Do you know what is really in your pet's food?
Pet foods contain additives, just like people food.
Dr. Al Plechner shares what to avoid and what to look for when shopping for your pet's food.
Learn how to read the label to prevent sickness and disease in your fury companion.
Transcription:
RadioMD Presents: Wellness for Life Radio | Original Air Date: May 29, 2015
Host: Susanne Bennett, DC
Guest: Al Plechner, DVM
This is it, the ultimate wellness show just for you. Wellness for Life Radio with Dr. Susanne Bennett.
DR. SUSANNE: You take the time to make sure you and your family are eating the healthiest food possible but what about your pets, your loving friends? Even with the best intentions, do you really know what your loyal friend is eating at dinner time? Here with me today is Dr. Alfred Plechner, who has been practicing veterinary medicine for almost 50 years and he’s been my vet of choice He’s here to share with us how to feed our furry friends the best food possible. Thank you so much for being with us, Dr. Plechner.
DR. PLECHNER: Thank you so much, Susanne, for having me. I really do appreciate it. You know, I really love your work over the years because you and I worked together on different cases and things and we believe the same. I mean, we’re thinking outside the box. We’re looking for a better way. We’re trying to upgrade the help that people need not only for themselves but also for their pets.
DR. SUSANNE: Yes, yes. Absolutely. You tell us, what do you have to look out for? What do we have to look out for when we purchase pet foods? Because there’s so many different varieties. I’d like you to share maybe some danger words that we better look out for in our pet food.
DR. PLECHNER: Well, yes, I think, realistically, the pet food market now is $42 billion. Everybody’s coming in to it. Everybody’s added things they think that people will like to eat themselves even if it may not be good for them you know darn well is not going to be good for the pets. So, you get into different forms of foods. The things that people have to realize is normally the three first ingredients are 90% of that food and so often feeding off the table. if you’re eating correctly, is good. You can add fresh veggies, you can add fruits, you can add stuff if you’re eating correctly. So, when you look at dog foods, cat foods, pet foods if you will look at the first three ingredients, see what they are. If it starts off with corn, corn gluten, wheat, wheat gluten, you tell me how good that is. You know it’s not good and you’ll get into the different types of food. That’s something that people need to look to which we’ll talk about. Things, I think, to watch out for are with additives like sweet potato, carrots and apples. If they are not organic, they are going to be high in pesticides, right? Glyphosates, the whole bit, that will, in fact, will be estrogen mimickers and will cause inflammation, all kinds of problems as you and I know. So the beauty and you stay away from things if you can. Our pets are inbred now and that’s what you’re looking at. You’re looking at a Ferrari that can’t take the gas from a 1928 Chevy. It’s not going to work. It’s just not going to work in the system and things that have high level estrogen whether a plant based, phyto or chemical, zino, only seem to add to the fire so you want to avoid products that have soy in them. You want to avoid products that have sesame seed and even sunflowers, if you can believe that because they’re all high in natural estrogen.
DR. SUSANNE: Wow. You know what? Well, if that’s what we’ve got to look out for. What do we want to see for the first three ingredients? What should we see? What do we want to look for?
DR. PLECHNER: You want to see, probably, some protein maybe some veggies if they’re you know healthy you know broccoli or whatever but I like to see some kind of protein first you know whether it’s fish or whether it’s a foul, whether it’s you know some kind of a meat product if possible, if the animals can tolerate that. Most of them are doing better on the, literally, on the fish and on chicken and duck and stuff like this. The interesting thing is you see raw foods. Raw food diets which are fresher. Hopefully, they’re processed correctly so there’s no salmonella in them, so on and so forth but some of the raw foods are a little harder to digest. Not a big deal. The grain-free foods which is the big marketing selling point if you will, now the interesting thing is we usually don’t see gluten enteropathy in these dogs and cats. However, the importance, as you know, of a grain free diet is it’s going to avoid GMO. Genetically modified grains and in like corn, like in a lot of the fillers if they put in, they’re genetically modified and the research is showing the one thing that I had written about interestingly enough in Russia when the researchers went in and they got soy bean milk for the infants and they fed it to a family of guinea pigs. They not only got allergies, auto-immunity and cancer but in the second generation there was a five times mortality rate and the interesting thing is the third generation feeding this genetically modified soy bean milk, they were all sterile. So you know what are we looking for, what are we leaving for our children and for our pets. See these are things we have to really, really, really consider. I think when you also consider pet food the longer the label the worse the food. Good nutrition is normally very simple and what you don’t want to do, you want to have…and when I created foods and I created Nature’s Recipe, the first one of these foods probably 30 years ago then all the lamb and rice, duck and potatoes, all of this. I went to a limited antigen diet meaning I had one protein, one carbohydrate because over the years many of the animals became allergic to lamb and rice, if you will, and that’s why I had to go to white potato. Right now if you can find say duck and potato, fish and potato make sure it’s white potato and not sweet potato unless it’s organic and these are some of the pitfalls that people can actually look at.
