Intro 0:00
Welcome to the Naturally Healthy Pets podcast. Let's get to it.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Hello and welcome to the Naturally Healthy Pets podcast. I'm your host, Dr Judy Morgan, and my guest today is Dr Betsy Redmond, and we are going to talk about vital tails understanding feline and canine gut health. Betsy, welcome. Thank you for being here today. So Dr Betsy Redmond is a highly rated educational speaker with 20 plus years of experience. She's also a nice person, by the way. Betsy works with groups, podcasts, influencers and more to help educate and empower others in pet GI health, which we all know, everything pretty much starts in the gut. She has extensive experience in laboratory research and content development in nutrition, gastrointestinal health, metabolomics and laboratory testing. She has a PhD in nutrition from the University of Georgia, a Master of Science from Emory University, and is a member of the American Academy of Veterinary Nutrition. So let's see you just wanted to spend most of your life in school.
Dr. Betsy Redmond
I did well, yeah, my my dad paid for school, so I stayed a long time.
Dr. Judy Morgan
You know, that's interesting, that you should say that, because when I wanted to go to vet school, my parents paid for undergrad, and my sister, they paid for her undergrad. But then when it came time for grad school, my dad said, Nope, you're on your own, because your sister may or may not ever stop going to school, and I don't want to be paying for it for the rest of my life.
Dr. Judy Morgan 1:39
So grad school was on us.
Dr. Betsy Redmond 1:40
yeah? Which makes sense. They got you a college education.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Right? He's like, Here you go. I got you this far. Now you're on your own. And it was fine. It toughened me up
Dr. Betsy Redmond
And I finally finished school. He sent me a letter with a check and said, This is the last check I'm sending you. And I was like, Well, what?
Dr. Judy Morgan
Yeah, you're done. You're done. You're off the payroll. All right, so we're gonna talk about a lot of different things today, and we don't have a lot of time to talk about it. So you have a company called Innovative Pet Lab, which we were introduced to a while back, and it's amazing. And I've tested many of my own pets, and so we're going to talk about them and their results and the differences in their lifestyles and why their results look like they do. So I'm excited to get to that, but we want to talk first about your perspective on gut health and pets, because we talk about this ad nauseam, because there's so many problems associated with bad gut health.
Dr. Judy Morgan 2:53
So first line of defense?
Dr. Betsy Redmond 2:55
yeah, the secretory IgA,
Dr. Judy Morgan 3:00
all right. So what is the secretory IgA? What is its function? How do we get it? How do we have too much of it, or too little of it?
Dr. Betsy Redmond
It's a Secretory IgA. It's the they call it the first line of defense, at the gut lining. You can have it, you know, in the blood, you can have it right at gut, like gut linings, really, anywhere there's a mucous membrane and it's a little, you know, all mammals have it. It's a little bit different. And people have two types. Dogs tend to have one that they know of. They have been differentiated. Rabbits have way more. There's less research on cats. So, yeah, not surprising. Yeah, you see a lot on like pigs and dogs, but And so it's something we look at that if it's, you know, the big things are, when it, when it comes out, it's gonna, you know, it's gonna react to parasites, pathogens. It grabs them essentially, and doesn't let them through. So it's, it's kind of helping with that. So when it's elevated, you're going to want to find out, why is it elevated? What is it it also can become elevated with food reactions. But if you know, if it's elevated, you want to find out why. But you also, that's what you're supposed to do, you know? So it's supposed to see something, so it's going to react more than other markers, because it is the first line of defense. So if it does its job, some of the other markers may never have to kick in, like the other parts of the immune system, and then low tends to be, you know, pets who have it could be that you have a selective deficiency. You can, you know, have a deficiency of IGA. There's, you know, several types of immunoglobulins and pets. Can, you know, survive without IGA. People, they say people, half the people who have selective IGA is people. Don't even know it. So sometimes there is a deficiency, but sometimes it's just you were high. You know, the pet was high for so long and fighting things for so long that it just tanked and it just couldn't do it anymore, didn't have the resources. Yeah. I also think, you know, reading articles on this stuff all the time, they talk about the selective IGA deficiency, you see that more in pets, in dogs, because they study that more because of inbreeding, and that the only place you can really look at it like and since inbreeding is frowned upon in people, they don't see it as much, except they did have an exception for royalty from earlier years.
