How Much Protein Does My Dog Need?

Host Jennifer: Welcome back to another episode. Super excited to get started. I'm your host. Jennifer will Blahnik. And of course, as always, I have Dan with me.

Host Dan: Yeah, this is Dan. Um, For those of you who are new to our show, I'm a pet food and pet nutrition, uh, entrepreneur and writer and activist. I wrote this book called dogs, dog food, and dogma about the weird overlap between, science and regulation and industry in the world of pet food and nutrition. And I'm the founder of keto, natural pet foods, along with some other things.

Host Jennifer: That's awesome. And we are so excited to get started on talking about how much protein should I feed my dog. That's a huge topic, but I do like that. We're gonna really focus in on what people are hearing really diving into like reading labels. So we're going to actually have some like take-home advice and take home education for your every day and some stats and facts for,

Yeah, I mean like that kind of stuff is what made this subject like seem like a worthy things that devote an entire episode to like, if you own a dog food company, you know, your social interactions with friends and family often involve questions from those of them that have pets about what you know about various things pertaining to what they should feed their dog.

And something I hear quite often are questions about protein. Should I be feeding my dog, a quote, high protein diet? How much protein do I want to feed my dog? Is it important that my dog has a certain amount of protein and in my eyes it's one of the most like issues surrounding protein intake is like as basically as important a nutritional issue, as you can think of certainly more important than things like, oh, is it fresh or not? Or, is it natural or not? Like in terms of stuff where there's very high quality, very well established, scientific evidence that it's going to impact your dog's health. Like protein is a super important though. I agree. And I think like the number one question out there, which by the way, we will have visuals throughout this and we have like this really great visual to kind of kick off things is why is protein important? So we kind of have this visual up here, we'll have it in the show notes, linking everything. And if you need any references, but it's really walk us through it. Like, what are the top three? Yeah. Basically these are the three things that, make up the bulk of the benefit of like why, you know, there are some in the world of nutrients, you've got some stuff that is absolutely vital. There's like some kinds of nutrients that if your dog, or if it, you know, as the case may be, you don't take them in, in sufficient quantities, you're going to develop some kind of deficiency disease. And so the thing I always tell people to think of when I've described that phenomenon is like I, when I was a child, my mother would talk about scurvy, have you don't eat enough citrus, you're going to get, or vitamin C, you're going to get scurvy, which is this weird, random disease that like old timey sailors used to get when they were on boats for like half a year. And they'd never got any vitamin soon as they bred every day. And that was it. They'd get this disease scurvy or like, you know, you can think of any number of things where you just like, don't get enough of one specific thing for long enough, you get a disease and some nutrients aren't like that. And the most notable one for dogs is, and for people is carbohydrate, dietary carbohydrate. It's a kind of nutrient food products are made up of it. If your dog eats it, it gets digested and does things in the body. But it is not an essential nutrient in the sense that if you stop feeding that to your dog altogether, and your dog takes a zero carbohydrate, it's not going to develop any kind of deficiency disease. And that's why like all the regulations that involve like these big elaborate nutrition profile, if you want to sell dog food in the U S got to meet this big elaborate nutrition profile, and it's got minimum required contents for all these things, including protein, but not carbohydrate, cause not essential, but protein obviously is essential and it's essential because it does any number of things in the dog's body. The one that everybody probably like already knows about is the idea of protein being like really important for muscle tissue. If you want to grow your muscles, you need, or your dog's muscles, you need to make sure that sufficient quantities of dietary protein are going in protein is little like building block of muscles. You don't take in sufficient protein. You will not gain muscle mass, no matter how, how much weightlifting you do, period. but then like just, just slightly off to the side of that is the issue of like maintaining muscle. It's not just about becoming a bodybuilder, having your dog become a bodybuilder. It's the fact that over time, if you don't take in enough protein and do enough activity, your dog's muscles will begin to waste away over time. As they get older, that that's a natural process. It's called sarcopenia. And it's basically like this age-related muscle wasting. And you see it's why, like when you think of your grandmother, think of like a fragile, frail person, as opposed to a muscle bound person, because as you get older and older, it goes, the sarcopenia like accelerates more and more. And so it applies for your dog as well. And it starts taking place in mid-life. And so, you know, like I'm a 40 year old man, like it's taking place in my body. Like I need to lift weights and take in protein or else I, every year I'm going to lose more and more muscle. And so the same thing applies to your dog. Your dog needs protein to build and to maintain muscle mass. And I think that emotional level to this is quality of life too. It's like, yes, the building blocks, but it's you want a long and healthy life for your dog. Absolutely. Like think of the things that your dog likes to do most in the world. When is it most happy? I would wager that many of the, for many of us top three all include some form of physical activity. Whether it's going for a walk, whether it's playing fetch games or tug games, some kind of physical activity. And obviously all that is powered by muscle mass. Like that's not something that you can do, like your grandmother does it run marathons for that same reason. And so, yeah, it's very, very much tied to quality of life. okay. Second one is really similar to the first. there are a whole bunch, you know, obviously skeletal muscles are not the only organ in the body. There are all kinds of other vital organs that do all kinds of other important things. And they are to a huge degree composed built up of protein. And in order to like, basically at any given point in your body or in your dog's body, there's constantly turnover like cells die and new cells are created. And basically like, what's what it's called. Protein turnover, the proteins that make up things like your dog's stomach or pancreas or any other of