Unmasking The Roots on the True Causes of Pet Disease with Dr. Marlene Siegel

00:00 – 00:44

Dr. Ruth Roberts: Hello, I am Dr. Ruth Roberts and welcome to another episode of Healing Tails. And today we're going to talk about unmasking the roots. Dr. Marlene Siegel is here with us. She's going to talk about the true causes of disease in pets. Dr. Marlene, welcome. You are an amazing force of nature in the integrative pet world.

00:44 – 00:49

Dr. Marlene Siegel: Ah, thank you, Dr. Ruth. It's such an honor to be with you. I love doing stuff with you. 

00:49 – 01:8

Dr. Ruth Roberts: That's so awesome. So we've been down and we sort of separately came to the same sort of route in looking at integrative veterary medicine. So that's a word that's starting to kind of pick up. But maybe talk a little bit about what integrative veterinary medicine means to you.

01:09 – 04:42

Dr. Marlene Siegel: I'm going to even back up one step further than that because when we first started it was holistic medicine or alternative medicine and it had this weird woo-woo connotation like nobody really knew what that was. It just sounded out there but when I actually looked up the definition of holistic it simply means it's the whole body. Body, mind and spirit. So that made a lot of sense. And then this word integrative came in which I loved because to me it meant that we were taking the best of the old eastern arts, the holistic world and blending that with the allopathic western modern medicine.

That made a lot of sense to me. The problem I then had was seeing a lot of veterinarians and health practitioners on the human side using that word but still using it in an allopathic manner. Which what I mean by that is instead of having a symptom, name it, blame it, and then having a pharmaceutical to fix it, never going to the root cause, they were coming out with an acupuncture point, an herb, an essential oil, but something that was still doing symptom suppression and still not addressing the root cause. So, "I kind of stepped away from that integrative title a little bit, and I said, 'What do I really do?' And what I do is actually bio regulatory medicine has nothing to do with the government. What it means is that it is identifying the biological pathways. You know the business of what happens inside the body, identifying what it takes for those systems to work and then what are we doing that's messing it up and how do we get it back online. 

And the three things that actually affect there's four. Number one is deficiencies. And these are deficiencies of essential nutrients. And these essential nutrients, the vitamins, minerals, the fatty acids, the proteins, the aminos, these actually run our metabolic pathways. So they're not just fluffy nice things to have around. It's not your Flintstone vitamin that we had to take when we were kids. This is like the real deal. This is what make our body work. And then some people say to me, well, if that's the case and we're so deficient, how come we're still here?

And that's because we were able to survive under less than ideal circumstances. We're biologically built to do that. So that when the season comes around and your resources are back, then you go back to thriving. So number one are deficiencies. Number two are toxicities. There's over a 100,000 toxins, synthetic toxins that have been developed and released into our food and our water, our animal husbandry just since the end of World War II, which was 1942.
And that combination of deficiency and toxicity leads to mitochondrial dysfunction. Now the powerhouses that not only make energy for our body but also help to regulate what gene expression because they communicate with the microbiome and they say oh look our environment is really toxic so we need to have a different gene expression to handle this toxic world or look we're in paradise and so we can have a different gene expression that allows you to flourish in that environment. 

So those are the big ones. Deficiency, toxicity, mitochondrial dysfunction, and there's always trapped emotions that are associated with all disease. So that's your medicine right there, guys. Now you understand what does it take to diagnose something is deficiency, toxicity, mitochondrial dysfunction, and what are your trapped emotions? How's that for easy? 

04:43 – 05:03

Dr. Ruth Roberts: Super, super easy. So I mean, and there you are. So there's your root causes of everything. And I think I love that you were talking about trapped emotions. And so I talk a lot about, you know, pets mirroring our emotions. So is it our trapped emotions or the pets trapped emotions or combination that that's that's the root?

05:05 – 06:57

Dr. Marlene Siegel: AH at the end of the day, it's ours. And they're showing us something that we need to learn, to do, to fix, to heal. I don't like to call it is a lesson because it sounds like, you know, when you're being given a lesson, you're being punished. No, it's about bringing our awareness to something that we have the ability to perceive differently and shift the energy of it. And we're all just energy. We're light beings that are energetic.

