Whole Foods, Whole Health: Revolutionizing Veterinary Diets

[00:16] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
Welcome back to another episode of Healing Tails. I'm Dr. Ruth Roberts, empowering change makers in pet health. And today I'm really thrilled to have Dr. Chris Bessent joining us. Dr. Bessent is truly a pioneer in holistic veterinary medicine. And like me, she's boasting over 35 years of experience. She is not only a veterinarian, but also certified in veterinary chiropractic, acupuncture, and Chinese herbal medicine. Additionally, she holds a master's degree in Oriental medicine for humans, and is a licensed acupuncturist for people as well. Dr. Bessent is the founder of Herb Smith and Medicus Veterinary Diets, which are two truly remarkable companies. And really, she's a maverick in her own right, because she was able to use these companies to help transform pet health, and utilize whole food ingredients and Chinese herbal formulas, and has been working diligently to make this information more readily available to you, the pet parent, as well as to our veterinary colleagues. Her work has positively impacted the lives of tens of thousands of pets. And her commitment to proactive preventive care is truly inspiring. So Dr. Bessent, welcome to this episode of Healing Tails.

[01:45] Dr. Chris Bessent:
Thank you so much for having me. It's always a joy to speak with like-minded people.

[01:51] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
Amen to that. So let's start out with just kind of talking a little bit about your journey in veterinary medicine. And I mean, you were in clinical practice for years. And how did you shift into companies that are producing herbal formulas and whole food veterinary diets?

[02:12] Dr. Chris Bessent:
I would tell you it wasn't on purpose. If I had known how difficult the climb would have been, I might have reconsidered. But I've been practicing for 36, 37 years now, so a long time. And I just kept getting introduced to veterinary patients that traditional medicine couldn't help. So dogs with disc issues or horses with terrible necks. And I had wonderful people in our area, acupuncturists and a veterinary chiropractor who treated those patients and made them better. And I was intrigued. I was like, how did they do it? And I need to know about it. And so I went and took the best training available in the world for chiropractic and then for acupuncture. And I said, I never want to go on an herb walk, but now I love herbs. And now I couldn't have been practicing without them. And of course, food is just an extension of the herbs. So it kind of all came together in my veterinary practice that if I could diagnose that pet from a biomedical Western perspective, as well as from a TCVM Chinese perspective, I could implement herbs or pharmaceuticals or recommend surgery or recommend food changes that would enhance their healing and get them back to normal faster.

So it really wasn't about developing products. For surely it wasn't that it wasn't about developing a company. It was a hundred percent my quest to be able to help every patient that came my way. And so I didn't have a preconceived idea that the food didn't matter, that the alternative medicine was fufu. I didn't think that at all. I just felt like, give me as many tools as I need to be able to help every patient that came my way.

Well, then as I had gotten to the point that I was kind of the mid 2000s and I had been treating patients all day, every day. And I thought, how could I expand this further? And the way to expand it further was to partner with really good pet stores or other veterinarians and teach what I knew about herbal medicine and what I knew about food therapy.

And then that developed Herbsmith. And from Herbsmith, of course, you shouldn't be using herbs if you're not using good food. That came to Simple Food Project, our complete and balanced food for cats and dogs from a TCVM perspective, as well as then it led into Medicus Veterinary Diets. Because if we're feeding our animals well when they're healthy, now we got to the point about how do we feed our patients that are ill?

We found, I found that my patients would be going home from their regular veterinarian with a big bag of kibble that was therapeutic, but they fed their dogs healthy their whole lives. And then when they got sick, now all of a sudden they're forced because they're scared. And that's all the vet had to offer. Now they were walking away with a big bag of kibble that they would have never fed their dog any other time. And to me, that was an issue that needed to be solved. I mean, we did such a great job as pet parents and holistic veterinarians to train people that food matters and that everything that they eat every day is shaping their health. And then when they got sick, we kind of had nothing for them. And that's really what where Medicus was born.

[06:18] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
And that's amazing. I mean, because what, you know, I went through the whole process of why are we feeding these prescription diets? And if you sit down and look at the ingredients, they are not a whole lot better than a bag of Beneful, which is one of the most popular grocery store brands. And it's relatively inexpensive, very low quality ingredients. And essentially what they were doing is adding supplements to create a therapeutic benefit.

