop. You’re probably talking about 10 minutes. That’s not enough time of walking, right? You’re talking like, hey, let’s walk a mile. Two miles, three miles.

00:55:15:00 – 00:55:41:02
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Thank you for yes. When there when you’re walking them to go potty, they’re stopping. They’re smelling, they’re looking around. They’re not really walking. We’re talking what you just said is walking with intention, you know, for the pet parent who’s doing the walking with them, they’re pumping their arms or squeezing their butt cheeks. You know, they’re trying to get some good deep breathing in and you’re moving along a nice clip, not running, but just at a nice exercise walk clip.

00:55:41:16 – 00:56:13:01
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And that would be the same for their pet. We have a lot of people that go biking with their dogs. I wrote a blog on that and there are some special equipment that you can put on so that the dog doesn’t pull you over and it have some wiggle room. Obviously, you want a dog that you’ve trained to do that so they don’t see a dog and then take off and you go flying off your bike, but definitely doing things that help get them out and moving and engaging with some form of exercise that is within the constraints of what their health will allow.

00:56:13:13 – 00:56:43:04
Nathan Crane
So my dogs are eight years old. They’re brother, sister. I run them five days a week, a mile, minimum a mile. Every time it’s on my bike. I’ve got a waist belt that attaches to two leashes and then they pull me, you know, like they literally pull me like the hot dog. Yeah. And like a sled dog. And so but you know, and I’m a bigger guy and so my weight is a little bit more than their weight.

00:56:43:04 – 00:57:04:15
Nathan Crane
But if I’m not mindful with hands on the brakes and paying attention and I mean, they’ll chase off after school, I got to grab their leashes, pull them back while I’m still going. They’ve pulled my dad over like torum right off the bike. You know, he’s 70, so he was not expecting that. So he he takes them one at a time and he can he can do it.

00:57:04:15 – 00:57:21:03
Nathan Crane
But both of them, he can’t do it. But I’ve just trained him that way and I just have to be mindful. But yeah, they’ll, I mean, they’ll full out sprint for a mile by the time we get back home. And then other days I just walk them, I’ll walk them a mile and then once in a while we’ll go out to the forest and they’ll run.

00:57:21:03 – 00:57:35:21
Nathan Crane
The whole time I get them off the leash and they’ll probably run two or three miles. And so at least I run them at least five days a week. I think just like me, I go to the gym five or six days a week, one or two days off a week is a good cadence. I kind of do the same thing with them.

00:57:35:21 – 00:57:46:05
Nathan Crane
I’m like, Yeah, they could use one or two days a week off because I’m running them. They’re sprinting, you know, a mile minimum five days a week, and and that works really good. That works really good for them.

00:57:46:22 – 00:58:08:11
Dr. Marlene Siegel
That they have a lot of dog parks now and the parks are getting very sophisticated. So they’re they’re broken up based on size. So you don’t have little Chihuahuas. And they’re with Great Danes and, you know, with our dog, Allison sent me some video of a D. She has her own Instagram page, by the way, guys. It’s called Antics of ADHD, Antics of a D.

00:58:08:16 – 00:58:24:20
Dr. Marlene Siegel
So she sent me a video of her at the dog park recently, and Eddie’s only, like, nine months old, so she’s still quite a baby, but she’s a little bit bigger. And the big dogs, intimidator. And when a whole bunch of dogs come over, they intimidator. So she’ll get on the ground and lay there and she watches what all the dogs are doing.

00:58:24:20 – 00:58:48:12
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And then she decides, who is it that she’s going to go play with? And then she gets up and they tumble and they run and they just have so much she comes home with hotdogs hanging out and she is ready to go to bed. So that’s a really good thing. If you have a dog that has a great temperament and the pet parents that go to dog, there are a unique breed of pet parents in a very positive way.

00:58:48:19 – 00:59:07:13
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Like they engage, they have birthday parties for their dogs and they invite the dog friends over and they can tell who their dog enjoys hanging out with. They have their best friends. And then there’s the BFG and it’s just adorable. But they really do have this intelligence of how they pick who they’re going to play with.

00:59:08:13 – 00:59:15:11
Nathan Crane
Okay, so let’s talk about diet. What is the ideal diet for dogs? And then what’s the ideal diet for cats?

00:59:16:19 – 00:59:46:07
Dr. Marlene Siegel
So ideal diet is going to be the same for a dog or cat because the wolves and the lions and tigers in the wild, they all eight the same thing. It was whatever wild animals that they could catch, kill it and eat it. We are marketed to believe that there is age differences and there’s health challenges differences. And so we have all of these niches which allow a lot more SKUs on the shelf for people to have to choose from.

00:59:47:19 – 01:00:16:24
Dr. Marlene Siegel
So basically they all eat a raw diet and that is not a piece of chicken from Publix that you throw on the ground because the way that meats handled is not healthy. A raw diet should be a grass fed grass finished. And I do have to digress for a moment. Carnivores get vitamin D from their protein only. Carnivores do not get vitamin D from the sun, herbivores, which are what is being fed and then put into the counter back.

