Dr. Judy Morgan 0:00
Welcome to the Naturally Healthy Pets podcast. Let's get to it. Hello and welcome to the Naturally Healthy Pets podcast. I'm your host Dr. Judy Morgan. My guest today is Chelsea Kent who is someone who makes me look like I am not busy at all because she has so many things going on. She co owns Heroes Pets, which is an amazing pet store in Littleton, Colorado, Parsley Pet HTMA testing for dogs, humans and horses, and also Solutions Pet Products, which is a an herbal and food line of products that are amazing. She affords significant industry insight and provides the opportunity to see what's currently important to consumers, manufacturers, reps and distributors nationwide. She has worked with Paws For Change, HRI Labs, the Royal Animal Health University, and the College of Integrative Veterinary Therapies. She's also an active advocate for the holistic market in regards to government and regulatory settings. And she's one of those crazy people who goes to the AFFCO meetings and is bored to tears a couple times a year just to see what craziness is going on in the pet industry. And she specializes in pathogen and industry regulation. Chelsea, thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to be here.
Chelsea Kent 1:22
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Dr. Judy Morgan 1:26
So you really are a voice for change, especially within the pet food industry, but just really for pet overall. And so there's, you've got your hands in so many different pots, and you've got so many things going on. But I think what we're going to focus on today is really looking at diet, and supplements. And you know how those things are combined, and how they can make huge differences for our pets. So one of the things that we hear very often is, when we are talking about feeding a fresh food diet or a raw food diet, we'll get pushback on social media, from people saying, oh, but my veterinarian put my pet on a prescription diet and says that he has to be on this prescription diet for the rest of his or her life. What do you have to say to that?
Chelsea Kent 2:27
Well, several of those prescription diets actually say on the package that it should not be used long term, it says for intermittent and supplemental feeding only. And generally speaking, those products, most of them actually contain biodiesel and alcohol production byproducts and meat meals. And you can actually see pictures on Google Earth of where they get those meat meals. If you look up like Darling Ingredients and go on Google Earth to do that, then it'll hone in on just enormous piles of dead animals that are just sitting right outside, and eventually they get around to using them. So I personally don't see how that could possibly be medicinal, even if they have some kind of adjustment made to it to support a specific issue. In my experience, I think that they will focus on one issue to the exclusion of the rest of the body. And that's really not beneficial.
Dr. Judy Morgan 3:28
Very, very, very true. And the whole thing is a misnomer anyway to call it a prescription diet and having to have a prescription for something that has really no medicine in it. And no medicinal value.
Chelsea Kent 3:45
Yeah, actually, when you have a product that's labeled as a prescription product, you are allowed to make any claim that you want on it really. And so because of the level of transparency that is limited, because like if I, Solutions, I'm allowed to be transparent on my product, then consumers are going to expect the same from bigger companies. And the bigger companies don't want that. So all of us are restricted in what we're allowed to say. So I was like, well, that's fine. I'll just make my products prescription products too. And I looked into doing that, went through the whole process up to like actually getting to the point of payment because I was just so mortified. But then I have a longer video on this online. But ultimately what we found out is that the only requirement really is that you sign an affidavit that says that you're going to use one specific ingredient in exactly the same amount every time. And then from that all you have to do is pay. So for us to register 14 products as prescription we'd have to pay over $16 million and then $330,000 per year, currently, it changes per year to maintain the prescription, that is the only requirement, you don't have to go through studies, trials, nothing.
Dr. Judy Morgan 5:14
That is crazy. But just those numbers that you just quoted, show you the market, like how much these companies are making on these products, that that really are not medicinal. And isn't it true that the term prescription diet is actually copyrighted by one company and everybody else can call them veterinary diets? Or they have to use a different terminology? Isn't the prescription diet copyrighted by one company?
Chelsea Kent 5:46
Yeah. And they actually got sued over using that word, and they did lose. So they have been making some minor modifications to their labeling.
Dr. Judy Morgan 5:56
So what are they calling it now if they're not allowed to call it a prescription diet?
Chelsea Kent 5:59
They're, I have to look closer at what they're doing. But I've noticed that it doesn't just say prescription diet. It's it has some slightly different wording where it's still alluding to that without just saying it flat out.
Dr. Judy Morgan 6:13
Interesting. I'll have to look it up. That's that's quite interesting. So I mean, I stood up and spoke out against prescription diets at one of the AFFCO meetings. And there was a lot of snickering in the row behind me, which was filled with people from one of those big pet food companies. So yeah. They're not very kind to those of us with an opposing opinion.
Chelsea Kent 6:34
Oh, that's the place to go to get snickered at, laughed at and booed is what we've found.