[06:51] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
So good on you. And then, and that was it. I mean, we'd see our patients, I think you have the same experience. You'd see our patients that yes, they had a health problem now, but now they're getting all this stuff, skin disease, the gut disease, because they're eating this pro-inflammatory diet.

[07:09] Dr. Chris Bessent:
And so I felt like therapeutic diets, in my opinion, definitely have a meaning that if you have a cute little dog like her that has kidney disease, you definitely need to restrict the phosphorus level because the kidneys are now injured. And so they can't properly process phosphorus the way they did. And so it accumulates in the body. And with that comes imbalances of calcium and bone development of muscles and just everything in their body is changing now because their kidneys can't function the way that they should. So a therapeutic diet needed to restrict phosphorus.

[07:55] Dr. Chris Bessent:
My comment was, why can't we do that same thing with real food, with whole food ingredients like chicken and chicken liver and chicken hearts and blueberries and cranberries? And could we hit the same nutrient profiles that are absolutely necessary for an animal who has a part of their body that's not functioning to its fullest? And can we do that with healthy good food?

And so it took me years, years and hundreds of thousands of dollars of testing to be able to say, "Absolutely, we can do this. We can absolutely produce a whole food diet that's restricted in phosphorus that would meet the needs of that dog with kidney disease." So now that pet parent who had been feeding their dog fabulous their whole lives, and now this dog in their older age starts to develop kidney insufficiency, now there's a whole food diet. It's in a freeze-dried format. So it's of the highest quality, all the vitamins and nutrients that we need, but it has a nutrient profile that will assist that dog with kidney insufficiency. And that was the whole idea behind it — we can do good things with nutrition and continue it, not just for health and wellness, but also for when they have an issue.

[09:26] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
Amazing. And that's the thing, I think that most people don't understand the formulation process and the testing process you went through. So if you wouldn't mind speaking a little bit more about that, I think that would be really helpful for folks to understand.

[09:45] Dr. Chris Bessent:
Yeah. So no question, I believe as you do, that they should have a species-appropriate diet. So a dog should eat as a scavenger carnivore, a cat is an obligate carnivore that absolutely needs to be fed that way. So I started with species-appropriate diets and then said, "Okay, for this disease issue, what needs to happen?" So let's go back to kidney again. So for a kidney diet, you need to have lower phosphorus.

Here's where the rub comes in. For a species-appropriate diet, it should be high meat and organ content, right? 70% plus. Well, meat is the highest source of phosphorus of all foods. So how could I make a low phosphorus food in something that is as close to species-appropriate as possible? And that's where all the testing came in. So in the beginning, I thought, "Okay, well, let's go with low phosphorus meats and see if that was enough." So then I did the blending and formulation with low phosphorus meat and tested. And yes, the phosphorus level was a little lower than it should be, but not anywhere close to what a dog with kidney failure needs. And so I tweaked it a couple of times, didn't get it right. And remember, each of those tweaks, the testing is about $2,500. So it's not cheap.

But I was so determined. And I literally remember the day I was sitting at my desk, I'm like, "Ugh, I've gone through a couple of iterations right now, haven't got to that point." And then I tested another formula that had some rice in it. And that one had beautiful phosphorus levels. So I literally remember thinking, "Oh my God, I can't add rice to this diet. These are carnivores." Well, I had to decide, do you want to feed them as a carnivore but towards their kidneys? Or could I add a very easy to digest bioavailable grain that would decrease the phosphorus level and support the kidneys to the best of their ability?

And so that's what we did. We ended up having to add rice to the diet and rice brought the phosphorus level down. Although we still had great omega-3 fatty acids, we still had antioxidants from the fruits and vegetables, we still had really high-quality meats and organs. So the idea in kidney disease used to be with veterinarians that we thought that you wanted to keep protein super low. Because if your protein was low, that lightened the load on the kidneys, which is true to a point. But as humans, as the pendulum swings, we way overdid it. And we dropped protein levels for kidney dogs down into the 8% range, which is crazy.

So what we found is that those dogs and cats started to catabolize or eat their own muscle tissue because they have a basic daily need for amino acids. And if we don't provide it to them in the diet, they're going to get it somehow and it comes from their muscle tissue. And that's why kidney dogs and kidney cats especially look like the walking dead. They're just like skeletons with skin because they've catabolized, they utilized all their own muscle tissue to fulfill that amino acid requirement.