01:00:16:24 – 01:00:40:02
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Hopefully there’s meat in there when you’re feeding your dogs. Herbivores only get vitamin D from the sun. So if they have not been fed out on pastures, grass fed, grass finished, then they’re going to be vitamin D deficient. And so whoever eats them, it’s going to be vitamin D deficient person or or whatever. So it is very important that you distinguish that it’s a grass fed grass finished diet.

01:00:40:13 – 01:01:03:15
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Hopefully they’ve only been on pasture. They haven’t been fed any grains because all grains are going to be genetically modified in today’s modern age. You want the diet to still be in the state of raw, so the moisture content should still be there, which most meat is going to be 70% moisture and the enzymes are still alive in that food because it hasn’t been heated above 105 degrees.

01:01:04:17 – 01:01:30:15
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Our food, because I do have a raw food company and our food is made in a USDA inspected facility. So we’re using human grade products. They’re inspected before they leave. For any pathogens, we test for e-coli, salmonella and listeria. And so these products are very clean and they’re handled. It’s immediately frozen, flesh frozen. So no grow, it’s shipped frozen to the consumer.

01:01:30:21 – 01:01:53:11
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And then the consumers are instructed to handle it wisely, like you don’t leave it sit out on the counter for 4 hours. It’s raw meat. Now, going back to what’s in it, meat, fat bone and organ meat in the right proportions, because that’s what the wild animals would have eaten. And in fact, if anybody really wonders what’s the right decision to make in any circumstance, look at a model in nature.

01:01:53:16 – 01:02:14:00
Dr. Marlene Siegel
How does nature do it and then try to model after that. So a little short breakaway there. All right. So meat, that bone and organ meat in the diet that we made the way the labeling companies though the laws that require labeling in the U.S. in order to call a diet complete balance, you have to add vitamins, minerals and fatty acids.

01:02:14:16 – 01:02:38:13
Dr. Marlene Siegel
But in order to make it shelf stable, they add synthetic vitamins, minerals, and they add cheap, rancid fatty acids, usually fish oil of some kind. And that becomes another layer of toxicity for these animals because they can’t utilize those nutrients. There was a university study done recently and they tested animals that were eating processed food. 85% were vitamin D deficient dogs.

01:02:39:06 – 01:03:10:03
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And I’ve been doing the metal analysis and the nutrient analysis now for over five years. And across the board, our meta analysis shows that a majority of these animals are deficient in 3 to 5, if not more essential nutrients. So Vitamin D, B12, magnesium, and then all the ones I listed at the beginning of the podcast. So we’re sending these animals out with not enough to support them and why the minerals and vitamins are important is because they are literally the cofactors that run our metabolic pathways.

01:03:10:11 – 01:03:34:14
Dr. Marlene Siegel
So it’s not just, oh, let me eat Flintstones, because that’s the vitamin we remember. There’s really the reason behind it are these are the essential nutrients that my products I created, the essential nutrients that the animals need to have. And I made them in a separate form so that you can dose that animal based on its body weight, based on its age, and based on its metabolic needs.

01:03:34:14 – 01:03:44:04
Dr. Marlene Siegel
So my pet parents feed the macronutrient separate from the micronutrients and then they are able to put a diet together in their kitchen. Was that confusing or did that make sense?

01:03:45:06 – 01:04:21:20
Nathan Crane
No, it makes sense. And I want to I want to unpack that a little bit and and push back on a couple of things and have a good conversation around it. One, because you said like cats clearly are carnivores obligate carnivores, right? Like that’s big cats, small cats, whatever. Like, that’s absurd. I don’t think there’s any question about that in the veterinary community where there is question about dogs being carnivores, for example, is even in the wild, you know, wolves and coyotes will forage for berries and things like that.

01:04:21:21 – 01:04:38:16
Nathan Crane
They’ll even eat some seeds and some plants. Now, that’s not their main diet. That’s not majority of their calories, but they do actually tend to be omnivorous in the wild if they’re short on meat. You know, they haven’t killed somebody.

01:04:39:12 – 01:05:04:08
Dr. Marlene Siegel
That’s the operative. That’s the operative. If they’re starving, they will try to eat anything. But you also look at that, Wolf, for example, and their bones are sticking out. They’re emaciated. You don’t see fat wolves. Okay. So it’s not what they would prefer and thrive on, but it’s what they can survive on while they’re waiting for that ability to kill something.

01:05:04:14 – 01:05:24:19
Nathan Crane
Mm hmm. Okay. So. But when you say they’re carnivores, like you’re you’re saying a dog is carnivore, you’re primarily saying what they’re preference is. Right? Like their thriving preference diet is. You know, if you give them fruit, they’ll eat fruit. You give them vegetables, they’ll eat vegetables. There are actually studies done. I don’t know if you’ve seen these.