Dr. Judy Morgan
So that is very interesting, alright, so, so when we start looking at test results, Secretory IgA is, is one of the things that we're going to be looking at. So, leaky gut. Where does leaky gut come from? I mean, I had one dog with protein losing enteropathy. So that's, that's like leaky gut on steroids. Like, really bad. So what's, what's the root cause?
Dr. Betsy Redmond
Yeah, I mean, so we look at Zonulin. So Zonulin is a marker that can identify leaky gut. So the intestinal cells and mucous membranes, they're all, I'm always putting my fingers together. I know people can't see, but just think, Yeah, think of everything. They're lined up right next to each other, and they have like, little things holding them together, little tight junctions. And when Zonulin comes out, it takes those off. So if the Zonulin is really high, it's identifying that, you know, the intestinal lining cells just aren't as together as they should be. So it's never going to be completely impermeable, because you want things to come through. You just want it to be controlled. So, you want to have, what's, you know, the things the immune system wants to check what's coming in, you know, hold it. Let me check. All right, you're on the list. You can come in, you know. So, so that's when that's impaired, and things are coming in that the immune system didn't get to check, that it may, you know, it's going to react to it. So oftentimes, with with intestinal permeability, you may have higher rates of food sensitivities or food reactions, because these, you know, proteins get through, and if it goes on a long time, you may see some inflammation. So sometimes we see those together. So that's why we look at one of the things that cause intestinal permeability, or leaky gut. Gluten is big. That gluten can cause that Zonulin to go up.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Is that human only, or do you see that in pets as well?
Dr. Betsy Redmod
We see that some in pets, yeah. So that's why we have an anti Gliadin on there, just to so people can see what that reaction is.
Dr. Judy Morgan
So the anti Gliadin is testing for gluten.
Dr. Betsy Redmod 8:08
yeah, it's a test, testing for gluten reaction.
Dr. Judy Morgan 8:12
Interesting, I'd love to see that. So all of my animals are raw fed. I would love to see these reports on dogs that are eating dogs and cats that are eating a lot of glutens.
Dr. Betsy Redmod
yeah, so it does. It does come up positive sometimes. So it doesn't. It's not something you really have to do if you know your dog's not getting that. I mean, when you're testing people, they're often hidden sources. Well, in dogs we have that had that too, like the neighbors feeding them a treat
Dr. Judy Morgan 8:43
this is how you can find out if they're snacking next door,
Dr. Betsy Redmod 8:45
right, right? So you know, it's if you know you're not get your dog's not getting that that's not something you can test. I mean you need to test and people, they also have things, other things that can lead to increased intestinal permeability, like alcohol, NSAIDS, smoking. So if your dog lived around secondhand smoke, I wouldn't rule that out, or your cat
Dr. Judy Morgan
interesting. So once we identify the GI inflammation, where do we go from there? Like, let's, let's say that we've got this Secretory IgA that's really high, or the Zonulin is really high. Do you make recommendations for how people move forward from there? I mean, it's great to do a test and get these results and then kind of go crap. Now, what do I do?
Dr. Betsy Redmod
Right? Right, yeah. And then we do and then we give general recommendations, and anytime these are really high and a pet has significant symptoms, we had a pet the other day, someone was asking, you know, their their markers were high and their pet had lost a lot of weight, and we're going to refer you to your vet, you need to go see somebody with some of these more surprising symptoms. So you have to look at it with symptoms. But we do give general, general guidelines on things that can make a difference, you know, supplements that may make a difference, changing food. So a lot of times changing food's a big one.