So in our kidney diet, it's moderate to moderate levels of protein. We're in the 20, 23 to 25% protein level because the current thought process is we need to give them enough amino acids that they're not digesting their own body, but not so much — not 40, 50% — that it's really challenging to the kidney.

So in formulation, there's kind of two ways of going about it. One is you can restrict some nutrients. So that was the kidney diet. We restricted phosphorus, but we kept a fair amount of protein. But then there are other diets that you just want to add a lot to. So our cancer diet, we formulated with lots of positive things: lots of omega-3 fatty acids, lots of antioxidants, a ketogenic diet. So we're starving the cancer, not feeding the cancer. So really, each formula that we look at in Medicus is one of those two: either I restricted things that needed to be restricted or I hyper flooded the body with all of the nutrients that they need to be able to withstand the disease or issues that they're having.

[15:04] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
And that's brilliant. I mean, there's a place for using synthetics, but if you can do this with whole foods, so much the better.

[15:14] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
And that kind of brings me to the next question.

[15:18] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
Why? I mean, because we could like — so for instance, amino acids are the building blocks of muscle and protein. And we could make a diet out of synthetic amino acids, which would taste horrible, and put all the requirements into the pet, but the result won't be the same. So why do you feel it is so important to use whole food ingredients in therapeutic diets versus kind of these processed and highly ultra-processed alternatives?

[15:48] Dr. Chris Bessent:
Yeah, I think that's such a great question. It's interesting. Not many people ask that question, but it's such a great question.

[15:56] Dr. Chris Bessent:
I think that it comes — I'll make it the negative side of it, and then I'll go to the positive side. On the negative side of it, a lot of what you see on labeling in pet foods — so if it says tomato, it could be tomato pomace, which would be everything that's left over after they squish everything out of the tomato. And now you have this powder. So how much nutrients are still left in it? It could be, gosh, so many variations. As long as it has the DNA of that fruit or vegetable or meat, it can be put onto the label. And I say that each tomato has so many nutrients. It has vitamins and minerals, but it also has lycopene and antioxidants and fiber from the seeds and so much more.

And it comes down to the idea of if I wanted to give myself — if I was sick with a cold — if I wanted to give myself vitamins, increase my vitamin C, because I know that's going to help me heal faster, would I eat a vitamin C tablet or would I eat an orange? And I am of the belief that I would eat that orange, because that orange has vitamin C, but it has all the other nutrients in that orange that work in beautiful harmony to support health. And that the vitamin C is only one component of that orange. It's not the only reason why oranges are good for you. So going back to nature and saying that nature knows best.

Let's go back to whole food. Let's go back to whole food rather than bits and parts of food. And bits and parts are cheaper. And the reason they're cheaper is because, like, apple pomace is a great one. They squished all the apple juice out. They took all the vitamins out. They took everything out. And what you're left with is this squished fiber powder. Why not use the whole apple? And that was always my feeling about food — rather than having bits and parts of food, why not use all food? That just seems to make the most sense to me. So that's how we approach all of our diets — Simple Food Project, as well as Medicus Veterinary Diets. Or if for some reason we're making a recommendation to somebody, they're home cooking and they need to do blah, blah, blah. Absolutely. I'm going to say things like, let's add some whole fat cottage cheese, or let's add some sweet potato to it. But not a sweet potato powder that's heavily processed, subjected to God knows what chemicals, temperature, pressure — whatever's left over at the end of it. Why not just feed the real sweet potato?

[19:00] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
Right on. It's kind of like in the 80s when the powers that be declared ketchup as a vegetable. And it's like, really? And really legitimized it as a vegetable for the school lunch program. And it's like, wow, how did we get there? So yes, somewhere along the time, there are some tomatoes in there, but there's all this other stuff too. Yeah.

Anyway, but that's the thing I think that a lot of folks don't understand about the way the pet food industry is set up. You get some of that information about meat meals, and that can be anywhere from truly ground dried meat to whatever they scraped off the kill floor and sort of dried up and powdered.

So this is the difficulty — it's difficult to, unless there's a clear definition given, it's really hard to know what's in the commercial diets.