01:05:24:19 – 01:05:46:00
Nathan Crane
There’s multiple studies done on feeding dogs, a completely plant based diet and extending their lifespan past the average. I’m not saying that’s great or the best way to do it. I’m not saying they have there are published studies on this. They’re case studies of it, too, where dogs have lived 20 to something like 28 years or something like that.

01:05:46:00 – 01:06:12:11
Nathan Crane
I think on a completely vegan diet, they have to give them supplements of certain supplements. Of course. So dogs have been shown to be able to live and in some cases even thrive on a plant based diet. I’m not saying that’s their their instinctual natural diet, but there is quite a bit of research that has been I don’t know if you’ve seen it, that has shown that they can’t thrive on a plant, a plant based diet.

01:06:13:08 – 01:06:31:05
Nathan Crane
Now, that’s real food. That’s real food, though. That’s not the kibble dried crap. These studies, they actually gave them real whole plant foods, just like somebody on a whole food plant based diet would eat. So they’re getting all the essential amino acids, they’re getting the vitamins and minerals. They’re, you know, have a few supplements when they need the supplements.

01:06:31:05 – 01:06:35:13
Nathan Crane
B12, in some cases, you know, you know, vitamin D, in some cases, that kind of stuff.

01:06:36:12 – 01:07:02:14
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Yeah, but you know, you’re talking apples and oranges because if you’re talking about what is a wild animal do in the wild, they’re going to try to survive. But when you take our pets in into our environments, they’re watching what we’re eating, they’re engaged with what we’re eating. And so when we give them something and actually dogs and wolves for a long time, you know, thousands of years, we’re hanging around the outskirts of man’s campsites.

01:07:03:01 – 01:07:27:21
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And so they would scavenge off of the waste that man produced. So they did become more adapted to dealing with a certain level of carbohydrates far better than cats. Cats have not made that adaption, but dogs have adapted to be able to endure some level of carbohydrates, as so we don’t call them obligate carnivores. They’re actually scavenger carnivores because they will scavenge for things.

01:07:28:08 – 01:07:48:22
Dr. Marlene Siegel
But in our home environments, that’s not their natural way of eating. You know, their timing is different, their hunting instincts are different. What we’re offering them, what we get them used to eating because of our social interaction with them. I wouldn’t call that a natural way for them to eat because they’re adapting to this way that we’re eating.

01:07:49:05 – 01:08:11:00
Dr. Marlene Siegel
So when people say, Oh, it’s okay if I give my animal table food, well, all depends on what you’re eating. You’re eating healthy, organic, and it’s species appropriate that, you know, giving your animal a carrot or something like that, that’s not going to be the end of the world. But when you make their diet a lot of carbohydrates from peas and carrots and high carbohydrate vegetables, that could be a problem.

01:08:11:04 – 01:08:29:12
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And then the fruit, you know, is high in sugar because our fruit today is not the same as the fruit that they ate 200 years ago, which our fruit today is bred to be very, very sweet. When I have I live in a food course, as you know, and my cherries do not taste like a big cherry that you buy from the store.

01:08:29:19 – 01:09:04:05
Dr. Marlene Siegel
They are fabulous, but they have a tartness and they have bitter and they have sour. You know, they they’re what our palates were designed to eat. But that’s not what we eat in today’s modern world. So your question is very complex, and my short answer was not so short. Ideally, from a species appropriate diet, I think that would be the easiest way to start because then you start getting off into the weeds when people are trying to feed a vegan diet, a lot of people have a hard time keeping their diet balanced when they’re vegan, let alone trying to balance their dogs diet.

01:09:04:10 – 01:09:08:03
Dr. Marlene Siegel
So you can get into a lot of problems if you really don’t know what you’re.

01:09:08:03 – 01:09:36:04
Nathan Crane
Yeah, I just I think for the, you know, the the population of people, there’s about 2 billion vegetarians on the planet and something like 100 million vegans or something like that who who, you know, ethically don’t want the raising and killing and slaughtering of innocent animals to feed their pets. Right. And so they’re finding ways to say, hey, I still want to be a pet parent and have a dog.

01:09:36:04 – 01:09:56:22
Nathan Crane
For example, but I don’t want to feed them meat. And so, you know, they’re also curious, okay, can I feed my dog plants and can they thrive? And there interesting, like I said, case studies and published research showing that, yes, they can be healthy and thrive. But you have to know what you’re doing. You have to have a well-planned diet just like you would as a human.

01:09:56:22 – 01:10:23:22
Nathan Crane
You have to have a well-planned diet. If you’re going to be vegan or plant based, you have to have a well-planned diet if you’re omnivore, right? Like the same amount of people are deficient in vitamin D and other vitamins, iodine, for example. I think I think iodine and vitamin D and a couple other vitamins are like, doesn’t matter what diet you’re on, the standard population are significantly deficient in these essential vitamins.