And I think that when we see these events come up and there's a strong emotion associated with it, I equate that to my computer program. When my computer's full, happens a lot, and it says, 'You need to free up some storage space.' So, what do you have to do? You can't just yell at your computer from across the room and say, 'Delete stuff.' No, you have to actually turn it on. You have to pull up the files and you have to choose what files you want to keep and what files you want to get rid of.

And when you get rid of a file and you hit the delete button, your computer says, 'Are you sure?' Because it's going to go into an abyss that the computer doesn't know what's going to happen. Well, that happens in our subconscious mind. So, we have all these programs that are running through and these programs helped us in some time space dimension. That's why they're there. But, do we need them now?

And when somebody can identify the emotion that they're having and see the pattern because it's not the first time you've experienced it. You've done it many times, many places, many people, and you just keep doing it. And it's because you haven't realized that the program's coming up for you to have a different experience. Think about it differently, perceive it differently, work with an energy worker, an emotional release person to help release the attachments that you have to that emotion and experience, and then you have room to do something else. That's all it is. You're clearing up space on the hard drive.

06:58 – 07:17

Dr. Ruth Roberts: That is an incredibly simple way to explain it. And I think that, you know, when we started talking about, oh, pets are our mirrors and all of this, it made people feel guilty. And really, it is it's an opportunity for you to learn a different path. And your pet is so happy to show it to you and for you to learn it.

07:17 – 07:50

Dr. Marlene Siegel: Yeah. Let me address that comment because I think you're right. There's a lot of people that are still in that victim mentality and they want to do the blame, the shame, even if they're blaming and shaming themselves. And none of this earth school is here to make us feel guilty. Everything here is an intentional moment for us to be able to become conscious and aware. So it's not that we caused it. It's that they are volunteering and that's your pets, it's your friends, it could be family, it could be nature.

You know, if you look at nature, all our answers actually exist there. So these are our opportunities to step back and go who's in charge? It's me. So if I'm in charge then I'm creating it and I also have the choice to do something about it. So step number one is we just got to own what's happening in our world. and then become aware of it. Not to punish ourselves, but to go, I am so grateful that I can now see I had judgment in my life or I had abandonment in my life or I had anger or whatever it was. And then when you get rid of it, you don't have to keep experiencing it. It's amazing.

08:34 – 08:37

Dr. Ruth Roberts: Wow. You mean there is an end in sight?"

08:37 – 09:00

Dr. Marlene Siegel: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if there's an actual end. I think we're always elevating and elevating and you know that's what that's what we're here for is to keep rising and to keep creating that conscious edge of creation. We're part of that conscious edge. Are we contributing in a positive way or are we contributing in a negative way? So it's all a choice. 

09:00 – 09:25

Dr. Ruth Roberts: That's it. And really that's all any of this is about is to improve our level of understanding and to decrease suffering as we go. And that's the human condition. That's the animal's condition. Our pets are much more in tune with that. So they're able to do this for themselves if we can extract ourselves and our stuff from their presence.

09:26 – 09:54

Dr. Marlene Siegel: Yeah. The models are all in nature. I mean, look at honey bees. I I raise bees as well and to see how they have community is amazing and they work together and they support each other and then they defend each other and you know we could all do so much better to learn how to get along not take more than what we need not destroy our environment not be ego driven you know a lot to be said.

09:54 – 10:09

Dr. Ruth Roberts: Amen to that. So here we went two highly train veterinarians straight into the woowoo and the emotional. But I say that jokingly, but I think that you're absolutely right. This is what's underneath all of this chronic disease is old stuff that keeps us in a pattern of suffering.

10:15 – 10:16

Dr. Marlene Siegel: Absolutely.

10:16 – 10:36

Dr. Ruth Roberts: And so awesome. Thank you for that. So let's talk into the actual sort of a little bit more medical stuff and the first thing you talked about was deficiencies and I think that is something that is super critical because we are so overfed and yet in many cases undernourished and we've done the same thing to our pets.