Dr. Judy Morgan 10:26
You are, what you eat,
Dr. Betsy Redmod 10:31
like I mentioned before, like we had done some shelter cats when we first started, because we had extra space in the run. So we're just running all sorts of things, and they were really high. I mean, even though they're they are taken care of. They've had, you know, they're in the shelter. They're getting what, you know, what the just the basic kibble, basic care. So those were, were much higher.
Dr. Judy Morgan 10:56
Do you find? Do you think that over vaccination would affect this as well, because when you have shelter cats, the first thing that happens they walk in the door, they get poked with vaccines, and especially in the shelter animals, but in a lot of family owned pets, we've got all the pesticides with, you know, the flea and tick chemicals. So do you think that has an effect on this as well?
Dr. Betsy Redmod
Yeah. I mean, they certainly, there's certainly in research. There's, you know, looking at vaccine rates. So we look at parasites, pathogens, viruses can also but, yeah, vaccines can cause those to jump up. and then back with the lower it is, it's not going to show up right away in puppies. So we tend we say, you know, wait till your dog's a year old, because you're going to see the immune system mature. You're going to see secretory Iga is going to be low, and it's going to build up. It does the same in people.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Very cool, all right, we need to take a break to hear from our sponsor. We'll be right back.
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Dr. Judy Morgan
Hello. You're listening to Dr Judy Morgan's Naturally Healthy Pets podcast. I'm your host, Dr Judy Morgan, and my guest today is Dr Betsy Redmond from IPL labs, and we are talking about testing stool samples to get information about our pets' health. So we had a conversation about this testing quite a while back, and the first tests that I ran were actually quite a while ago, 7/19/22 so I did a couple of my dogs, just because I wanted to see what we were testing for and what it was going to show. now, I already knew problems that my dogs had, so, you know, this is kind of the old I'm not going to tell you what I know. I'm testing you out. But, you know, this is, it's a scientific study.
Dr. Betsy Redmond
Oh, yeah, I think that you have expectations.
Dr. Judy Morgan
right, so, and, you know, I am not this kind of scientist. So, you know, if you said to me, Oh, we're testing calprotectin, Secretory IgA, Zonulin, anti Gliadin, IgA, pancreatic elastase one, beta gluconaise...I'm like, those are nice, chemical sounding names. That's great. What do they do and what do they mean? So I sent in a stool sample for Stewie. Now, a lot of people who've been following me for a long time know who Stewie was. He was a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. He was, the time we did this, probably 10, yeah, probably 10 years old, and he was in stage D heart failure. So he's on all kinds of heart meds. And he was in stage two kidney disease from his heart meds, and he had really bad leaky gut to the point of protein losing, enteropathy, and his albumin levels were always scary low, and that had been going on for years. So I sent in his stool sample because I was like, well, this will be a great test. We'll see if they pick this up. Here's a shock. Everything came out normal, except for Zonulin, which is what you were just talking about Zonulin. When that's high, those little bonds between the cells are breaking down. The cells are spreading apart. We're getting leaky gut. And so he was losing his protein because those cells were spread out. His Zonulin high is considered anything over 11. He was 11.57 and it says consider a change in diet, such as the human grade food while he was already on that removing gluten, if the anti Gliadin is high, which he doesn't get any gluten, and it wasn't high. supporting the microbiome with probiotics, which we were doing gut enhancing supplements such as slippery elm, I think I had him on L glutamine, minimizing stress with exercise in a regular routine, which he did have, but levels may be increased in animals on long term medications, and so this is part of your problem when you have an animal with multi system dysfunction. And we, everybody who knows me, knows that I don't like to use medications at all, but when you have a dog in the stage D heart failure, you're kind of stuck. So, so, but he was very well managed with all those different things. But, you know, here's, I gave you a test and you came back with flying colors, like, you don't put that on the form when you fill it out. So, so that was kind of nice. And then I also tested my, my little guy Forrest, who, at the time, was like a year, year and a half old. And He came back so he would do this bloody vomiting, mostly bloody diarrhea with occasional vomiting. He was on a raw human grade diet, but he's a little stress bucket, and so he came back normal with everything except calprotectin was borderline. so tell us about calprotectin.