01:10:23:22 – 01:10:47:16
Nathan Crane
So any diet you have to have well planned. We’re talking whole foods, real foods. We’re talking a good diversity of food for ethical reasons. If people want to feed their their their animals, you know, more of a plant based diet, there are ways to do it. You have to learn how to do it. But what you’re saying is, hey, a species appropriate diet, a dog in the wild or a cat in the wild is going to generally be more carnivore.

01:10:47:16 – 01:11:07:19
Nathan Crane
And so if you’re going to feed them more of what they would eat in the wild, then that’s that is raw meat, raw organs, raw bones, these kinds of things that they would find when they killed an animal and ate that animal. That’s what they’re going to be. That’s more of what you want to feed them.

01:11:08:06 – 01:11:30:08
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Is what your absolute. There was a study done by the University of Helsinki, which is a veterinary college. It’s one of the few studies that have ever been done in the veterinary world. And they took four populations of animals. They had one group of dogs that were only raw, and they had one group of dogs that were only kibble eaters.

01:11:31:05 – 01:11:53:03
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And they did all of these different tests to find there were different inflammatory benchmarks that they were looking at. And then they took the raw eaters and fed them kibble and they took the kibble eaters and venom raw. And then after a period of time, they came back and they measured those same inflammatory markers to see where the animals were.

01:11:53:11 – 01:12:16:19
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And then every case, the raw eaters were the lowest on the inflammatory markers, the kibble eaters were the highest. And when they switched, the groups to the opposite diet, it went back to the kibble eaters, the inflammatory markers went up, and the raw eaters, the inflammatory markers went down, which is the way you want to go.

01:12:17:02 – 01:12:34:08
Nathan Crane
So there’s so much processed crap in that dried food. I mean, it is so full of chemical additives and fillers and preservatives. I want to make a distinction. When you’re saying kibble, generally, you’re not just talking about the brand kibble. You’re talking about dry dog food in general.

01:12:34:08 – 01:12:38:03
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Thank you. Yes. I don’t even know if there’s a brand called Kibble, but.

01:12:38:19 – 01:12:42:03
Nathan Crane
What I remember there was one. I don’t know if they’re still around, but.

01:12:43:01 – 01:13:13:02
Dr. Marlene Siegel
All right. Yeah, it’s that little dry nugget that doesn’t have moisture in it. And you can when you open the bag, all that that fat and waxy stuff on the outside, of course, that’s all the rancid fats that are in there. So that’s probably as bad as you can get for a diet. Now, what the university also showed that you could feed 51% raw and minimize the amount of kibble because some pet parents feel like it’s too expensive to feed a straight raw diet.

01:13:13:07 – 01:13:33:19
Dr. Marlene Siegel
If your animal is under £40, it really is a no brainer. It’s it’s not that expensive when you get into the large and giant breed dogs. Yes. They’re going to eat a lot of meat. They can eat up to two or 2 to 4, £5 a day, depending on their body weight. However, what people don’t calculate in is the broken care that you’re paying for.

01:13:34:05 – 01:14:01:16
Dr. Marlene Siegel
So one veterinary visit for a sick animal could easily run between 400 and over $1,000 if spend $1,000 trying to diagnose your dog. That’s not even maybe treating it for vomiting, diarrhea, cancer. God forbid. Then how much of that raw food could you have used for just that one visit that would have probably taken you out a couple of months?

01:14:02:01 – 01:14:21:21
Dr. Marlene Siegel
So Again, our society is trained to be a broke care society. Fact Growing up, I would hear if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Well, seriously, that’s a society that puts blinders on. I’m not going to look at what I’m doing and then when it breaks, then all of a sudden, oh my gosh, now I got to face it and I got to deal with it.

01:14:22:02 – 01:14:47:13
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Now, if you’re like my client that we fire Justin, he’s just going to go out and get another dog, all right? Because it’s a it’s a commodity to him. He’s just a pet owner. It’s just something that he owns. But if you are the pet parent that really wants to have a life with your pet and help them to live the longest, healthiest life possible, we’re likely to outlive them and we’re going to suffer that loss when we say goodbye.

01:14:47:19 – 01:15:12:02
Dr. Marlene Siegel
But we’ve had all those years of joy and gratitude and blessings that they bring, and we certainly know that animals in our lives enhance our lives immeasurably, and even we can measure the hormones, improvements, the quality of our life that improves when we have a pet and not one that we’re abusing. You know, these are people that love their animals and they treat them as part of the family and the kids grow up with them.

01:15:12:02 – 01:15:33:24
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And it’s a family, two legged son, four legged. So for those people, when they start looking at what it costs them in broke care and then I help them to see what would it really cost to feed them correctly. And Nathan, it’s shocking. It’s not that bad. So you’re you’re behind back.

01:15:34:06 – 01:15:58:14
Nathan Crane
It’s more than what people are used to. But when you when you look at it in the long run, it’s it actually makes sense, especially when you start factoring in medical bills. Right. And same thing with our own health. It’s like, you know, I was at a point not too long ago, not too many years ago, it was like, do we buy groceries today or do we save this little bit of money to pay rent in a couple of days?