these like internal vital organs are made up of proteins that are constantly degrading over time. And so in order to keep that stuff maintained in order to keep it healthy, you have to take your dog has to take in enough protein to replace what's being degraded naturally. Otherwise you start to develop dysfunction over time. It's why you have decreased function as animals tend to get older. so it's, it's like the same concept is like maintenance of muscle tissue, but it's just a reminder that like muscles, not the only organ, there are all kinds of other important vital things that similarly lose functionality. If you don't get it, if your dog doesn't take in enough protein. And then the last one is this weird kind of like, you know, these are weird words that not everybody's familiar with necessarily gluconeogenesis. What that is, is basically the process by which your dog makes carbohydrate in its own body. So your dog doesn't have a dietary requirement for carbohydrate, but it does use carbohydrate for some things in its body. The reason there's not a dietary requirement is because one of the things that your dog's body can do naturally is turn protein into glucose, into carbohydrates so that it can use it for brain things and a couple other vital functions. Yeah. All of these nutrients go through a long journey within the body. They get converted into all kinds of different things. And so this process is basically the primary way that a dog that doesn't take in carbohydrate from its diet is making glucose within its body. It's making it from protein. And so like, it's kinda tied to these other, like the issues of like maintenance of tissue, because those proteins that make up those tissues are very much going to be used for this process. It's like one of the ways that like one of the reasons you have degradation and so you need more coming in in order to kind of make up for that. So three very important things that, yeah, exactly very much like vital central to health. And they're why protein is an essential nutrient for your dog. You cannot sell dog food in the United States unless it contains a certain amount of protein because the science shows that if they take in any less than that, you're going to get a deficiency disease. Yeah. It's it absolutely is important. And I know like when I first started having dogs, I know that that was always top of mind of like making sure, cause like to me as a non-scientist I was like, protein is energy. And like I knew it was important. I didn't have all the exact facts and science and all of the backup, but it's just, I think it's a well known, so Yeah, it's intuitive enough. I think, you know, we, we obviously talk a lot about carbohydrate stuff and macro nutrient intake for dogs and different people in my experience have different levels of understanding of what the science says about that stuff. But just about everybody on some level has this like intuitive dog is pretty much Wolf. Wolf is pretty much meat. Only meat is pretty much protein. So there's this like yeah. Clearly my dog needs some L like is, it's very natural for my dog taking a lot of that, but it's like fleshing out the details of all that. That's kind of like a little less, that's a little rarer among pet owners that, that, that kind of like detailed info. Yeah. I totally agree. And you know, it's, it's so fascinating. Like I remember standing in the dog food aisle and you flip around all these different packages and the numbers are all over the board. Like I just remember being so confused, like this one says, you know, 48% and this one says 20% and this one's, you know, canned is low and you're just so confused and there's no explanation in the package explaining anything. And so, right. That's what a big part of the reason why we're doing this episode is to try and give folks some clarity there, try to give you everyone. That's listening a way to like enough info that you've got, that you can approach that in a little bit of a more educated fashion, have a better sense of what you're reading on the label and what like what to make of it. I agree. And I remember, and we can dive into this next of you when we were kind of reviewing like all the different sub topics we can cover on today's episode of even there's difference between kibble and what, which I was like really. But it makes sense because we can kind of talk about like the dry matter, which is part of this. And it's an, a very important part of calculating everything and calculate protein. So like ultimately just give everybody that's listening, like a roadmap of where we're going to go is I've got to explain this threshold issue first, this issue of like what, when I see a percentage on the back of a bag of dog food that says, you know, 20% protein, what does that mean? Because there's some nuance to that and we'll, we'll cover that first to make sure we're all starting on the same page. And then we're going to talk about some different arguments for what would be considered the optimal amount of protein for your dog. How should you think about what is the exact right amount for my dog? And we're going to walk through a few different ways of thinking about that. And then at the end, we'll deal with the issue of, is there such a thing? What is high protein? What is too much protein? Is there such a thing as too much protein for a dog? And that'll be, hopefully that'll give everybody the tools they need to make good informed decisions. But yeah. So to start off with the, the issue of like, when you flip over a bag of dog food and you look at the percentage on the back, it's, it's just like, it's not intuitive. And it's confusing basically what you see reported on the bag. When you see a percentage number next to what's what's those crude protein. What that is, is a reflection of the amount of protein in the product as you're feeding it to your dog. So that what that means is like inclusive of any water that's in the product. That's kind of the big distinction. There's, there's some tube primary ways to think about if you're, if we're just reporting, what percentage by weight of the food is one nutrient or another protein or fat or carbohydrate, the two ways you can do it are either what's called as fed, which is what you actually see on the label. And it represents you take this product out of its packaging, whether it's a can, whether it's a bowl of kibble and you feed it to your dog this way, without altering it, this percentage of the way to the food that your dog is going to eat is protein. Okay. The other way. And the way that it's more, it's it's makes for easier comparisons between products is what's called dry matter percentage and dry matter percentages. Basically what percentage of this product is protein. If we take out all the water water in pet food is a huge variable, depending on what style of food you feed. If you feed kibble, they're basically all somewhere like eight to 12% water, they're very, you know, it's made by essentially drying out the product and making it shelf stable. So it's very