Dr. Betsy Redmond
Calprotectin is it identifies neutrophil infiltration into the gut lining. So it's Neutrophils are white blood cells, so there's some kind of inflammation, and it's the immune system is rushing in there to try to fix it. You know, try to repair it. There's a lot of good research looking at calprotectin when they do scopes, and then they'll get a tissue sample, and then they'll look at the actual fecal calprotectant. And so they do correlate, so you can use it to identify inflammation and then follow treatment.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Yep. So so he actually is doing really well. We discovered through trial and error, that every time I feed him rabbit, he blows with bloody stools, which is so weird, because it's rabbit is so non inflammatory. It's like the my go to for, I need a test diet. Novel protein, yeah, not for him. No, no bunnies.
Dr. Betsy Redmond 18:59
He doesn't want to be like everybody else.
Dr. Judy Morgan 19:02
Well, he is not. he's my special needs child, all right, so then you and I had a conversation, and I told you that I had all these cats at the time. I had 13. We're down to nine. A couple of them just disappeared. I think they're living at neighbor's houses, because they're outside cats well, so two of them are older indoor cats, and there are nine who are outside cats. All, but, all, but no, I think all of them were born on our property. So they're, they're local cats, and of the 9, 8 of them were born on our property, like by delivered by me, so so we know their history. And the cats who live outside live a very normal outdoor cat life. It's a very safe environment. They have their little heated beds in the barn. They like to go in the greenhouse, it's really nice. And you know, they're very, very good for mouse control. So you said, Well, I would like to send you test kits, and let's do a comparison of what raw fed, healthy outdoor minimal, minimally vaccinated cats. So the outdoor kitties have had one rabies vaccine and one distemper vaccine,
Dr. Betsy Redmond
because I think that was right after we'd done the shelter cats. And we're like, whoa,
Dr. Judy Morgan
right? So you were like, oh, let's do a comparison to see what we get. So it was really fun chasing my outdoor cats around trying to figure out where they were pooping. And my husband would be like, Look, there's one of them across the field. Run over there and try to unearth what they were burying.
Dr. Betsy Redmond
Right? Yeah, harder with cats,
Dr. Judy Morgan
yeah. So I was not able to get samples on all of them. It poured rain one night, and a couple of them decided they wanted to come in my office. So I was like, Oh, good. This is my perfect chance. So it was great. So on, every one of the outdoor cats who are eating raw food and are minimally vaccinated, we got perfect results, no inflammation, no leaky gut, just happy happy happy guts. And so that kind of tells you, okay, this is what we're supposed to do,
Dr. Betsy Redmond
right? This life they're supposed to have it right?
Dr. Judy Morgan
This life they're supposed to have. So let me find Okay. So then we also, it was easy to get it on my two indoor kitties. And the indoor kitties are older. They're like 13, and I've had they. I delivered them as well. So I've had them since they were little, tiny babies. So what came up high on them?
Dr. Betsy Redmond
And I just want to say, I love the names of all your cats.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Oh, eggplant, Buddha, zucchini, Dazzle. Dazzle is beautiful. Porch was living under my daughter's porch, and her children are zucchini, eggplant and applesauce, because that was the foods that my granddaughter dropped on them. eggplant is eggplant, because when we delivered her, she's a dark gray, dilute torty, but she was literally purple. Her coat was purple, and my daughter said she looks like an eggplant. So done. So at one time, I was naming all my animals after letters of the alphabet, so we do have a Q in here
Dr. Betsy Redmond 22:37
near the end of the alphabet. Yeah,
Dr. Judy Morgan 22:40
yeah. Well, Q, but my son named his little baby kitten that I got him when he was four years old. Q, because that was the bad guy on Star Trek. And so this is Q reincarnated. anyway, so, but Buddha and eggplant, the 13 year old indoor cats, both came up high and screamingly high on their Secretory IgA,
Dr. Betsy Redmond
yes, yeah. So they were having, they were reacting to something. So I think also, as you, as they age, so Secretory IgA is going to see something. It's going to go after it. But some of it, like your immune system may help also, before it ever gets there. So as they get older, there's less total immune reaction. So Secretory IgA, you know, if there was a parasite or a virus or some type of food reaction, it would, it would grab it and kind of keep it from coming in.