01:15:58:14 – 01:16:40:10
Nathan Crane
Because we don’t really have the option to do both. And we still chose to buy organic. We still chose to eat healthier. We still chose, you know, real foods. We couldn’t buy all the packaged stuff and all the more expensive stuff. But it was still you know, it was still a choice we were making even then because of how important health became to me, my wife and for our kids, for my daughter at that time, who was just born and it was, you know, the more you put that importance on your own health and you realize how expensive being sick really is, not just medical bills, which are insane, but how expensive it is to

01:16:40:10 – 01:17:03:03
Nathan Crane
your well-being, how expensive it is to you missing work or missing, you know, if you run a business, how expensive it is to your family, you not being there like the expenses go way beyond spending a few extra dollars on foods and things that are cleaner and more organic and healthier foods. So I think for our pets, I get it, I get it.

01:17:03:03 – 01:17:06:05
Nathan Crane
I totally get it. Once we prioritize it, it’s it becomes and then.

01:17:06:05 – 01:17:24:20
Dr. Marlene Siegel
We have the quality of life in there, too. It’s nobody wants to see the pet suffer. Nobody does like at least nobody that I’ve ever worked with. So when you add quality of life and all the other stuff that we just it’s really not that expensive. Like we just have to make choices. I’m like you. I only eat organic.

01:17:24:20 – 01:17:37:15
Dr. Marlene Siegel
I only use homemade. Good chemical cleaners like, you know, essential oils, which is technically a chemical. It’s a constituent. But these are things that come from the earth. Yeah. So natural chemical the earth.

01:17:37:15 – 01:18:00:24
Nathan Crane
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I wanted to say back on the diet piece, it’s funny because people who say this makes me laugh all the time. People who say that they’re on a carnivore diet. I’m on the carnivore diet. I’m on the lion diet. I’m a carnivore, right? Like people can choose whatever diet they want for themselves. I really that’s their choice.

01:18:00:24 – 01:18:25:13
Nathan Crane
I respect that. Like I really don’t care at the end of the day. But I have to laugh because if you look at a lion or you look at a carnivore in the wild and I’ve watched my own dogs do it in the wild when we’re running, right, they kill an animal and they eat the entire animal to tell the fur, the the bones, the tissues, the hearts, the organs, the brains, the skulls.

01:18:25:22 – 01:18:50:13
Nathan Crane
They literally tear open the intestines, the stomach and even carnivores are actually plant eaters because they’re eating the fermented in the stomachs and intestines of the herbivores they just ate. So, you know, if someone says they’re a carnivore and they’re like all they’re eating is I’m like, you’re not even close to a carnivore. You’re a beefeater, right? Right.

01:18:50:13 – 01:19:20:05
Nathan Crane
Which is like carnivores even eat plants. And carnivore people today don’t realize that they eat the plants from the intestines and and a lot more. They’re getting fiber from the fur. You know, they’re eating the bones, the herbs, eat everything from the animals that they kill everything they possibly can from the animal that they kill. And so I’m like, if you’re going to be if you going to call yourself a carnivore, go out in the wild and actually eat like a carnivore eats and then come back and tell us if you’re a carnivore, I’d love to see it.

01:19:21:21 – 01:19:47:09
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Talked about feeding animals more of a plant based diet. And one of the distinctions I want to help people understand is that carnivores do not have amylase in their saliva. It is the digestive enzyme that we use to break down carbohydrates. And animals don’t chew their food. They tear, gulp and swallow by design because, you know, if you’re a carnivore in the wild and you’ve killed something, you’ve made a lot of commotion, you’ve attracted other predators.

01:19:47:14 – 01:20:15:20
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And they’re either going to eat you because you’re distracted in your eating or they’re going to take your and steal your lunch. So the fact that dogs and cats do not have amylase in their saliva and they don’t chew their food if we’re going to feed them more of a plant based higher carbohydrate diet, we just need to help them with the digestion of that because otherwise they zap their pancreas as the only organ that they’re using to digest with.

01:20:17:01 – 01:20:42:05
Dr. Marlene Siegel
So at least with the raw diet, the protein is being digested by the enzymes that are still living in that meat that. Help it when when food rots. What’s happening is you have a couple of cells that break open. They release the enzymes that self digest and then that coats the next layer of cells next to them. And then that that starts to break down and those cells open up and boom, boom, boom.

01:20:42:09 – 01:21:11:15
Dr. Marlene Siegel
You know, if you ever watch a piece of fruit, it’s break. When it’s rotting, it starts so that usually a center spot and then it goes out, out, out until the whole thing as much. And so when we’re feeding a plant based diet, if somebody chooses to do that, you just have to add in the enzymes that that animal needs to help break that food down because were not the that’s why they ate it out of the intestines of the animal because that animal was able to break down the carbohydrates.