little water. So in the case of kibble, the, as fed protein percentage, what you see on the bag is pretty close to the dry matter percentage because most of the product is dry matter. There's only a small amount of water, 10% or something like that. But if you don't feed a kibble product, if you feed something, that's either canned or raw or fresh, then in that case, you can have, I mean, the moisture content is like much higher, not just marginally. So, but like in wet products, it's very typical to be 70% or more water. So w you know, what that means is that like, if half of the actual dry matter half of the food product in there is protein. So half of every cow of all the food in there is protein. That's still going to show up on the label as only 15% protein as fat, because 70% of the product is water. So only 30% of it is food. And half of that is 15%. So you can have two products that are where the macronutrient content is exactly the same, but if one is canned and the other is kibble, you're going to see super different numbers on the back of the bat. Because half of, you know, a product that's only 10% water is going to have. One is going to be like 40% protein or something like that. Whereas half of a product that's 70% water is only going to save 15% on the label. And did G make a slide that has a good, Is you can show people who are watching it on video, so you can see what I'm talking about. this just gives kind of an example of the two different styles of food are Katonah kibble products, and this blue Buffalo canned product. And you can see Don't much sense by the way, because I never really thought of, does the kibble, which is very dry. It's like comparing like crackers to bread pudding because The Content is so vastly different, but yeah, absolutely. Especially Usually different it's hugely different. And so like, in order to get the same number of calories in, if you have two products, like I said before, they're made up of exactly the same nutrients, but one is canned and has a ton of water in it. And the other is kibble and has very little, the total amount, like the weight of the total food that your dog is going to take in. If you're feeding a canned product can be way heavier, right? Because you have tons of water that the is taking in as well. Whereas kibble, it's going to be much less by weight food, because there's just much less water in there to make up the difference. So anyway, those are the two main, like, that's, that's the important distinction to grasp when you're talking about looking at the back of a label, just remember it's the as fed percentage. So if you're trying to determine which of two products has more protein in it, you can't just look at the percentage, the number that's reported. You can see in this case, for instance, the blue Buffalo product, the number is only 8.5% to ketone a product. The number is 46%. It's like, okay, this obvious this, what does this have eight or six times more protein product? No, it doesn't. It has a lot more for the record, but it's not six times more because there's this difference between, you know, as fed and dry matter. And so what you need to do is basically such the moisture has to be reported as well. So like, you'll see right next to where you see the amount of protein in there, you'll see the amount of moisture in there. It's hard to tell on this graphic, but yes, there is a literally says moisture. So that's really good. Yeah. Like I know you can see on the ketone a product that's 10% on the blue Buffalo product. It's 70 what? 78%. And so what you're doing is in the case of blue Buffalo, you take that out, right? And so what remains is 22% of the weight of the product take out the 78% moisture and it's 22%. And so the fraction of the food product that's w that's protein is 8.5, which is what's on the label divided by 22, which is the total amount of food, total amount of dry matter. And in the case of Katonah, it's similar, it's the exact same process, but just different kinds of numbers, right? You take out the 10% of the product that's moisture, and you divide the reported 46% by the remaining 90%, 90% of the thing. That's not water. And it's just food just dry matter. So that's how you get between as fed and dry matter and ensure that you're comparing apples to apples when you're comparing two different food products. I wish they had that formula like right on the label, you know, when you walk through it and this school, my sons yeah. Take it. Yeah. It's one of a million. We will surely do a show at some point where we just compare common sense with reality in the world of pet food, labeling regulations. Cause it's just maddening. It's like, like this is not how I always, I just like to point out, like you hear all the time that these days people treat pets like family. I certainly do. I know you certainly do. And basically everybody does the vast majority of pet owners in the us do. And so you're making nutritional decisions for them. They require different nutrients, but your process of thinking about it, what kind of food do I want to feed? And why is basically the same as when you're thinking about what to feed your family, but the, the way that like food is labeled for our consumption, when we're asked to make decisions for ourselves about what to eat is pretty good. It's pretty common sensical. It allows, it gives you the information that most people are going to rely on and making decisions. Whereas in the pet food world, it's just like, it's Greek. It's like, all of it is requires some weird translation like this, and it's just nonsense. So yeah, we could devote a whole show, a whole show to that. Yeah. I think that would be a fascinating topic. Yeah. There's a million that we could do to be a long show. They aren't changing. If anybody's listening to this, that wants to keep up with the exciting world of pet food, labeling regulation, they're changing in a way that is getting better for sure. And it looks a lot more like the FDA nutrition facts that are on food, human use food products, but it's still a couple of years down the road. The process takes a while to like come into being. So we've been, we've been through like the, as fed. So like that's the crude protein right on the label. And we've talked through the dry matter percentage. And so kind of like, let's get into this other number, this other percentage down here at the bottom between the dry food and the wet food of this percentage of, you know, energy calories of like, how do we get there? How do we talk, talking about math and formula? Yup. So just for everybody that is already sick of all the math we've done in this show, and I promise this is basically the last math part one more way, where he needs to think about the percentage of protein in the product besides AskPat and dry matter when you're shopping. And you're just looking at different products and trying to figure out what's the best fit for your dog. All you need to know is as fed and dry matter and how to work between the two of them, what the two concepts