Dr. Judy Morgan
So here's the here's the difference in these cats from the outdoor cats. These could go outside if they wanted to, but they won't, and they are afraid of our dogs. and they hide way up high in our one lives on my mom's piano, and the other one the piano and the windowsill, and the other one lives, we have a kitty condo, and he lives in the very top of the kitty condo, and their Secretory IgA is high from stress.
Dr. Betsy Redmond
I was gonna say, Are they pretty stressed?
Dr. Judy Morgan
Then they are stressed puppies. And I read a great study on stress in indoor cats, and it literally stated that over 80% of indoor cats live a very high stress life because they're not getting to hunt and pounce and do what cats are supposed to be doing. They're not eating the correct diet so many things. And, you know, we kind of ignore them and go, yeah, they're fine, you know.
Dr. Judy Morgan 24:40
So, so these two cats are living even though it's a very good life. And at the time that I did this, these cats would not eat raw, raw. They would only eat freeze dried that was rehydrated. They were just pulled out. So they were raised on Raw. So it was little weird, but and they were eating some canned food, and we know that canned food is going to be more inflammatory for their gut than a raw food is going to be so And interestingly, they have both now, weirdly switched over to completely raw food. So that's awesome. I don't really sure how that happened, but I think we just ran out of the other stuff, and was like, this is all we got.
Dr. Judy Morgan 25:21
so they they look better, but the stress level. And so this is one of those things that we just don't talk about the emotions of our animals and the stress levels of our animals, but then you get lab results back and you go, Oh my gosh. Like, look at that.
Dr. Betsy Redmond
Yeah. I mean, one of the things we talk about is when they're high, like, just overall health, too. Pets like a calm environment. You know, dogs especially like a schedule. They know what's your and that all helps with your circadian rhythm. You know, people have a sleep wake cycle and an eating cycle, the whole Chrono nutrition and all that, but knowing what your day is going to be and that you're not freaked out all the time, that has an impact.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Yep. So you know, we we can look at a stool sample from our animals and say, oh my gosh, I'm not providing everything that I like. There's a stress level here for these cats, and that's really the difference between the two sets of cats. It's because they're on great diets. These two, they got vaccinated a couple times when they were very young, but they haven't had anything in a long time. So, you know, and they don't get any chemicals. So we don't have chemicals involved. We don't have vaccines involved. It's the food is the same food that the other cats are eating. So that leaves one thing living in a stressful environment, with dogs barking at them and wanting to chase them, versus cats out doing their cat thing,
Dr. Betsy Redmond
right? It's funny, they don't want to go out.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Well, I think there's a lot we live on 23 acres, and we used to be in a suburban kind of quiet neighborhood, so it's very different. They when we first moved here, they were going outside, and now they won't, and I think that they got scared outside, either by one of the dogs, or they don't like it out here. Yeah, we're not doing the wildlife thing. So anyway, we are out of time. So I just want to put out there that if you go to InnovativePetLab.com and use the code DRJUDY, you can get 15% off any of their test kits, and they are on all the social media. So we will put that in the show notes. I think this is the coolest, coolest science. I'm not, I'm not like, into the like, doing the research and the studies, so I'm glad somebody else is. But it's really cool to get these results on my animals and see what's going on with them, and then being able to do something about it. So yeah, what this tells me is I got stressed indoor kitties. I got to try to make their life a little less stressful, maybe I'll get them some flower essences or something. So thank you. Dr Betsy. I really appreciate you, and hopefully we'll be seeing you soon.
Dr. Betsy Redmond
All right, yeah, thank you.
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.