01:21:11:19 – 01:21:40:04
Dr. Marlene Siegel
And what they’re now eating is a pre digested, fermented rich, probiotic prebiotic slurry that they’re eating from the intestines. It’s far different than saying, look, they’re out there eating their own grasses and eating their own corn and eating their own blueberries. No, they they very minimal part of their was eating it straight. They got most of it from the intestines of the animal, the herbivore that they are now eating.

01:21:41:22 – 01:22:10:10
Nathan Crane
So on that note, there is now I don’t know about cats and I don’t know about all dogs, but there was a dog, there was a study. They were looking at male beagles and seeing because they were because that’s been the the general understanding is that dogs don’t have amylase in the saliva, but they have they have new technology to to test some of these things, just like urine, actually, we thought was totally sterile.

01:22:10:10 – 01:22:34:11
Nathan Crane
I actually found out just in the last years they have new technology to determine that urine actually has very tiny amounts of bacteria in it. So it’s mostly sterile, except it has some of your own bacteria that’s already in your body in it, like tiny amounts. So it’s technically not 100% sterile. But there there was a study where they’re looking at the salivary glands of beagles and found that they do have amylase, in fact.

01:22:34:11 – 01:22:39:08
Nathan Crane
So I don’t know if that’s all dogs or if that was just this particular study. I don’t know if you know about this.

01:22:39:10 – 01:23:08:22
Dr. Marlene Siegel
It’s it’s trace amounts. It’s not it’s not enough production where we would say that they were designed to actually eat a carbohydrate diet because their food doesn’t stay in their mouth long enough to actually mix in. Like when we chew food the way we’re supposed to eat, we’re supposed to to our food up. So the surface area of the food becomes larger and mixes it with our saliva, which has the amylase in it, and then that begins the carbohydrate digestion in our mouth.

01:23:09:04 – 01:23:25:23
Dr. Marlene Siegel
But most people don’t eat properly. They put a bite of food in their mouth, they touch up three times and then they swallow. So they’re not getting that good carbohydrate digestion started in their mouth. And for a lot of people that begins the whole process of mal digestion, malabsorption.

01:23:26:24 – 01:23:49:11
Nathan Crane
Upset, stomach, all kinds of stuff. Now it’s true. You watch your dog eat, you know, any food, give them a raw piece of meat. It’s like one, two quick little bites, swallow it. Now, you know, their digestive tract is so different than humans as well. Their digestive tract is smaller, they have way more acid. That’s why they can eat raw bones.

01:23:49:11 – 01:24:11:10
Nathan Crane
And they’re, you know, acid just breaks it right up. Right. They can they don’t have to chew. They can just swallow. Their intestinal length is significantly shorter than ours. Their bodies are just made to like gulp, gulp, swallow things down. You know, I look at them, I almost feel bad sometimes. They’re so excited to eat. You Know how I got I got this piece of meat or whatever.

01:24:11:10 – 01:24:25:12
Nathan Crane
I got so ready to eat. They’re so happy, so excited. And then, like, they swallow it in, like, 2 seconds, and I’m like, where is the satisfaction in, you know, you sit that when I’m hungry and I got a nice big meal in front of me and I’m like, I’m like, Oh, I really this is going to taste delicious.

01:24:25:12 – 01:24:40:02
Nathan Crane
I sit there, enjoy it for like 10 minutes, 15 minutes. I’m like, Oh, that was good. You know, they’re they’re like, gobble, gobble. And it’s gone. And it’s like there’s aspects of the last, like, 2 seconds, but that’s how they’re designed. That’s how they’re designed. Yes.

01:24:40:11 – 01:25:05:04
Dr. Marlene Siegel
It’s a great point. They’re not eating for the flavors and for the ambiance and for the cuisine they’re eating because hungry. So their hunger drive is driving them for satiety. Yeah. So it’s and they don’t have the same social implications around eating, they can eat by themselves. In fact a lot of times they’ll chase off their partners. So they love to share their food.

01:25:05:12 – 01:25:24:08
Dr. Marlene Siegel
So it’s a eating to them is a totally it’s survival, right? Like they have to be hungry so that they can pass their gene pool on because if you’re a carnivore in the wild and you pass up a meal, you do that too many times. You’re going to die. You won’t have the energy to keep doing your your job.

01:25:25:15 – 01:25:55:14
Nathan Crane
So big takeaways as we wrap up feeling anything that I might have missed but real foods, whole foods, species appropriate diet. Get your animals off the dried kibble crap, give them filtered water, get them fresh air and sunshine every day. Get them out into nature often as possible. Exercise them ideally high intensity, exercise some kind of jogging or running or even brisk walking.

01:25:55:14 – 01:26:18:10
Nathan Crane
But you’re going to do, you know, at least, you know, a mile or longer, multiple days a week. Show them love. Don’t be like Justin. And just used you know use them as whatever he thinks animals are for have guardianship right guardianship and being guardians instead dominators anything else.