[20:01] Dr. Chris Bessent:
Honestly, the pet food industry has become the wastebasket of human food — the human food industry. And many of the components that are used in pet food, particularly in kibble, are things that are byproducts, that are leftover, that are just going to be thrown away. And people thought, well, why don't we just add it to the kibble? And then we can put it on the label. And the pet parent will think, "Woo, we got tomato in the kibble." Well, really, we didn't. And unfortunately, how does the average person know that they don't? And even though it's a pervasive problem among the industry, it was really an issue in my mind for an ill pet.

So when they needed it most, they were getting the least. And that was — I'm not saying in any way, shape or form that any of our diets are going to fix disease. They're not. What they're going to do is they're going to give the body every macronutrient, micronutrient, phytonutrient — everything that that dog or cat's body needs to be able to heal themselves.

And I'm a firm believer that that makes a huge difference. If you're eating crappy food your whole life, you're going to have much more disease, chronic disease, than if you eat well your whole life. And that is true for us and it's absolutely true for our pets as well.

And never is it more needed — let's say cancer. When they're fighting cancer, they need every bit of energy that they have towards fighting the cancer. And everything that we do should be enhancing and balancing their immune system to give them everything they need to kind of have the tide go in our favor. And that is the idea behind Medicus Veterinary Diets — they're therapeutic, but with real healthy whole food. So like all our fruits and vegetables, they're organic because not only are we not providing some nutrients, but the ultra-processing is producing lots of really bad chemicals. Yeah, okay, now your dog has cancer and they have to fight these chemicals as well. That just didn't make sense to me. And so, for example, in our meat, we do what's called biogenic amine testing. And biogenic amines are the chemical compounds that happen when meat starts to degrade. So it's like cadaverine and putrescine, and you can literally send your meat off to a lab and they'll test that.

And that's a quantitative documentation of the freshness of that meat. And if our sick patients have to be consuming putrescine and cadaverine and trying to filter that out of their body, we're not doing them any favors.

So biogenic amine is a way to quantitatively say we use the highest quality meats. I can say it, but it's better if I can prove it to you. Prove it. Yeah, something that I can't make up. And the nice thing about biogenic amines is they don't go away with heavy processing. So if you tested biogenic amines of meat and bone meal, off the roof — would totally be considered spoiled and not safe for consumption. But for some reason, it's allowed with regulatory discretion in pet food.

[23:59] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
Right. And I think that's just one of the things that's so confusing. So you've got biogenic amines. And then in the processing of kibble, especially the extrusion process, then you get things like AGEs — the advanced glycation end products — so we're adding more toxins into a food that's already pro-inflammatory. And that's bad enough. But the other thing that many of my clients would complain about in the days before I started teaching whole foods was the palatability of the prescription diets — it was just not good. And so have you found that to be an issue with Medicus?

[24:48] Dr. Chris Bessent:
To a point, and I expected it because these animals are sick. They don't feel well. I would say that we still — especially with kitties — cats are always the challenge. They go to the beat of their own drum and usually it's not the same beat I want them to go to. So cats can be really difficult. For cats, to get them to eat it — the dogs, they eat it well.

[25:16] Dr. Chris Bessent:
And I even get five-star reviews all the time about, "Oh, my dog is eating better than he's ever eaten." So I think the downfall of freeze-drying is freeze-drying doesn't have a great sense of smell. So freeze-drying — if you've ever had a freeze-dried strawberry or raspberry — it looks ugly.

[25:39] Dr. Chris Bessent:
It doesn't have a great — it doesn't smell like — but the second you taste it, it's like the flavor is concentrated. So for dogs and cats, for freeze-dried, you need to get them to eat it once. Once they eat it once, they're like, "Oh, this is what it is." And then they love it. And the same thing for cats. So if the palatability is an issue, we often add warm water or warm broth so that they can waft that smell. Because cats and dogs — it's all about smell.

[26:13] Dr. Chris Bessent:
We perceive the world with our eyes and they perceive the world with their nose. And so there are times that you do have to add warm water to it. But once you get them eating it — boom, it's off to the races and they do great.

[26:31] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
That's beautiful because that is so crucial.

[26:35] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
There are two phases of life which have the highest energy and caloric demands. And one is growth, and the second is healing. And I think that we forget that — that the caloric demands may be equal to that of growth or maybe one and a half times.