mean. But what we're about to do is go into what the science says about what's optimal for dogs. And in those cases, in those studies that have like fleshed that out, that looked into that issue. Typically the way that the diets are analyzed is what percentage of the energy or the calories in the food that the animal is eating is protein. And the reason that, that, that number's not going to be the same as the, as fed percentage that's protein or the dry matter percentage that's protein. And the reason for that is that different nutrients contain different amounts of calories. So people who have paid attention to kind of nutritional science for themselves know like fat has more calories per gram than protein. Typically the numbers, the rough numbers are like, you're going to digest 8.5 calories per gram of fat. If you add for every gram of fat that you eat 8.5 calories worth of fat come out. Whereas in protein it's like 3.5 has fewer calories per gram. So if you're just comparing the weight of the product, if you're looking at the percentage of the product, that's protein by weight, it ends up being kind of misleading. When you're thinking about when we're like trying to analyze what's optimal, basically like just the convention that most of the scientists have adhered to is looking at what percentage of the products, calories come from protein. And so these different studies that have looked at like, what is the right amount of protein to feed a dog typically are framed in those terms? What percentage of the calories? So again, it's not something that like, you need to know when you're shopping, but it's understand it for the purposes of our discussion today. Cause that's kind of like how the, all the relevant data got reported basically. Right? And that's where we kind of go into the studies and how much, you know, that is a crucial, crucial number and formula, but right. It's not most everyday person who's comparing brand versus brand B will need to know it, but it's very, very important in terms of the other topics that we'll get into. Yup. For following along with what I'm about to go into, it's like, that's, that's the, the, the, way that we're going to be comparing is what percentage of the diet is protein by calories. Yeah, exactly. there are, you know, they're, they're generally speaking, there are three ways that, or they're kind of like three different numbers that I encourage folks to focus on. When they're thinking for themselves about how much protein they ought to feed a dog. I would love it. If the answer to this question, how much protein should I feed my dog was something where I could say, it's this number. And that's the answer do that. But the reality is just, it's not like that, that there's different ways to think about this and the three different ways to think about it all produce different numbers. And so I'll walk through those three different things and folks can take, and I'll explain how I think about it and folks can choose for themselves what they, how they see it. so one of the most important ways to think about one of the most intuitive ways to think about like how much protein should a dog eat is how much protein. If you gave a dog a real authentic choice, you gave it the all you can eat buffet of different kinds of nutrients, and you just said, eat whatever you want. How much of their diet would be protein. If you were to do that, if you could somehow set up an environment where your dog had access to fat, carbohydrate, protein, and all kinds of different quantities, and then you watched it over time, how much protein would it eat? And the reality is that scientists have done that. They've done that experiment. They've done it multiple times where they basically create a kind of food set up that has variability baked into it. And then they watch over time. How much of each of the different, like little buckets of food the dogs take in and they can draw out averages based on that. And if I remember correctly, that's like free feeding or self. Yeah. That's typically the way that it's done is they just like, they let the dog choose for themselves. It's, self-selection free feeding studies and they set up enough different kinds of food and different amounts of new nutrition in each one that you can drive some patterns based on when you watch, like what the dogs eat. and when that has been done, what is typically seen is just under 50% of the calories that the dogs want to eat is protein. The number that comes out of the kind of leading study is 44%. I'm going to give it for anybody. That's watching this on video. I'm a, my, one of my hobbies is rock climbing. And when you rock climb, you injure your fingers a lot because you're putting a lot of pressure on it. And I have this weird damaged finger that I'd have surgery, Including like broken, damaged. Yeah. That claw is what you're going to get. So don't let it distract you. The number is 44% number that came out of the leading study. That if you give dogs the chance to choose for themselves, they're going to take in about 44% of their calories from protein point. Number one Point number two. like we mentioned before, dogs and wolves, very similar animals, 98% genetic overlap. So their mitochondrial DNA is exactly the same for 98%. They're so similar that they can breed with one another, which is like it most, a lot of biologists. If you just ask them, how do I tell, like, what's the difference between one species and another, the way they define it is they say, well, two different species, can't breed with one another, you know, like, a blue whale and a polar bear can't breed and make an actual offspring or different species. It doesn't work like that. Dogs and wolves are two different species, but they're so similar that they can interbreed with one another. And I don't know if they're the only two species in the world where that's the case. I'm sure there are like weird microbials that can do stuff like that. But generally speaking, it's incredibly rare. And so that it gives you a sense of how some are they are. And the last thing shows us some are they are, is that like they had, if you look back in their history, genetically their evolution as canine species has taken more than a hundred million years, a hundred million units, like whatever, 10 million generations and for all 99.9, 9% of that, they were exactly the same species. They split off just in the past 10,000 years. Okay. So for the vast majority of the time they were doing exact, they were one in the same. all of which means it's really relevant to understand wolves in the wild people. Aren't making decisions about what to feed them, right? They're out there eating whatever is most natural for them to eat, given their lifestyle, given their environment, given their biology. And plenty of scientists have looked at basically what do wolves tend to eat? And they've thought about it in terms of like, nutrient percentages, just like we've we get when we look at self-selection studies in dogs and when that is done, the typical, the most common