Dr. Judy Morgan 6:39
Yes, for sure, for sure. And you might need to take your bodyguard with you as well. All right. So you also have in your notes here, how timing can impact income? Talking about carb loading, ketogenic diets, that sort of thing? What are you alluding to there?
Chelsea Kent 6:59
Sure. So I think one thing that's really important for consumers to understand is that you don't have to have a specific diet to cater to specific health goals. So you can take a diet that works really well for your pet, and you can do a modification to it to make it work better to achieve specific goals. So for example, if your pet has cancer, you can take a good quality raw diet that's lower in carbs, and you can modify it to be ketogenic, so that it still works for your pet. If you have a really highly active pet that needs some carbs, because they burn energy so fast, then you can provide carbs with the diet that you're using that might have very low carbs, but you can add those in one way or another. So you can also affect how much that ends up costing you, by the way that you do it. So for example, if you just at every single meal, you take oats, and you just dump it into your raw food, but your pet's still burning all of their energy really quickly, then you're going to probably be spending a decent amount on treats as well. And to some degree might even give them too many calories and cause diarrhea and sometimes weight loss. Or you can not put the carbs into the food. And then you can do basically what bodybuilders do. And you can carb load them before activity. So rather than just giving them a cookie, you can take something like fresh oats that are really good quality. And if you want you can mix some other ingredients in them and give it right before activity so that they're burning that immediately. And they also don't have the detriments associated with excessive sugars in the diet long term. So you're really focusing on decreasing just treat or in some cases, just junk food purchases. And you're incorporating that into how much they're getting every day so it can support your budget while also supporting the goals that you have for your pet.
Dr. Judy Morgan 9:10
Great advice. That's very good. So your company Solutions Pet Food. There's there's a lot of interesting things about Solutions. First of all, it's incredibly nutrient dense and incredibly high calorie per ounce versus most foods. I mean, it's almost double a lot of the foods. What are the benefits of that and how much education does it take to get people to not overfeed?
Chelsea Kent 9:45
That is a little bit harder part the not over feeding thing. So the benefit of that one. We do find that with a lot of breeds, especially barrel chested breeds, if you feed them a large volume of food increases the risk of bloat and torsion. So feeding a smaller volume, but still covering what they need nutritionally can be one way to help to prevent issues like that. Also, with it being higher calorie, since you can feed less, even though the sticker price is higher, it costs a lot less to utilize the food. So if you have a really, really good quality food that costs per pound, what Solutions costs, that it's the same number of calories as every other food, it is really unaffordable for most people. But if you're feeding it the way that it's intended to be feeded, fed, then the lower volume allows you to be able to afford using it. So it actually works out to be less expensive than the majority of the products that are on the market and still be higher quality. So I think that for a lot of consumers that want to feed higher quality, it becomes one of the only real options. And then the amount of time that it takes
Dr. Judy Morgan 11:09
That's pretty interesting. I have a I have a brachiocephalic English Toy. And if I volume load her, like if I give her too much, she is regurgitating, and it's coming out her nose and everywhere else. So I have to be really careful that her volume of food is much smaller than everyone else's. So this is that would be another instance where being able to feed a much, you know, half as much on the platter so that we don't get that regurge but we're still getting the nutrition. So that's, that's pretty cool.
Chelsea Kent 11:47
I also find that so feeding your dogs, a lot of times they will need like things spread out a little bit more. You give them a lot of volume at once and they end up vomiting in the mornings and being able to do those smaller volume for seniors probably because of absorption tends to help them.
Dr. Judy Morgan 12:08
Yep, good points. All right, we're gonna take a break to hear from our sponsors. When we come back, we're going to talk about restorative diets, what they are and how we should use those. Stay tuned.
PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT 12:20
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Dr. Judy Morgan 12:54
Welcome back. You're listening to Dr. Judy Morgan's Naturally Healthy Pets. I'm your host, Dr. Judy Morgan, and my guest today is Chelsea Kent, owner of Heroes Pets in Littleton, Colorado, Parsley Pet HTMA testing for dogs, humans and horses, and Solutions Pet Products. And today, we are focusing on dietary modification to support health conditions. And so Chelsea, we were talking about some of the differences between Solutions as far as caloric density and amount that needs to be fed. But you also have something or term some of your diets as restorative diets. What is a restorative diet what does that entail?
Chelsea Kent 13:36
So, as I had previously stated, you can utilize a base product, and then you can make a modification to it to get to certain goals. So we created these restorative diets to provide the modifications for people. So we've got some modified diets with Solutions as the base for things like allergies, leaky gut, cancer and metabolic diseases, liver, things like that. So for most people, they won't necessarily know what needs to be done to do a modification. So our restorative diets are providing that for them.