[26:56] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
And usually the growth caloric demand is maybe twice that of the adult animal. So eating is so critical. Yeah.

[27:05] Dr. Chris Bessent:
That's fabulous. I haven't thought of it that way, but you're 100% right on that. And that's why when you look at Medicus diets, they're all really high calorie count. So the cancer diet is in the 5,000 kilocalories per kg, which is really high. And it's important because I want every single bite that that animal takes to give them the caloric needs that they need as well as all the nutrients as well.

[27:33] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
Right on. And that's just so important. So — and speaking of that, you've mentioned that there's a kidney diet, there's a diet to support pets with cancer. Are there other health issues that you've designed Medicus to support?

[27:47] Dr. Chris Bessent:
Yeah. For the dogs, we have a kidney diet, a sensitive stomach diet — which is absolutely amazing — a bland diet for like a pancreatitis dog, two cancer diets. So cancer diet with beef and a cancer diet with chicken, depending on what that animal needs. And then we also have a sensitive skin diet. And the sensitive skin diet is novel proteins with omega-6 GLA in it — so evening primrose.

And then for kitties, we have a kidney diet, a bladder diet — that's amazing — and we went through the same super saturation testing that all bladder diets go through and they came back fabulous. So a bladder diet, and then a metabolic health diet for those fat diabetic cats.

[28:40] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
Right on. So super saturation testing — what does that mean?

[28:45] Dr. Chris Bessent:
Yeah, what it means is cats are desert creatures, and as a desert creature, they get all their moisture from their food. So if they're eating a dry diet, where are they going to get their moisture from? They hyper-concentrate their urine. So they don't urinate out as much — it's one way for them to conserve hydration. And so what happens when they don't urinate as much and they hyper-concentrate their urine, they also hyper-concentrate all the minerals. When the minerals are hyper-concentrated in the appropriate pH of the urine, crystals and stones form.

[29:25] Dr. Chris Bessent:
So relative super saturation is a way to — so it was 20 kitties and they all ate the food. They had their urine collected before they ate the food for two to three weeks. Then they had multiple times where they collected urine.

And then they tested for sodium and magnesium and potassium levels and all of the minerals in the oxalate — all the minerals that are in the urine to see if they are from the diet getting too many minerals that is setting up the perfect scenario for crystals and stones to develop.

[30:09] Dr. Chris Bessent:
So the idea behind the bladder diet is you want to have minimal minerals.

[30:15] Dr. Chris Bessent:
That those minerals can do what they need within the body, but not so much that they get excreted into the urine and set up this perfect scenario to cause struvite crystals, for example, or struvite stones.

So our diet has been tested and deemed to be appropriately decreasing struvite crystals and to break down struvite stones and to prevent oxalate stones. But oxalate stones — if your pet has oxalate stones, you have to have surgery done. There's no breaking that down.

[30:52] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
Yeah, that's a tough one.

[30:55] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
And I think that's critical. So you're able to use the diet to keep a very tight pH range so that there's not the opportunity for those crystals to form.

[31:05] Dr. Chris Bessent:
And minimize the amount of individual minerals that make up those stones. So you have to do both. You have to keep the pH right, but you also have to minimize the amount of the basic components that are being excreted into the urine.

[31:24] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
Right on. And those are difficult concepts to understand. So that was an eloquent explanation.

[31:35] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
So many pet parents are not familiar with the concept of using food as medicine. And so part of when I was learning food therapy was comparing — okay, we have herbal formulas that can support this particular pattern of disharmony — but then you can take the properties of food and then sort of create a long-term support. So can you explain a little bit more about that and also how whole food ingredients in specific can act as therapeutic tools?

[32:13] Dr. Chris Bessent:
Absolutely. I would say it is — when you eat food, how does it make you feel? And how does it make your pet feel? And the best analogy to it is in the summertime, I'm going to choose to eat fruits and vegetables and cooling foods because it's hot externally — that heat is penetrating into my body. And so I'm going to use food to cool myself. In the dead of winter, I'm going to want — I'm going to crave, my body wants — soups and stews and root vegetables and warming foods to make my body neutral again. So the ideal is that your body is balanced with the amount of hot to the amount of cold — the amount of heat for metabolism, but the amount of fluids for hydration.