01:26:19:08 – 01:26:42:21
Dr. Marlene Siegel
That was my favorite line right there is that we are guardians of this planet. We are guardians of our bodies. We have the responsibility for our children and our family and our friends. Because when you know something and you know somebody is harming themselves or their pet, I don’t think it’s right to not say something. No, you can say it nicely.

01:26:42:21 – 01:27:04:02
Dr. Marlene Siegel
You don’t have to be judgmental and angry and you don’t have to be a jerk about it. But I think it is important that we, by modeling what we do, that we influence those around. Now, I’m also around in 70. I think your dad and I are close to the same age and I live my talk. I walk my talk.

01:27:05:02 – 01:27:24:23
Dr. Marlene Siegel
You had brought up the veterinarian who they call themselves holistic, and they don’t even even model the diet portion. That is a huge problem in our industry because people don’t know how to select the right doctor and they should do what you did you first. They have to be educated. The pet parent has to be educated. We have an online program.

01:27:24:23 – 01:27:50:04
Dr. Marlene Siegel
They are welcome to do that and become empowered to understand how do I really take care of my pet. Then when you go to seek a veterinarian now you have good questions to ask. And the first question I would ask is, what do you recommend feeding my pets? And if they tell you some kind of a labeled product, a kibble or a canned food that comes with initials on it from a big box company, that’s not for you.

01:27:50:17 – 01:28:16:09
Dr. Marlene Siegel
So go interview somebody else. And until you find the person that understands that they’re they’re not just treating one thing. You’re treating the whole body. It’s it’s bio regulatory medicine means that we’re understanding how the body works. And then we’re putting together a lifestyle plan that helps support the body. We are not going to be better, God. We’re not going to create it.

01:28:16:09 – 01:28:37:24
Dr. Marlene Siegel
We have never been able to create a better model than what is already created for us. So let’s be the good steward. Let’s be the guardian, and let’s understand what we have so that we can best support the biology of the body, whether it’s ours or our pets. And then last but certainly not least, apply that to how we treat Mother Earth.

01:28:38:13 – 01:29:04:19
Nathan Crane
Yeah, you know, I do want to add this really quick because I think it’s important. I just remembered, you know, I’m I’m a big proponent of, you know, a whole food plant based diet for people, you know, whether it’s vegan or vegetarian or primarily whole food plant based. And I tried putting one of my dogs years ago on a vegetarian diet and whether I didn’t know what I was doing with that or not, he clearly hated it.

01:29:04:19 – 01:29:29:18
Nathan Crane
He ate his poop all the time. I couldn’t stop him from eating his own poop, which, you know, I knew that was not a good sign then. I didn’t I didn’t understand like I do now how that was a terrible thing. That was primarily his, you know, due to his diet and digestive issues and things going on. And and he just was not a happy dog on that diet.

01:29:29:18 – 01:30:00:09
Nathan Crane
And it was like I was forcing him against what he really wanted. And while I do believe in animal rights and and I’m not a proponent of raising animals for slaughtering and killing them and eating them, I’m just personally not. I also do have to look at that experience and look at species appropriate diets and look at animals in the wild like dogs and, you know, lean into the fact that, hey, this may be the diet that they really need.

01:30:00:20 – 01:30:30:23
Nathan Crane
I currently do feed my dogs meat. And because I, in talking with you over the last few years, have come to agree with you that I think that is the ideal diet for them. But at the same time, ethically, it’s challenging. Ethically, as a person who is whole food plant base, who has compassion and care for animals, who chooses not to eat animals, because I believe all animals have souls and I don’t believe it’s my right to kill them and eat them.

01:30:31:09 – 01:30:55:06
Nathan Crane
I also look at, okay, if I’m going to choose to have a dog, you know, and I’ve forced a dog in the past to be vegetarian and he did not do well on that. Again, that may have been my fault, you know, and the first time I gave my dogs raw meat, the two dogs that, you know, Sonny and Moonie, because they were on primarily in the first few years, are primarily on like dry dog food and canned dog food and stuff like that.

01:30:55:15 – 01:31:13:23
Nathan Crane
The first time I came around me there, I saw this energy light in their eyes that I’d never seen in any one of our animals ever. It was like the first time that Ed, they were just like, Oh my God, what is this? And they salivate and they like they went crazy while they didn’t really care that much for the food I used to give them, they would just go and kind of eat it.

01:31:14:05 – 01:31:34:14
Nathan Crane
Nonchalant. They fight each other over the raw meat, you know, like, no, that’s mine. That’s mine. They’re like. Like, it’s I clearly saw, okay, this is what they really want. And so I’m always torn between like, well, yeah, but I’m still contributing to, you know, raising and killing innocent animals for them to eat. And so it is tough.

01:31:34:14 – 01:31:55:11
Nathan Crane
I mean, I think people who are people in my audience, you know, a percentage of people who are, you know, vegan or who, you know, have compassion for animals and don’t want to contribute towards the raising and killing of innocent animals. But then also choosing to have dogs or cats. It’s a tough predicament that we’re in. I mean, I’m not saying I have the solution or the answer to it.