answer, the way that the kind of the, the black letter like dogma of the science of just like reading a textbook, is that just over 50% of the calories that wolves take in tend to come from protein number that you've seen most commonly is 52%, 52% of calories. So really similar to what if you, you know, left to their own devices, wolves will take in to what dogs will take in just right around that half. Their total number of calories point is what they tend to take in. And like we said before, it makes all the sense in the world about wolves, right? Because we know like wolves are carnivores. They eat in my book. I lived with the folks from the Yellowstone Wolf project for a period of time. And you hear them talk about the ecology of wolves, diet of wolves. And it is with almost no exception, all meat, they take down big game and Yellowstone, at least they take down these things, ungulates things like elk. and that stuff is obviously made up of protein and fat to the two less significant degree. So just over half the calories that wolves tend to eat, come from protein as well. So first two ways to think about the amount of protein that a dog should eat. One, if you give them, leave them to their own devices, I'm going to take in just under half of their calories from protein. Number two is if you look in their genetic history, what's most natural given the course of their development for hundreds of mil, for, excuse me, tens of millions of years, they've taken in the diet of the same diet that a Wolf eats, which is just about, again, half of the calories from protein, Right? Third thing, third way to think about what's optimal amount of protein for your dog is the number that the regulatory body in the United States says that the percentage of a product calories, pet food products, calories that the regulators say has to be protein if you want to sell it in the United States. So like I said before, there are bodies that regulate the sale, pet food in the U S you can't just come out there and start selling something, made up of whatever nutritional content you want and tell consumers, this is the best stuff ever. You've got to demonstrate in some ways that it contains a certain nutritional content, but because science knows that if you don't give a dog that, that something that meets that nutritional profile, that it's going to get a deficiency disease. And so in the you, and that's very much the case with protein enough, science has been done to understand that if your dog takes in less than 16% of its calories from protein, it's going to start it's at the risk of developing deficiency diseases. And in this, in the case of protein, unlike vitamin C, developing, leading to the development of scurvy in protein, you're talking about like literal starvation. You're talking about malnutrition where it doesn't get enough protein to do the three things that we talked about at the beginning. And what that means is like, basically you're talking about breakdown of vital tissues. You have these tissues that are cycling out of the proteins of which they're made up all the time, 24 hours a day in your dog's body. And if you don't give it at least 16% protein in its diet, you're not going to be replenishing that stuff. And you're going to experience that your dog will see that as muscle wasting, like, you'll see over time, if you don't give your dog 16% protein, you will lose muscle mass. That's, that's a well demonstrated thing. I wish that everyone knew that number, by the way, like, just know it, The fact that, you know, in this case, we're trying to compare apples to apples here, right? And so we're talking about percentage of the pro like percentage of calories. So 16% is the percentage of calories that the regulators say, if you don't give your dog that much, it's going to, the science says it's going to start to develop a deficiency disease. And so what that means is that that's also the line that they say a pet food has to contain that much. Basically you got to clear that 16% of calories threshold, if you want to sell pet food in the United States. now the difficulty though, is that it doesn't mean just flip over the bag and look for, see the number 16 or more next to the protein. Like if there's, if you're buying it in the store, you can rest assured it contains at least 16% of calories from protein, because it's illegal to do it otherwise. but the, the issue is if you're trying to find out exactly how much protein is in there, and you just look at the percentage, that's going to be a reflection, like we said before of the, as fed by weight percentage. And so it's not like you're like looking for 16 or 44 or 52 there, but basically again, this is just like a rubric consent thing. Like we're all we're talking about now is like concept, like what the science shows. Science shows that if you feed a dog less than 16% of its calories from protein, it's a, it's going to develop deficiency, disease studies show that wolves typically take in 52% of their calories from protein and studies show that dogs, if left to their own devices will take in 44% of their calories from protein. And, in case you need to take that home, I think we have another slide, right? That's like the compares all three of those and shows. Cause it gives you a sense of like, this is a PR it's a big difference, right? That gap between what is needed in order to avoid deficiency disease. And what is common if left to their own devices is big. You can see it represented here. Like this is Almost looks like three times. Yeah, Exactly. That's right. and yeah, you can see what we drew on the line there. Like if you, to, to demonstrate the difference between these three different, like ways of thinking about percentage, you know, key Tona, our chicken recipe. If you look at the back of the bag, it's guaranteed protein content is 46% as fed, which works out to 40%, 42%, excuse me, of the calories and the products you can see. It's like, it has to go through that conversion process. so there are kind of implications here, right? It's like, this is, these are three things that we know for sure that the science demonstrates to good effect. and so when thinking about, okay, well, w well, which one of these do I want to strive for, for my dog? You've got to think about what to you you're aiming to accomplish. I mean, in any of these cases, you can feel good. You're not going to starve your dog as long as you're giving it more than 16% of its calories from protein, but then the issue is, do you actually want to feed it more to help ensure other health outcomes stuff? That's not just about acute deficiency where it's immediately going to begin going into some kind of degradation process, but like over long term, do these things tend to decrease chronic disease risk and make my dot, like improve my dog's, what they call health span, like the period of time, the amount of time in its life, where it's doing healthy things. and so for me, the, by far the more compelling, rather than just trying to feed my dog something where I just barely