[33:09] Dr. Chris Bessent:
And so that's why you and me and dogs have cravings for different things — not ice cream, but darn,

[33:20] Dr. Chris Bessent:
that was a good craving. You tend to crave things that your body is looking for, that your body wants. Like another great analogy to it is when you plant wildflowers in your pasture for your horses, you'll notice that your horses are going to eat particular things and other plants they tend to stay away from.

And that is that kind of self-selection of what we eat to try to support our health and wellness. So we as creatures — animals do it naturally. And I think we've gotten so far away from that idea that we don't even know how to do it anymore. And this medicine is all about that. It's all about balance. And it's about using everything — lifestyle and food and herbs — that you might use all of those things you're doing every day to balance your body. Because when your body is balanced, you have the best health, you feel good. And same thing for the dog. If you have a dog who has allergies and they're super hot, if you feed them cooling meats, they feel so much better. And so that's just this constant, every day throughout our lifetime, trying to rebalance, trying to keep us even between hot and cold.

[34:47] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
Right on. And it's really interesting to me. Pharmacognosy is like the big hot thing right now. And essentially what we're doing is presenting a series of herbs that the animal can then say, "Yep, I need this right now." And I love your analogy about the horses and the pasture. They are still able to choose because they're living in their environment. But dogs and cats and people, we're living inside for the most part. And so if we don't have access to these plants, we've kind of lost the concept of what we should be eating now — what actually should be in season. So it's really, it's quite interesting.

[35:32] Dr. Chris Bessent:
Hey, you could do it with yourself in that — this makes me feel well. When I eat mac and cheese, I don't feel so well. No,

[35:43] Dr. Chris Bessent:
you're probably saying, "Eh, it's fine once." But you probably need to get back to some lean protein and healthy fruits and vegetables. So you can see in your dogs as well — if you're feeding them well, you're feeding them to balance them — over time, it slowly but surely helps them feel well as well. And I think probably as Americans or as human beings, we like a quick fix.

[36:12] Dr. Chris Bessent:
So drugs are a quick fix. If I have a dog who's itching like crazy and he gets Prednisone, he feels better immediately. And that's so tempting to use. But then in the long run, all the negative side effects are much worse than the original itching to begin with. Where food and herbs — and I kind of put them in the same category — food and herbs take time. It's a slow, gradual progression. It's not dramatic. And I think that as human beings, it's harder. We like that quick fix. We like that "I give a pill and they're better" versus "I've been feeding them this way for two weeks and now they're better."

But the upside to it is now you've built this triangle of support. So now when you stop the food, it's not like stopping a drug where they just immediately go back to being bad. It takes time for the effect to slowly go away. So the Simple Food Project is very much based on Chinese medicine. So we made warming, cooling, and neutral foods for cats and for dogs.

And then we can — I can make recommendations, or you can make recommendations — depending on what that dog has. If they're hypothyroid, so not enough thyroid, they're cold in general — even in the middle of summer, they're cold. So we want to give them warming foods to increase their metabolism and to give them what they’re missing.

[37:47] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
And I think that's so critical because we've really lost sight of that. We do love the quick fix in the U.S., and I think that the medical system has trained us to believe, oh, we'll just take the pill, it'll be better.

[38:02] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
But I think that almost everyone has had some experience — whether it's with themselves, a family member, or their pets — of seeing the cost of some of these drugs over time.

[38:16] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
And as you said, the cost is often worse. The treatment is worse than the disease, so to speak.

[38:21] Dr. Chris Bessent:
Well, I think the best way to go about it is to use pharmaceuticals when you need to — but the least amount for the shortest duration — and then go from that pharmaceutical to maybe some herbs,

[38:38] Dr. Chris Bessent:
and you're going to be laying the foundation of health with good food. So yes, if you need a pharmaceutical, use it. If you need surgery, absolutely — thank God that we have it available to us. But use it with discretion rather than just, "I want that dog to stop itching."

[39:03] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
Amazing. So for folks that are new to whole food diets, what advice would you give when they’re transitioning from having fed kibble or even some of the canned diets over to a whole food-based diet?

[39:20] Dr. Chris Bessent:
Oh boy.