DR. SUSANNE: Right, I saw on your website DrPlechner.com that you have a big list of phytoestrogens you spoke about it a minute ago. Phytoestrogens, which are foods that actually promote the binding sites and stimulate the binding sites of estrogens in our pets and that’s something that you don’t want. I mean, that list was really long, Dr. Plechner. I mean I saw apples there, sesame seeds that you just mentioned. So, we really need to go there, go to the website drplechner.com and look up that, that article on phytoestrogens, right?
DR. PLECHNER: Yes and the other end of the thing, too, is Susanne is there’s thoughts that some people say, “Well, phytoestrogens are good because they’re short acting and they will bind the receptor sites for thyroids so on and so forth and they’ll take up the place of the bad estrogen.” Over the years, I have not found this to be true but what’s really simple, honestly, would be do a total estrogen on yourself or on, for example your pet, which is easy to do. Go ahead and then feed high level phytoestrogens for two weeks and then recheck and see where your estrogen levels are. See if they’ve gone done and if they haven’t and gone up, then you know it’s bad for you. So< this is a way of actually proving this without saying, “Well, I think it’s this, I think it’s that.” There’s a lot of, “I think,” stuff out there that is on the internet that some is correct, some is not correct.
DR. SUSANNE: You know a lot of veterinarians would say they don’t even have that kind of a test. I mean do they really do that test regularly?
DR. PLECHNER: They don’t, there’s only one lab in actually in Texas. There’s only one veterinary lab in Texas that can do the total estrogen. The rest of the laboratories in this country cannot…veterinary labs can’t do them. Quest does this for humans, LabCorp-- a lot of the humans will do total estrogen because this is an area that has really, really, really been missed. I mean, in the human field they don’t realize there’s a tremendous amount of estrogen coming out of the inner layer adrenal cortex and with cancer…Well, for example with women if you test they check the three ovarian estrogens: estradiol, estrone, and estriol, E1,2 and 3. They don’t look at adrenal estrogen. I’ve had a number of through MD’s obviously, a number human patients, that were postmenopausal where their estradiol’s were down and they said they were taking an estrogen patch. Well, I suggested maybe doing total estrogen which should be 40 or less and many of these women were at 90, 95, 100 meaning that if you get an estrogen patch you’re going to kick them into allergies, auto-immunity and cancer but this is, for some reason this is definitely missing in my profession. But in the human profession, they’re not using, there’s not a lot of belief that estrogen comes out of the adrenal cortex. They know androgen does, as you know. They know male hormones comes out but now, the same layer of zona reticularis, you get a tremendous amount of estrogen. What’s it’s coming from, I think, is one of the main things that people don’t realize is that if you measure a hormone in the body you get an empirical level. That’s all fine. Well, you’re in the normal level--that’s what the lab tells you. However, you don’t know whether, in fact, in the body that’s active or not so you’ve got to check the affects. So, when you do, for example, cortisol whatever level it is, you do estrogen because it can be very high cortisol but the estrogen is high—
DR. SUSANNE: I’m so sorry we’ve got, it’s already time. How could this be so quick? You know what? Thank you so much, Dr. Plechner. Great information. Go to DrPlechner.com for more information.
This is Dr. Susanne sharing natural strategies on Wellness for Life Radio on RadioMD. Until next time stay well.