clear the hurdle of the amount that's needed to keep it out of starvation. I think you're being much more sensible trying to feed it something, a percentage that is a consistent with its evolutionary heritage and be consistent with its natural instincts, which are both to consume about half of its calories from protein. however, when I tell people that sometimes people will say, well, wait a second. Isn't that is that I'm worried about giving my dog too much protein. I, I was going to jump in and say, is that well, where do we stand of you do see not just high protein on labels, but there is kind of an something floating out there in the industry. And I have heard it of, I don't want to get my dog too much protein. Yup. Yeah. So basically, and, and this is worth noting for every that's listening here, or I guess watching on video in the show notes, you'll be able to find links to the studies that demonstrate the three points that we've already gone into about like what the different percentages are for different kinds of experiments. you'll also see links to the studies that I'm about to describe, the, the deal with the issue of is there such a thing as too much protein for a dog? the answer in short is there is not in any practical sense, a way to feed your dog too much protein. It is conceptually possible, but the number is absolutely massive. And so the reason that it's conceptually possible is that protein is not the only essential nutrient for a dog. They have to take in all kinds of different vitamins to some degree, to avoid deficiency disease. They also have to take in a certain amount of fat on a regular basis in order to prevent the development of other deficiency diseases. And the only way you can feed your dog too much protein is if you feed it so much that it's not getting the amount of fat that it needs. And what that means is basically if you go above like 80% of the diet being protein. And so you're talking about like lean chicken, breast, only tire diet, like something like that could run the risk of having your dog develop a deficiency disease from not getting enough fat, but otherwise the amount of fat that's required, doesn't come into play. If you're talking about feeding your dog, something like is natural for a Wolf, or is common. If dogs are left to their own devices, something like 50% of the calories from protein that doesn't run up against that, that concern about the amount of fats in the product at all. But that's not even like when you talk to folks who have a, a little bit of an idea, they've heard something triggers something. When they think about too much protein, what you tend to hear instead is people will say, well, isn't it true that too much protein can damage my dog's kidneys. That's kind of the thing kidneys are involved in protein metabolism. And th you know, as they're, they're basically involved in, in processing proteins that comes in. And so at one point in the development of nutritional science folks in the veterinary domain believed that, well, if I've got a dog that has kidney problems, that has some kind of renal disease, renal is like kid. If I've got a dog with renal disease, I don't want to give it very much protein mix. It's a good theory. It's a good idea. I don't want to give it. We probably shouldn't give it much protein cause we don't want to tax that organ. That's not functioning so well in the first place, which is a pretty plausible sounding theory, pretty reasonable sounding theory. And it has become a source of like dogma in the veterinary nutrition community, where folks will say, if your dog has kidney disease, you have to cut back on the amount of protein, because kidneys are used to process the protein and you don't want to tax that organ, but it's even been extended even further than that. Where some people say have developed the notion that my dog's kidneys are perfectly healthy, but I want to make sure they stay that way. So I don't want to feed it to, I don't want to feed it a high protein diet because it's going to tax those kidneys is going to lead to kidney disease over the term. The reality, and it's been documented like very thoroughly is that neither of those theories hold water. Those are nutritional myths that continue to persist it to some degree or another in the conventional wisdom. But they've been tested experimentally numerous times. And there is absolutely no basis for them. And you can read there's this fantastic. It's not an actual study, but it's a, it's a piece that was published in the, in an academic journal that describes all the studies that have been done. It's what's called like, it's not really a meta analysis, but it's just like an evidence review. Somebody that this vet who used to, I believe the guy's passed away now, but a guy from the university of Pennsylvania wrote up an entire paper on, is this fact, or is this nutritional myth and is vehement that what the answer is is it's nutritional myth. And he traces like where the theory came from, from studies on rats and how it made sense to test that theory. It sounds kind of plausible, but then it was tested very well tested and does not hold water. And like I said, the link is in the show notes, you can read it for yourself and you can see I'm not exaggerating the like language that the guy uses is like completely unequivocal. That's great. I, as a non-scientific person, that sounds like something to just read through. And the comparison of is this effect and tracing it back. It's largely not technical language. Like if it, if you're just kind of like, yeah, exactly. and there's not much math, so that's good too, but it's when you start, you know, the, the, the idea that, okay, kidneys equal protein processing, lot of protein pride puts tax on the kidneys. They might not be able to handle it. That does sound like a reasonable, plausible theory. That's worth testing. But when you take a step back and you go, wait a second, these animals, if a left, they've developed an instinct, it's taken half of their calories from protein. And we know that for 99.9% of their evolutionary heritage, they took in about 50% of their calories from protein. The idea that giving your dog that much is going to damage its kidneys kind of starts to, then it feels like less plausible theory, right? You know, you could see why that wouldn't be something that would make sense. Why would an animal develop instincts to take this stuff in? Why would it do that in its natural environment? And yet that contributes to the development of kidney disease in a real way. It kind of doesn't make sense when you think about it in that kind of way. So anyway, that's the issue, date is possible to summarize is possible to feed your dog so much protein that it's going to be bad for its health. It is incredibly unlikely in practice. You have to feed it 80% of its calories from protein, something like that. I can be done with just a normal feeding schedule. Like, okay, Think you can buy no pet food, no pet food that you can buy in any store in the country is going to be 