Dr. Judy Morgan 14:16
Where do people find that? Is that on your website, where you have listings for how to do that?
Chelsea Kent 14:21
Yeah. So at the top under the resources tab, it's the third one down says restorative diets, and each one is a downloadable PowerPoint.
Dr. Judy Morgan 14:30
Oh, cool. How long is each PowerPoint?
Chelsea Kent 14:35
Um, well, there's an FAQ document that we do recommend that people read through and then each document for the restorative diets is about eight pages or so and it gives some information about why you would want to do that diet as well as the exact diet itself so that you can calculate it for your pet and some suggested possible supplements that you might want to use as well.
Dr. Judy Morgan 15:02
Very cool. All right. So great resource of information. So now that you brought up supplements, so a lot of people use a lot of herbs and a lot of supplements with the diet. How do we make sure that we are not potentially getting to toxic levels? I mean, for me personally, I sort of feel like if you're using whole foods, supplements and herbs, it's pretty hard to like if you're using whole foods that's very different from giving like a vitamin supplement like a vitamin D, which we definitely know we can get toxic levels. But how? What resources do we have? And how do we know? Like, for instance, Solutions, we have a lot of different herbal products that your company makes? How many of those can be combined together? And when would would we be concerned? Is it better to rotate them do? Can we give a bunch of them at the same time for, you know, heart disease and heavy metal toxicity and endocrine disease? Because most of our pets don't have one problem? Most of them have multiple comorbidities. So how do we choose?
Chelsea Kent 16:17
So you can combine several of them, it's not a bad idea to reach out to us get us and ask if you're not really sure. So for example, restore and endocrine can both influence adrenal function and one will boost it and one will lower it. So it's not necessarily helpful to use those two together, unless you're just kind of trying to go for a moderating effect. When it comes to the concept of potentially causing toxicities, I do find that a lot of people will use things that have some specific concerns where you would want to calculate how much you're giving. So like, for example, there's some seaweed calcium products out there that also contain iodine. But if you're giving enough iodine, that is something that you can overdo pretty easily and cause hyperthyroid, which can also cause some heart palpitations and anxiety and other issues. And you also want ratios to be correct. So like with whole foods, you're not going to be getting toxicities out of the majority of Whole Foods. But if you are giving too much of a calcium supplement relative to magnesium and phosphorus, then you might cause an imbalance in the ratio that can actually have some negative ramifications. So it's just important to know what you're giving and why if you have multiple things that you're providing, particularly if they contain minerals, then that's when you really start to need to look at calculating.
Dr. Judy Morgan 17:55
For sure, okay, which you know, for the average pet parent, that is something that's kind of above, above most people's desire to start figuring things out. So, with that being the case? Would we be better off maybe rotating? So if we have a pet with multiple comorbidities? Would we be better to kind of rotate through things rather than dumping a whole bunch of at the same time?
Chelsea Kent 18:22
Yes, especially if it contains minerals, if there are minerals involved, then either rotate or calculate or get help calculating?
Dr. Judy Morgan 18:33
Okay, so when you're talking about minerals, you're talking specifically like adding in calcium supplements or,
Chelsea Kent 18:41
or iodine. Iron, sometimes copper, especially copper can be pretty high in diets. So just any mineral really, I think that it's important just to keep a consideration of it, if you are providing any additional supplements.
Dr. Judy Morgan 19:02
Okay. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's, it's like, geez my dogs, or anybody who's sick, my cancer dog, he's on 22 different things. But a lot of it's mushroom products. I don't worry about don't worry about minerals with mushroom products.
Chelsea Kent 19:17
Yeah, if you're just giving a whole food supplement, then it's not really something that you need to take into consideration. It tends to usually be if it's something where it says, say copper or copper with another word, where there's clearly an addition of that thing in nature.
Dr. Judy Morgan 19:36
So if we have like copper sulfate, copper, proteinate, copper complex, those kinds of things. Okay, got it. Got it. All right. Well, that makes perfect sense. So one of the another question that we get asked really commonly, animals with, oh, by the way, Solutions cat and dog or just dog?
Chelsea Kent 19:54
It's just dog as is and you can modify it to work for cats by adding one of the milk products and or one of the jiggles. So by ratio, you're decreasing fat and increasing protein. And it does create a complete profile for cats that way.
Dr. Judy Morgan 20:12
Interesting, I did not know that. I'll have to try it for my kitties. Okay. And so right now all of Solutions products except for your herbal powders, everything is shipped frozen, correct? Okay, so we got another question quite commonly for animals with kidney disease, can they be fed a raw product? And can they be fed something like Solutions?