10:36 – 14:30

Dr. Marlene Siegel: Yeah. So number one, we've destroyed the microbiome of mother earth and our farming practices are egregious in how unsustainable they are. So, our farmers are supplying nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, the NPK as a soil replacement after they grow something, but there's so many other micronutrients that are now being depleted and they're not being restored because regenerative farming practices aren't being done.

So, when you start there, whatever is growing on that soil now is going to be deficient in nutrients. And I just did a master class on this and it was five to 40% of the vegetables that we're eating grown on these farming conditions are nutrient depleted compared to 100 years ago. So almost half of the nutrient availability or more is gone from the food. Just right there.

So, whatever's eating that food is also going to be deficient. There was a university study that looked at a population of dogs being fed a kibble diet, highly processed food. 85% of those animals were vitamin D insufficient because vitamin D for an herbivore comes from synthesizing the sun. Vitamin D from a carnivore comes from their protein source. And you and I as omnivores, we get it from both the sun and from our protein. But if you imagine that most processed foods are using the waste on these feed lots, these animals haven't been out in the sun and they're already going to be vitamin D deficient. So of course, whatever is eating that's going to be vitamin D deficient. Vitamin D is one of the two co-actors that run the entire innate immune system. That's the immune system within our bodies that was built to take care of our immunity without us having to intervene by thinking about it. But if you turn that whole system off, then it's not working. Now, how do you expect that animal to get better?

We go to the vet, they see a symptom, they put them on an antibiotic, a steroid, an immune suppressant, a whatever, you know, a prescription diet that's even processed and nutrient deficient. And the animal gets a little bit better and then relapses and a little bit better and then it relapses. And we wonder why is that? Well, nutrient deficiencies.

I test every one of my patients for nutrient deficiencies. Even at a year of age, over 80% of these animals have multiple deficiencies in the actual deficient range. And a majority of them are below the mean. The mean is what they say is the average that the average population should be at. They're even below that. They may not be in the absolutely deficient category, but they're below what they need and they're the balance of them is off. So, this is huge problem. Absolutely huge.

And yet only a handful of holistic practitioners are even testing for this. It's not something that you can look at the animal and go, 'Oh, you're calcium or selenium or vitamin D deficient.' It doesn't show up that way. It's this insidious not doing well. The ADR ain't doing right. So we—"

Yeah. I say test don't guess, right? Do you remember the Oh gosh. When we were little, we heard never assume anything. And when you break the word assume down is it makes an ass out of you and me and me.

So for our pet parents that are out there, find a veterinarian who will help you test for these deficiencies and toxicities so that you're actually working with something tangible. Now you know what you need to do differently.

14:31 – 15:08

Dr. Ruth Roberts: Right on. And that's the thing that's so frustrating, too. It's like there's 78,000 small animal veterinarians in the United States roughly at this point. There's 1,500 members of the American Holistic Veterinary Medical Association. And that's just sort of a gauge. There's plenty of other holistic vets that maybe are not a member, but that's part of the frustration is that so many pet parents don't have access to holistic vets, much less a vet that's actually working at the nutritional level. Because that certainly was not one of our strong points of education in veterinary school. 

15:09 – 15:54

Dr. Marlene Siegel: They gave us boxed dog food and cat food to feed to our pets rather than educate us on what is actually healthy. I I just had to bring that up in the master class that I was doing, you know, because people always ask me, well, why is my veterinarian never said this or why is my veterinarian so against a species appropriate or raw balanced diet? And it's because of lack of education. Like we really were not taught biology. We really weren't. And that's why when I do bio regulatory medicine, I now 40 years into practice finally understand the surface of how these organs work."

But right, you know, for for my first 25 years really didn't understand it because we didn't really understand those biological pathways. 

15:54 – 16:14

Dr. Ruth Roberts: And that's the thing that's amazing. The pace of science and understanding how things work together has just exploded. Well, it's always exploding, but particularly nutrition in the last four to five years, our level of understanding is much better, but I'd still say we're just scratching the surface on it.

16:14 – 16:48

Dr. Marlene Siegel: That and detoxification. Yes. Dr. Ruth, when I'm lecturing, it's pretty funny because I don't want to put anybody on the spot and embarrass them, but I'll say, 'Can you name me the six organs of detoxification?' Not one, not one was able to name all six. They'll go uh you know kidney, liver, sometimes they get colon, but they really don't know what these organs of detoxification were designed in the body to do.