[39:24] Dr. Chris Bessent:
It's a tough one because how do you know if apple is really apple or is it apple pomace? Because it could be labeled as apple. And so that's where it really comes into trusting your suppliers, trusting your gut — no pun intended.

[39:47] Dr. Chris Bessent:
But it is a difficult position that pet parents are in. They really are.

[39:57] Dr. Chris Bessent:
I literally — as a veterinarian — I'd walk down a grocery store aisle of pet food, and I'd see these beautiful pictures of chicken breasts and peas and carrots. And I'd think, "What's wrong with that? That's fabulous."

[40:12] Dr. Chris Bessent:
Well, then I'd pick up the bag and I would read the ingredients and I'm like, "Wow, that's not even close to what they lay on the bag."

[40:23] Dr. Chris Bessent:
If you look at the actual ingredients — where they have to use actual relatively correct terms — you would get a better idea of what that food really is. But unfortunately, the FDA says if you have the DNA of chicken in it, you can call it chicken. It doesn't mean that much. You have the DNA of a carrot — you can say there's carrots in it. It doesn't mean they're good quality. It doesn't mean they're a whole food carrot. It just means they could have been a part of a processed carrot. So it is really difficult. But I would say that most pet parents have such a close relationship with their dog, that feeling of feeling good that we feel for ourselves — I think pet parents see that in their pet as well. When you watch your pet — you switch their food to whatever it is — and they're just not thriving. They're not doing well. They don't want to eat it. To me, all of that is an indication that it's not making them feel well — that it's probably not the food that they should be having.

[41:34] Dr. Chris Bessent:
And I know that's very subjective and ambiguous, but we do our best. Nobody ever says they feed crappy food to their dog — ever. We all go by the system.

[41:48] Dr. Chris Bessent:
And then it's trusting people like you and I, or a pet health coach who's educated in it, and who's really gone through and done the research on it, done the homework.

[42:01] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
And I think what you said is — if they don't want to eat it, it's not serving them — I think that is so critical to remember. Because I can't tell you the number of clients that have gone out and bought the latest, fanciest, and greatest, and the dog is like, "No. No, thank you." And it's because it does not serve what they need. So trust your dog or your cat. Well, cats are a little different, but they're going to tell you if this is the right thing or not the right thing.

[42:31] Dr. Chris Bessent:
With the exception of if they're sick. Yes.

[42:35] Dr. Chris Bessent:
If we're sick, we're not going to want to eat this amazingly beautiful, healthy food. We don't feel well, so we might just pick at it. And the same thing for dogs. But slowly but surely, we can help to give them the nutrients that they need to be able to heal.

[42:51] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
Amen to that.

[42:54] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
So this has been a lot of fun. And I want to make sure that our listeners know where to go to find out more information about your work with Herbsmith and Medicus Veterinary Diets and Simple Food Project. So where do we send them?

[43:09] Dr. Chris Bessent:
Our websites are probably your best bet because we have blogs and we have webinars and we have all sorts of great information discussing solid research behind each one of the recommendations. So the Simple Food Project is simplefoodproject.com.

[43:26] Dr. Chris Bessent:
And Medicus Veterinary Diets is medicusveterinarydiets.com. We also have Instagram pages and Facebook pages. And we have about five customer support people that are amazingly fabulous. So any questions you have, let us know. We'll always get back to you within the day — potentially the following day — but generally speaking fairly quickly. And then I do a thing called "Curate the Bowl." So if you go to Herbsmith, you can take this quiz. And this quiz is basically giving me all the information about your dog and what's going on with them and what would I recommend. So I might recommend chiropractic. I might recommend acupuncture. I might recommend surgery. I might recommend a Herbsmith product and then to use Medicus Veterinary Diet. So it's completely free. And I physically look at them every single day and give my recommendation as to what I think is going to help your pet.

[44:34] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
That is an incredible service. Dr. Bessent, thank you so much for joining today. This has been a fun conversation and I think one that our listeners will really enjoy. And we hope to have you back sometime soon.

[45:12] Dr. Chris Bessent:
Thank you so much.

[45:13] Dr. Ruth Roberts:
Thanks for listening to Healing Tails, where pet parents become healers, one tail wag at a time. Want more tools and support? Head to DrRuthRoberts.com. Until next time, trust your gut, question the noise, and keep showing up for your pet.