The Truth - Dr Karen Shaw Becker
Dr Karen Shaw Becker
Doctor of Veterinary Medicine Karen Shaw Becker on the Raw Food Diet
Watch the below video for a short, sharp and hard hitting overview of why our dogs need proper and appropriate nutrition to thrive.
For optimal health to occur, animals must consume the food they were designed to eat; a species appropriate diet. Our domestic dogs are carvinvirous animals by design and by nature, as they had been prior to domestication (15000 years ago).
While they have been and still are selectively bred for their phenotype (outward characteristics), dogs’ genotype remains the same as it has for millions of years, which tells us which foods they should be eating.
Dogs are biologically equipped to assimilate and digest foods that they were designed to eat. Dogs mouths and digestive tracts are designed to eat meat, with hinged jaws and teeth not designed for chewing (as found in herbivores such as cows), but sharp teeth for tearing and ripping flesh. As dogs ancestors would hunt and kill wild prey, they did not evolve to digest clean or sterile food, and they have incredibly resilient and strong guts designed to handle naturally occurring bacteria, with short GI tracts designed for food to enter and exit the system quickly.
As food was not provided for them, dogs would have daily rigorous workouts in an attempt to catch enough food in order to not starve to death. This also provided them with intense stimulation of all of their sensors, plus nervous, skeletal, endocrine and circulatory system involvement.
Pet food as we know it today is a new and man-made concept developed in the last 100 years, before which dogs have been scavengers for millions of years. Dogs are not designed or evolved to process foreign foods such as starch and carbs, and as such the modern dog food industry is allowing dogs to survive, but not thrive.
While dogs (& cats for that matter) can withstand and endure being fed biologically inappropriate foods (just like we can as humans), we are now seeing generations of nutritionally weakened animals who suffer from degenerative diseases linked to nutritional deficiencies that most vets have not and do not acknowledge.
The dog food industry exploits recycling in the human food industry; taking grains that fail inspection, uninspected pieces and parts left over from the seafood industry, leftover restaurant grease, downer cows, dead farm animals, diseased livestock and road kill that all must be picked up and disposed of through “rendering”, a process that takes the animal proteins and converts them into raw materials for the pet food industry.
This is then purchased by big brands who blend this rendered fat and meat with a large quantity of unnecessary starch, add bulk vitamin mineral supplements, extrude it at high temperatures creating all sorts of toxic reactions including advanced glycation end products and heterocyclic amines and then sell it at unbelievable profit. As dog parents are becoming more educated about the system, the big brands are changing their marketing to try and win them back.
Whenever has a paediatrician advised feeding one single big name branded food because a home prepared and fresh diet could be harmful for a child? Never.
Dogs have gone from eating a natural diet 99.999% of the time, to now consuming an extruded and processed diet 0.001% of the time. They evolved to consume a low carbohydrate, high moisture diet, and now, in the last 100 years, are presented with a high carbohydrate, low moisture diet, putting them in significant metabolic and physiologic stress, as well as being the root causes of most degenerative diseases and inflammatory processes that now plague our pet population.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx2YIIpF4cc&t=90s