Well, if you don't know how they work, how are you going to support them? Right? Makes sense, right? 

16:49 – 17:06

Dr. Ruth Roberts: And the other thing, too, is just recognizing that our world has become so incredibly toxic that a detox is not something you do twice a year. It is a daily event doing it well. "Yeah. Yeah. So, let's talk let's talk about that a little bit.

17:06 – 17:16

Dr. Marlene Siegel:
Citrus pectin on an empty stomach so that I start lowering inflammation and binding my toxins. You got to walk the talk. 

17:16 – 17:33

Dr. Ruth Roberts: You got to do it because and and I mean you are clearly walking the talk because you know you just said 40 years of practice. You've got five years of practice on me. You are full of them in vigor and vitality and so clearly you have figured out a few things."

17:34 – 17:37

Dr. Marlene Siegel: Yeah. Yeah. I'm rounding 70.

17:37 – 17:45

Dr. Ruth Roberts: Right on. Many of our colleagues at our age are not looking too good. And it's because they taking the standard American 

17:45 – 18:32

Dr. Marlene Siegel: and they're burned out. Like I I can't believe how many practitioners are just so unhappy with practice and it's because they're dealing with failure after failure or frustration and they can't resolve the problem and they want to.

So not one single veterinarian have I ever met that didn't have the heart and passion and love to do good. But if you don't know, you don't know, right? So you you know as they start to if they don't just burn out and retire if they start looking for other answers then they start to come across you or me and and then we can start educate and I have programs for pet parents I have programs for veterinarians because it is my goal to make sure that we really transform our industry.

18:32 – 19:00

Dr. Ruth Roberts: Yeah because it's and I think you're exactly right. It's the fact that there's just not the tools available to the veterinarian so they can do a better job. And I think that what we're seeing today is that pet parents are like, 'Holy smokes, I asked my vet a question and she blew up at me.' And I think that frustration is that they know it's not working, but they don't know what else to do. And so what they do is say the party line harder. And that's not helping anybody. 

19:00 – 22:06

Dr. Marlene Siegel: Not at all. And I want to bring up euthanasia because this is coming up to me more and more. We have a wonderful tool in the veterinary industry which is the ability to end suffering with legal euthanization. That's where we put an animal to sleep with an injection chemical that stops the heart and the breathing. And that's a wonderful thing for sure. However, it should not be used as an excuse because that veterinarian doesn't know what else to do.

And that's what breaks my heart. People that come up to me and they go, I wish I would have heard about you a day, a week, a month, a year earlier because I didn't have to make that decision. In fact, there's one of my cases I presented in my detox thing with you where an owner brings their 15-year-old dog in.

It had a plethora of problems. It was in seizures, active seizures. So, we had to stop the seizures. When the seizures were finally under control, the dog still had the unable to walk, had nystagmus, and a lot of neurologic signs.

And I went out and I spoke with the owner and I said, 'Hey, we got the seizures to stop, but she's not normal. I think there's a lot of underlying problems here, 15 years old. Do you want to continue or do you want to say goodbye?' You know, it's still their choice. And this woman looked me dead in the eyes and said, 'Fully years ago, we had a dog that got sick. We went to our vet and the vet just said, 'There's nothing more we can do. You need to euthanize.' And they just did.

But for the following years, they never got over the guilt and the shame that they didn't at least try. They didn't question. They didn't seek other answers. They didn't get a second opinion. They just euthanized the dog. And so she said to me, 'I can't do that again. I want you to try. If it doesn't work, that's fine, but I need to know that we can try.' And I sent that dog home the next morning walking normal, no neurologic signs.

It had a brain tumor. It had heavy metal toxicity. It had severe pancreatitis. It had a plethora of problems. But she had three more weeks before the next seizure. And then they were able to make an educated decision without the guilt because now we had definitive information back about what all the different problems were. And you know at that point it's fair to the animal to end the suffering. But somebody tells you to do that just because they don't have any other choices. Their toolkit is so limited that they can't offer anything else. And that's a problem for me.