80% protein. And where that gets us is kind of to the last point before we just try to summarize everything, which is that, what, okay. We know that we know based on what we've talked about today, what the percentage of like protein calories tends to be. We know that what's reported on the bag is not percentage of calories. It's this as fed percentage and working from that. So the percentage of calories involves math and it's hard. And who knows? What if I just look for, if I'm hearing you correctly, Dan it's like the amount of protein that has to be in there is pretty low. And the amount that a dog will tend to take in on it left to its own devices like three times as much. So maybe I should just go look for, what's called a hotline, high protein diet. If I see on the bag high protein, and it's got a Wolf on the bag and it's got an image of, something that could like a steak or a hamburger, a chicken weighing, something that contains, we all know contains a lot of protein. I'm just going to defer to that. It Has to be right, right. It has to happen. Unfortunately it's not. because the, like the, the standard, the minimum is so low that you could feed twice as much of them as the minimum, and still be closer to the minimum than the average amount that a dog would take in if left to its own devices and be one of the highest protein pet foods on the market today. Like th th the amount that's often put in there is so low that like stuff that is marketed as high protein, there's not an official, it has to contain this many calories to be high protein, but it's, it's just kind of a common sense, like tests that the brands tend to use. Like I said, you can do twice as much as is required and still be, not even close to what is typical in an, in a wild environment. And so just relying on something that's, oh, this is a high protein diet. All that means is that it's somewhat higher than the, like very minimum that is going to keep your dog from immediately beginning to develop a disease. So I do not think of that as being a particularly helpful heuristic. I know that's like kind of a $10 word, but touristic means like a simple, like a way to reduce, the whole weird body of evidence that should be involved in making a decision into a couple of really clear steps. Like what's a good way to approximate all that stuff in a way that I can actually put to use. So I'm in the store. I'm not going to bring my calculator or I'm just, and so some people will just go, my heuristic is I'm going to look for a high protein diet and feed that I would say, that's not as good an idea as what you really should do is if you're going to feed a commercial product that you can buy at the store. And then when you flip it over, it's got a nutrition facts panel on the back of it. You want to feed the high IST protein product that you can find if you want to do what's most natural for adult in both the sense that it would eat it. If it's left to its own devices. And in the sense that it's, what's, it's eaten throughout its entire genetic history, what you should essentially be doing is looking for the highest protein product you can buy in a store, even then, it's not going to be as high as those two, like good barometers of what measure, good health. It's not going to be 52% of calories. It's going to be somewhat less than that. Keep our product Katonah is about a tie. I'm not, you know, there's hundreds and hundreds of pet food products. I'm not a hundred percent sure that we're the highest we're up there. And ours is like you showed on the graphic before is only 42% of the calories coming from protein. There ain't much that you can find that's higher than that, but if you can, God bless you. If that's the most important issue, that's a good choice for you. but I guess that's just what I'm trying to emphasize is that you're not going to find there's zero risk of finding something that contains so much protein that it's going to jeopardize your dog's health. There's no evidence that such a product is being sold in the United States today. Period, full stop. That's not a thing. So really the best heuristic that I would encourage people to use is look for the highest number. You can find feed the highest number you can find that's being sold in a commercial product. If you want to feed your dog, the healthiest amount of protein, that's basically basically what you should do. And that's really good advice to just of flip, not really getting sold on the front panel. Cause I feel that is all the unregulated call-outs marketing language, right? The Wolf running across the field, that's all fine. And well, that's the branding establishment. You look for certain brands, but flipping it over, diving into table. That's going to tell you more, if it's high, low, medium, like you said, it's never going to get to that 40 for the 50%. Like it's never going to get there, but to at least look for the numbers, like numbers will tell the story versus anything else that's on that front part of the package, whether it can Absolutely right. It's like ignore letters, letters, meaningless, look at the number, you know, like other than the crew protein lettering, but like any narrative, like language narrative that's on there, like the evolutionary and ancestral and Nash, all that stuff. You can just ignore that because like, there is, it is very wishy-washy and it's very easy to bend the rules there. And trust me when I tell you that folks are out there bending the rules every day. But if you look at the numbers, then you can make that decision in a way that, that, that holds water. It's a great point. The only thing to remember is what we talked about at the beginning of this talk, which is that what you see on the back is the dry matter percentage not, or excuse me, ah, I screwed it up the ass bed percentage. Sorry, not the dry matter percentage. So what that means is that if you're looking at a fresh, raw product, those numbers are gone, the percentage of protein is going to look low and you've got to make sure you go through that, that exercise of subtracting out the moisture and looking at what percentage of what remains is protein. If you're trying, if you say like, I think you should, I'm going to feed the highest protein product that I can find for my job when you're looking at don't just look for the biggest number on the back. You have to do that one step of subtracting out the moisture and then looking at what percentage of what remains is protein. And you want to max out that number, but you're totally right. Ignore the Lang that's that stuff about language is meaningless. It's just meaningless. Great learn, learn lots. Cause I remember just being, so I used the word confused, but it really kind of gets to the point of being overwhelming, especially when you're searching for new food, you're comparing food and you know, back in the day when like it wasn't a subscription that was delivered to your door. I mean, you're just staring in the food aisle of like, where do I go, Piles and Isles of food Isles and rows and rows. So this is