01:31:55:11 – 01:32:02:05
Nathan Crane
I’m just saying I’m living through that predicament right now and trying to figure it and trying to figure it out, you know?

01:32:03:00 – 01:32:32:04
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Yeah. You know, when you go into like how the indigenous tribes, you know, the Indians or the Native Americans, how they lived their lives, they did eat meat. They would have a kill, but they honored the soul of that animal. They used every single part of that animal. They killed it as humanely as they could. You know, there was a lot of consciousness and gratitude around and how they live their lives and how they ate.

01:32:33:06 – 01:33:00:15
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Plants are alive. I talk to my plants and when I eat them, they I give gratitude and thanks. So maybe part of the answer is that we try to live our lives as close as we can to way we were species appropriate, designed to eat, and that we just have gratitude and caring and compassion for every aspect of our life.

01:33:00:21 – 01:33:30:21
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Like if we’re if we are going to eat something, if if it’s a vegetable or it’s an animal, we should be giving gratitude because it’s sustaining us. It’s giving us nutrition. So maybe that’s the answer, is that we just become much more graceful, compassionate, kind and aware, be present with the things that we do in our life on a daily basis, be here today and in now and right there.

01:33:30:21 – 01:33:43:07
Dr. Marlene Siegel
That just raises the energy and the consciousness of the world. What a nice way to end our conversation with with something so positive as being conscious and aware and in the moment.

01:33:44:00 – 01:34:09:02
Nathan Crane
Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think adding compassion to anything in our lives going to be is going to be better than not. Right. And this would be a conversation for later time. I know we both actually have to wrap up, unfortunately, but don’t I mean, I personally don’t agree with the idea that we can pray over an animal’s soul and that justifies us eating them right.

01:34:09:02 – 01:34:26:01
Nathan Crane
Like and this isn’t like to judge anybody. It’s just this is my personal belief and I don’t expect anybody else to have this belief either. But I don’t believe I can just you. Okay. I’m going to pray over your soul and thank you for letting me eat you. Because there’s no animal that wants you to kill them. There’s no animal that wants you to eat them.

01:34:26:09 – 01:34:47:23
Nathan Crane
If you’ve ever tried killing an animal by hand, which I have years ago, you know, it’s like they absolutely want to live. They absolutely do not want you to kill them. They have emotions. Difference between animals and plants, in my opinion, is I believe animals have a soul similar to humans, maybe not exactly the same, but similar. And plants don’t have that conscious soul.

01:34:48:02 – 01:35:09:01
Nathan Crane
They are they feel with when we put, you know, machines up to them and they have senses, but they don’t have consciousness like humans or animals. Animals, consciousness. We know that. Right. And they have feelings and emotions and they you know, plants are not. When we compare plants to animals, I don’t think you know, I personally don’t think we can compare them at all.

01:35:09:01 – 01:35:27:24
Nathan Crane
But again, it’s not a judgment and that’s a conversation that’s a deeper conversation for another time, because it’s an ethical conversation. It’s a philosophical conversation and it’s an important one. I think that millions of people want to have a deeper level today without getting into I don’t like the fighting and the judgment and your and I’m good and blah blah.

01:35:27:24 – 01:35:50:22
Nathan Crane
It’s like, I don’t believe in all that crap, but I think it’s a conversation worth exploring and having and feel philosophizing about, you know? But anyway, this has been a great it’s always great chatting with you, Marlene. You’re a wealth of knowledge and information and you’ve given a lot of really good tips and things for people today to take better care of their furry loved ones.

01:35:50:22 – 01:36:05:20
Nathan Crane
If people want to get in touch with you, maybe schedule an appointment to come to your clinic. I know you’re in your near Tampa, Florida, or take your pet pet parent course or I know you’ve got supplements and products that you sell. Like, where’s the best place for people to get in touch with you.

01:36:07:00 – 01:36:31:05
Dr. Marlene Siegel
D r like and doctor and then my name dot com so d r Marlene SIEGEL dot com and r l e and e s like and sam i e g like and George e l so dear Marlene SIEGEL dot com is the hub for everything. Our courses are online products. My office consultations. We do consultations online. So there’s a plethora of information out there as well.

01:36:31:05 – 01:36:52:17
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Very active on social media this year. So we put a lot of content out there and so grateful for you that you have taken the pet world under your wing, pun intended. And helping people to round out their lives for themselves and for their fur babies or feathered or scaled babies and Mother Earth.

01:36:53:08 – 01:37:07:18
Nathan Crane
Hey, last name is Crane. So taken under my wing makes a lot of sense. All right, awesome. Thank you so much. And I’ll see you. I’ll see you at our retreat next week. I’m looking forward to it.

01:37:08:10 – 01:37:11:13
Dr. Marlene Siegel
I say we both make it to Mexico. Woo!

01:37:11:13 – 01:37:12:14
Nathan Crane
All right, take care.

01:37:13:09 – 01:37:14:04
Dr. Marlene Siegel
Hi, everybody.