And when I say let me finish one more thing. I'm sorry Dr. Ruth, but I want people to understand that we're not trying to make animals live forever. None of us are going to be here forever. We all have an exit strategy. I'm talking about leaving before it's our time to leave, right? So, there's always quality of life that we can offer, even if it's in that last few stages. The number one thing we want to achieve for ourselves, for our pets, for mother earth is quality of life.

22:07 – 22:29

Dr. Ruth Roberts: Right on. And that is so critical because one of the other things I'm hearing from so many people is their dog has weakness or paresis or paralysis in the back end and the choices they are given at the emergency clinic are $10,000-$20,000 for an MRI and surgery or euthanasia and there's nothing in between.

22:29 – 22:30

Dr. Marlene Siegel: Yeah. Well, that's wrong. 

22:29 – 24:06

Dr. Ruth Roberts: I mean, even in conventional medicine, there's something called conservative management. And for some reason that's just gone completely out the window. And you know, and I have to agree with you. I mean, we need to help pet parents understand where their animals are. That's part of why I started the holistic pet health coach program was because a client, 15-year-old Westy, had a litany of woes, a litany of chronic health problems.

She went into the internist. She'd been seeing once a month for the last three years. The internist said, 'Ah, Janet, there's just nothing else I can do for Rosie, and I really think you really need to consider euthanasia.' And Janet's like, 'What? What changed?' And so, she kept asking this person, and she's not giving her any other answers than it's just Rosy's time.

So, Janet pays her bill, has a copy of the lab work, walks out to the car, and looks at the lab work. Rosy's creatinine has gone up by 0.1 which is insignificant and so you know this is the deal so if Janet had said oh okay that's the end of Rosie but what Janet did instead was find someone else to work with use my support to help her support the vet for some other options and Rosie lived another year and that is absolutely criminal what's happening in our profession when your two choices are 20 grand or euthanasia and that's just ahh so frustrating.

24:07 – 25:44

Dr. Marlene Siegel: We can go on and on these stories but it's very significant. I think the take-home message that I want to reinforce with what you said is that you don't have to stop with just that opinion. I got to tell you a quick story. So we have a lady, she has a little tiny dog and the dog can't pee. So she goes to the veterinarian and correctly the veterinarian diagnosed the dog with bladder cancer. She had transitional cell carcinoma and it was blocking her urethra so she couldn't pee.

And the veterinarian said, 'You need to put her to sleep.' The lady goes, 'I don't want to do that.' So she goes to another veterinarian. The exact same thing happens. They tell her the same thing. They support the diagnosis. She goes to a referral center and the referral center says to her, 'Not only does she have bladder cancer, but she would be the most cruel and inhumane pet parent if she left with that dog and did not euthanize it.' And then I was stop number four.

So she came in, she was not willing to euthanize. I have a very arduous toolkit. So we did the proper workup, confirmed the diagnosis, but I started doing therapies that were bringing down the inflammation and by the next morning, 12 hours, I emptied the bladder with a needle. So I, you know, the dog was comfortable. And then by the next morning, the dog is peeing on her own. A year later, she's still going through some therapies and our products, and the dog is still alive. Does she still have cancer? Yes. But is she having quality of life? 100%. 

25:45 – 26:28

Dr. Ruth Roberts: And that's that's the critical thing. This is what is so frustrating. And I think this is where a lot of pet parents get stuck. Your client is remarkable for being persistent and not taking no for an answer. Yeah. And having you as a resource, I mean, that's the incredible things. So, and you know, it's amazing that we can do so much online. There are some things we can't. But in that situation, if there's a pet parent out there that's heard it's euthanasia or this or just it's euthanasia period. What are some suggestions you would make to them to start finding other resources in their area? Let's say they're in the middle of Bentonville, Arkansas.

26:28 – 28:34

Dr. Marlene Siegel: So, number one, start with education. And I'm just going to plug my pet parent course because it gives them three hours of resources and proof of concept. So once you are armed with knowledge, now you can start even going and asking your veterinarian, hey, I want to run these labs. I've learned about them. The lab can send me a test kit and you can pull the blood or urine or hair, whatever it needs, and we can send it in. I offer that even on my consultations. Even if I don't have a client patient relationship, anything that falls within my course, I can do pet health. I can be their coach, right? Because it's falling within that mechanism.