Chelsea Kent 20:44
Yes. So Solutions does have a urinary tract support diet that also supports the heart. Because if you're supporting one, you're supporting the other, and vice versa, you're taxing one then you're taxing the other. So we do have that diet that is lower in carbohydrates because carbohydrates can be really dehydrating, which obviously is hard on the kidneys. And it's higher in moisture. The concern about whether or not they can be fed raw product, I mean that some of that might actually go back to mineral balance. A lot of vets think that raw diets can't be complete and balanced, where they can't have enough minerals. And some of them don't. If they're not formulated correctly, then that is the responsibility of the owner to figure out how to meet those numbers. But the kidneys and heart are very dependent on minerals. And that's a large part of how they manage pH. So as long as you're giving them what they need nutritionally, then absolutely, I think that providing a raw diet is much much healthier for them and better for longevity than doing especially a dry diet or a high carb diet.
Dr. Judy Morgan 22:02
Absolutely 100% in agreement. So I'm going to take you down another rabbit hole, the DCM debacle, because we still have cardiologists insisting that we have to add grains to our pets' diets.
Chelsea Kent 22:20
Yeah, I say that the biggest consideration there is that you're supposed to be adding taurine and there are no grains that contain taurine. So how is that beneficial? The most important thing for heart health is really protein, the heart is a muscle, even more so than the really the definition of an organ, it's a muscle. So if you think of somebody that goes to the gym all the time, and works out, they need more protein, not more grains. So there might be some benefit to grains, if they're really active and burning off all of their calories. But the purpose of the grain is actually so that they don't utilize their muscle tissue if they don't have enough protein. So you can instead just provide enough protein to use that for energy and the amino acids to rebuild the matrix of the tissues, rather than just loading them with grains. One point that I make to people often is that DCM effects far far, far less than 1% of the canine population, and the majority of them, it is genetic predisposition, in cancer we hear its causing death in 50 to 75% of dogs. And we know scientifically that high sugar content of the diet is going to contribute to cancers. So it's like we're saying, Okay, let's add a whole bunch of grain to help with this very unlikely health problem. And let's not think about the fact that we're contributing to cancer that's highly prevalent.
Dr. Judy Morgan 24:07
Good point, very good point. And I haven't heard anyone else make that that correlation. But it is true. I mean, we know that these high carb diets are absolutely the wrong thing to be giving to these animals, particularly who are in the age group where they're going to be more prone to cancers. So that is, that's a good point. Okay. So you've I know you have the food, you have jiggles. You have milks, Nog oh, by the way, I went to the goat farm last week. That's where your milk is packaged. I met the goats. It was amazing. Unfortunately, the owner of the farm was not there, but we went in and met the goats and I saw the packaging and there was a Solutions package sitting in there waiting to go through the machine. So that was kind of fun.
Chelsea Kent 25:04
Did you see the goat with the funny bangs?
Dr. Judy Morgan 25:08
Yes. goats were outside. But yeah, there's one that he was quite unique. She was quite anyway. But it was really fun. So and it's really cool to be able to see, you know, production facilities, see the cleanliness, see how things are handled and really know that the products are coming from incredible sourcing. And we really appreciate all the work that you do. You're you have a science, your science mind, which somebody has to have. And we really appreciate that. And I'm really appreciative for your work and sitting through AFFCO meetings and putting up with all that bull, something.
Chelsea Kent 25:55
Thank you. I find that it's all really important to be able to understand those things. Because I think a lot of the conversations that turn into arguments in the industry are the result of people not really understanding some components of something. And it usually comes back to regulation and behind the scenes things. So all the time. I'm like, that's not the conversation we should be having.
Dr. Judy Morgan 26:24
There you go. All right. So for anyone who wants more information about Chelsea's company, its SolutionsPetProducts.com. They are also on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Threads.net. I don't even know what that one is. So there's a platform we haven't discovered yet. Chelsea, thank you very much for your time. We appreciate you taking time out of your very, very busy schedule to talk to us today. And thanks for all the great information and so people can go to the website to get some of those diet modifications, which that's pretty cool information. So thank you very much.
Outro
Thanks for listening to another great Naturally Healthy Pets episode. Be sure to check out the show notes for some helpful links. And if you enjoy the show, please be sure to follow and listen for free on your favorite podcast app. We value your feedback and we'd love to hear from you on how we're doing. Visit DrJudyMorgan.com for healthy product recommendations, comprehensive courses, upcoming events and other fantastic resources. Until next time, keep giving your pet the vibrant life they deserve.
DISCLAIMER
The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. It is no substitute for professional care by a veterinarian, licensed nutritionist or other qualified professional. You're encouraged to do your own research and should not rely on this information as professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Dr. Judy and her guests express their own views, experience and conclusions. Dr. Judy Morgan's Naturally Healthy Pets neither endorses or opposes any particular view discussed here.