really, really good. Take home of, you know, one there's, there's no evidence of too much protein, so there's nothing you can grab off that row in the grocery store, take it home, feed your dog. And he's going to have, like you said, affects to the kidneys, affect other organs. There's no evidence anywhere. He would have to be truly, truly intentional of trying to get too much protein into your dog. But You know what I mean, Chicken breast. I don't think anyone's kind of doing a bodybuilder diet with their dog anytime soon, but Yeah, I'm not, but I th you might be surprised if you dabble in the like recreational dog sports communities, some of them involve a strength. There are some people that get are just very invested in making the dog as muscular as possible. It's strange to me, but I have St Bernard's and they're just like, naturally, they want to get so big and muscular. Anyway, they're so strong that it's just like, I'm not too concerned about it. Yeah. I'm on the opposite. I don't affect A little nine pounders. Yeah. Different, different world. But yeah, it's, I do just love this conversation because it's just really educational, just dialing it down to the black and white of flipping it over that flipping over your package, looking at the true numbers of taking that home. And it just, it's not that everyone's going to do math at the store or online when they're shopping, but it is very important to just kind of understand how do we arrive at these numbers and for those scientific minded people that want to read all the studies that want to dive into the science, like you said, we're going to link everything. So it's not mentioning things. You can look at the studies yourself and truly understand the free feeding and how they got to certain levels. And, I remember even there were like some studies where maybe the protein consumption was a little lower for the feet, the free feeding, but over several days it did get up and it's really instinctually balanced to that same number over and over. That was very similar to what Wolf's consume in the vile. So, yeah, it's crazy scientific. I mean, I, again, I'm, I'm like the creative person. I don't read, you know, scientific journals for fun, but you do. And thank you for dedicating all this time years, literally writing the book and your book of course will go many, many different topics. And I think that's a good call out to have, if, if you're looking to read more in this same topic, but other topics in terms of like dog nutrition, dog stock food, and Dom dogma is your book available on Amazon, all the standard channels. And it's just a really good go-to insight of literally you spent what, four years writing that book. And Again has references in there too. So we're here to highlight these really good studies, really good facts and stats of how much protein should I feed my dog. So this was great. We, I want to make one note before we just like boogie and close this out. If it is, you, you might listen to this and say, I think this guy's wrong. And here's why I've got a, I've got a, explanation based on evidence as a S a counterargument that's grounded in evidence. That's not something that's grounded in something like somebody that I trust told me this but is here's the explanation. You said this about this study, but in reality, it's, it's why, if you have something like that, whether you're listening to this as a veterinarian, maybe one of your clients, maybe you gave your client advice on protein. That's inconsistent with all the stuff I just said, and you listen to all this and you say, this guy is wrong and you want to bring it up for us. Do that there, wherever this is posted, whether it's a podcast format or video format, you can find me directly on the internet in any number of places, make that point to us because big part of what we're going to be aiming to do on the show is addressing counter-arguments. I believe wholeheartedly from where I sit right now and having done a great deal of professional work in this space that, that everything I've told you is on the money. If you think I'm wrong, come talk about it with us use professional language, don't be, you know, don't be an internet troll and make sure that you're talking about evidence and not just talking about, somebody told me this, or I did my own internet re I Google that doesn't rise. So we're not going to address that. But if you highlight something, that's a study and you talk to us in professional language, I guarantee you that we will address your points on this show. We'll probably be aiming to do it in some kind of mailbag, like returning thing. That's really important. I agree, and I, this dog community, and especially just understanding, again, the facts like you said of not just, oh, I found this random article, but kind of bringing it forward in a professional way. It only improves the community in terms of education, through dialogue, like you said, please bring it. It will be developing, you know, sending an email or kind of contacting us of, you know, Hey, I want to criticize, or have a other point to something else or counterpoint to something that you said, please bring it. We would love to dive in it's In like scientific communities function. Well, to the extent that different people have differing opinions are willing to do that. There you have dysfunction in the community where somebody says something and I hear it. And I go, I disagree with that, but I'm not going to bring it up. We're not going to talk about it. I'm just going to go ahead and publish my work outside of the defense, what you end up having siloed off communities that are just talking in echo chambers, and there's no actual effort to get to the truth. And I think it's a huge problem generally in scientific communities, to the extent the you experience that. And unfortunately it is very present in the world of veterinary nutrition, veterinary, nutritional science is hugely subject to that notion where it's just people existing in their own silos or refusal to engage in meaningful dialogue. And so this is me making a plea that if you think this is compelling, bring it to your veterinarian and tell them, Hey, look, if you think this guy's wrong, go tell him, go tell him, we'll talk about it on the show. And you have, I'm proud to admit that I'm somebody that I proud to claim that I'm somebody that admits when he's wrong reasonably well, I think, Yeah, it's facts. It's just, it's all black and white. I think that's the most fascinating thing learning through all of this. And you bring this studies and kind of citing everything is it's right there. It's very black and white and it's been proven they've done the study. So I agreed. Dialogue is best. We're open to it. And this is how we're going to improve and iterate. And the show can kind of become what it will become. So this has been great. We covered so much, log has been very nice. Good to talk to you as always. Absolutely. So until next time, thanks everyone. And we will see you on the next episode. All right. Take care of.