I'm not treating and diagnosing a specific disease, but I'm setting the body up for success. Finding out what's going on and deficiencies and toxicities. I'm helping to uh reduce inflammation, heal the gut, get on a species appropriate diet, do the detoxification, everything that needs to happen to heal anyway. And then your last step would be what are the fine-tuning things you do for that particular name disease. And then I would either work with their veterinarian as a consultant or they come down to my office one time, put my hands on that animal that is now an established patient and now I can take it further.

But what I've done is I've set it up to where pet parents can do an awful lot at home. They're going to have to buy some equipment. So ozone is a big tool in my practice, but it is a very affordable and easily taught tool for pet parents. Easy peasy. Hyperbaric oxygen, frequency therapy. There's so many things that we have that the pet parent can do at home. I'm not saying it's going to be the end all be all for a cancer patient. They're going to need to go above that, but they can still get the foundation done. And for most degenerative problems, osteoarthritis, skin diseases, allergies, obesity, those kind of things, oh my gosh, you that's easy to fix.

28:34 – 29:13

Dr. Ruth Roberts: Yeah, right on. And that's it. I mean, there is a lot of ways to find tools. And if you are in a situation right now as a pet parent, things are pretty easy peasy. This is actually the time to go do a course with Dr. Siegel. I've got courses, Dr. Judy's got courses. There's so much information available to you, even if you don't have a holistic vet in your area. So be proactive. Start learning now. Figure out what's going to work for your pet, what's not going to work for your pet. I think that is so, so critical.

29:14 – 30:05

Dr. Marlene Siegel: I heard a term recently and I loved it and it was that we are stewards. We are stewards of our body. We are stewards of our planet. We are the stewards of everything that lives on this planet. meaning that we have a responsibility to make good choices. And if what we're doing is causing more damage, then we need to be aware of that and stop doing it. Have a replacement for that. And that may be as simple as I'm going to buy different products for cleaning my home that don't have toxins in them or I'm going to eat organic or I'm going to grow some of my own food or whatever that looks like. We can start somewhere and start making better choices that ultimately impact our health, our pets health, our family's health and planet earth.

30:06 – 31:00

Dr. Ruth Roberts: Amen to that. I mean that is it. We are always at choice and even if you are really tight financially, things are difficult, there are small changes that you can make. You can start with, you know, if you can't afford organic produce, you can go to an environmental working group and find out what their clean 15 is and the dirty dozen. And so they're going to tell you the 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables and the 15 least contaminated. So that's a better choice. Not eating the Fritos is a better choice. Not feeding your cat the Fritos is a better choice. And so it's little tiny things that we have so much power on earth, right? And that's what we want you to do is exercise your power, your choice, and be the good steward. That is what we are all supposed to do.

31:01 – 31:46

Dr. Marlene Siegel: Yep. And it's easy. It's really not hard. We just have to think differently. And that's all choice. We go back to the beginning. Kind of like the comedian where they tie it all back together again at the end.

Yeah. Here's the line, folks. We might have to do standup health. But it's true. We It's just like who do we turn around? Oh, remember this. Okay. I don't know if you can see my hand. Right. When you're pointing your finger at somebody and you're going to blame them. Well, there's three fingers pointing back at you. So, let's not go out there and try to make it somebody else's problems. Own it. Own it and make a choice to be different.

32:46 – 32:16

Dr. Ruth Roberts: Amen. Stepped out of victimhood and into empowerment. And when you do that for yourself, you're doing it for your pet because you're going to own the 3 seconds between when the veterinarian says to you, 'There's nothing you can do but euthanize this dog.' Between what your response would be, maybe bursting out into tears or something like that. Take those three seconds and say, 'Thank you, doctor. I appreciate your opinion. I'll be going now.’”

32:19 – 33:22

Dr. Marlene Siegel: "Thank you. I love that. 

32:21 – 32:35

Dr. Ruth Roberts: And and there's I mean, there are situations where really that is the right answer. And you will know in your heart that that is the right answer. But if your heart is like, 'H, no.' Trust your heart. 

32:36 – 33:08

Dr. Marlene Siegel: And instead of leaving that veterinarian a one-star review because you weren't happy with their answer, why don't you gift them with some education, you know, maybe give them the link to either my veterary training course or something Dr. Ruth has or something Dr. Morgan has so that they can at least be exposed. Maybe they won't make the step yet, but at least you've opened the door. You planted the seed metaphorically speaking and you know maybe down the road you've really done them a benefit by helping to open their mind.

33:09 – 33:36

Dr. Ruth Roberts: Amen. And that's the the other thing that's really hard right is to step from anger into compassion. And when you can step into compassion then you can be a change maker. Yeah. So that's that's so critical. And how much better is that than just being angry at somebody because they told you this terrible thing. Yeah. And recognize instead that that's what their toolbox had.

33:38 – 33:43

Dr. Marlene Siegel: Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Well- wow. 

33:43 – 33:58

Dr. Ruth Roberts: We have danced around the moon today. 

33:58 – 34:10

Dr. Marlene Siegel: That was high level. But, you know, I I think people need to see the big picture. So, I agree. You know, and I know that anytime we have a conversation, there's somebody out there that we're speaking to. And even if we only touch one person, I know we've touched many people, but even one person, we've done good in the world.

34:10 – 34:37

Dr. Ruth Roberts: That is the truth. So, Dr. Marlene, this has been an absolute ball. All of the work you've done at Pasco Veterinary Center, creating lines of products of raw food, has all been in the effort to support pets and their pet parents so that they are better guides, they are better shepherds. Yeah. 

So, where can our listeners find you uh and figure out how to access your resources? 

34:38 – 36:31

Dr. Marlene Siegel: Everything is at DR like doctor, you know, the initials. drmarlenesiegel.com    made it super easy. But I I do want to mention that, you know, I have a raw food company. I have a supplement line. I didn't do that because I just thought the world needed one more. I did it because every company that I approached to do a clean, healthy line said, 'Oh, we can't do that. We know we don't think there's a market for people who want that higher end.' And I said, 'Well, I've got cancer patients. I can't afford for my patients to have another drop of toxin. So, I have to have that clean of a line and I have to know that the ingredients that are in that bottle or capsule actually are in that bottle or capsule.
It took me four years to find a group of supplement companies that I could trust that had standards equal to or higher than my own. I finally found them, which was amazing. But, you know, I searched the world and I found them an hour from where I live. Amazing. Amazing. Isn't that crazy? And they're there. They were there. So, I want people to understand that things in the marketing world are not what they always look at.

You that you you read these labels and if it says proprietary blend, really raise an eyebrow because you may not really know what's in that blend. If there's a lot of ingredients listed along that, you don't know that all those ingredients are actually in there. It could be any mixture of them. And what they do is they label it that way so that when they go to purchase ingredients, if something is really expensive, well, they may not buy that product and put more of something else in, right? That's how they make their formulas, but they're not consistent, right? And that's a huge problem.

36:32 – 36:46

Dr. Ruth Roberts:  And there's certain doses that we know work for certain molecules. And if you're, you know, you've got just a pinch in there, then you're wasting your money.

36:46 – 38:36

Dr. Marlene Siegel: Yeah. Hey, I want to talk about one more thing. Do we have a couple minutes? Okay, we do. We got time. So, let's talk about raw food because when I started my company, there were less than five companies doing raw food and now there are gazillions. But what happens is these companies are making raw food that sounds appealing to us as the pet parent. So, if you're paying meat prices, but you're have a diet that's 20 to 30% vegetables, think about that. A, are you really providing what species appropriate that animal needs? B, are they able to break down all those vegetables, which the answer is no. C, are the nutrients in those vegetables, are they even organic, let alone have sufficient nutrient quality in them?

So, what I learned when I started going into the food industry was there has to be a better way because the pet food companies make you put certain label requirements in there, but that doesn't mean they're bioavailable or that they're absorbable or that they even have the nutrient content in them because it's not measured. So, what I started to do was differentiate the macronutrients from the micronutrients. So, a macronutrient is your meat, fat, bone, and organ meat. That's what makes the foundation of the diet.

So when a carnivore in the wild would go out and hunt something because it was hungry and it killed a rabbit, a wilderbeast, whatever it was going to kill, and they ate it. They ate the meat that bone and organ meat. But they also would tear through the intestines. And in the intestines was the grasses and things that the herbivore was eating. Digested for you. It's a DIY system. So all of that vegetable material is now digested for the carnivore to get along with the pre and probiotics from the intestinal tract of the herbivore. That's how nature modeled that. You don't see carnivores out there grazing in vegetable gardens.

So now- unless they're Bobby. So now we're going to come back and go, okay, what would be a species appropriate diet? Not the diet that they can survive on, but they can thrive on. And that's how I in my mind was able to understand what nature modeled and how we can model that as close as possible in our modern world.

39:25 – 40:28

Dr. Ruth Roberts: Right on. And I took a very different approach. So I my training is in traditional Chinese veterary medicine and I took the cook diet approach which a lot of folks would disagree with. But what I've seen is that when we're using high quality animal proteins and especially for these animals that have been sick for so long, I see them improve dramatically. We're presenting them with vegetables that are predigested and then they're predigested. Exactly that. And so that's it. The whole food is predigested. And so for these animals that have been sick for so long, they're able to absorb the nutrient.

We add in I do use synthetic vitamins because I've seen and actually most of them are food based. But what I've seen is that that surplus along with the real food ingredients, the co-factors increase the absorption and we see that animal come back to health. Now for cats, they are absolutely the species that should only be raw-fed. But convincing some cats of that is an interesting trick.

40:28 – 41:20

Dr. Marlene Siegel: Yeah, we we got our ways. But you know what you're saying is that and I totally agree that taking an animal off of a highly processed diet and getting them on even a cooked diet is going to be a thousand% better than where they were and then keep moving towards as species appropriate as we can get. But we have to heal the gut. We have to improve digestion. We have to bring down inflammation. There's a lot of factors. Most of my patients are on enzymes, dietary enzymes, because they need that additional support. We've just whacked their pancreas so hard that there's not a lot of digestion available.

So, we supplement the digestive enzymes to facilitate them to be able to break it down because at the end of the day, if they eat something and they can't break it down, out the poop shoot it goes. Exactly. Or create inflammation.

41:20 – 41:50

Dr. Ruth Roberts: Right. And it often comes out in a most undesirable form. So that's the deal is how can we get them to digest and assimilate."

Yeah. Right on. Yeah. Dr. Siegel is has been an absolute ball. And so go to drmarlenesiegel.com. She's got all of her courses information there. Supplement, raw diet, all those good things. And is there one last message you'd like to leave our listeners with about taking a proactive approach to their pet's health?

41:50 – 43:10

Dr. Marlene Siegel: Yeah. Put yourself in a state of gratitude every morning, midday, and every night. Stop and think about what it is that you have to be grateful for. And it doesn't have to be big stuff. You open your eyes and you may see the sun coming through. You may hear birds chirping. You may feel good that morning. You may have um my well just went out at the house. So waking up and having water when I tell you how grateful I am because when you don't have it it's miserable. So they don't have to be big things but just what are you grateful for? Start your day with that because energetically what that does is it changes your neurochemicals and your pets in train to your energy. So you're going to reset them while you reset yourself.

And then throughout the day, look around. Be present for just a moment and observe what what's happening in the world around you and be grateful that you can participate in that. Find goodness. And then before you go to bed at night, one more review. What are you grateful for that happened that day? And maybe for you guys, it's going to be that you heard this talk and we would appreciate that. Tell Dr. Ruth, how much you adore her and appreciate her and are grateful for all the work that she does to help bring education to you, the pet parent.

43:10 – 44:30

Dr. Ruth Roberts: Thank you for that. Yeah, Dr. Siegel, thank you so much. For all of you out there listening, we're so glad to have you here because you want different for yourself and for your pets. So stay tuned. There'll be another episode of Healing Tales coming up real soon. 

Dr. Marlene Siegel: Bye everybody. 

Thanks for listening to Healing Tails where pet parents become healers one tail wag at a time. Want more tools and support? Head to druth roberts.com. Until next time, trust your gut, question the noise, and keep showing up for your pet.