.jpg)
The Raw Dog Food Truth
Pets with allergies, skin issues gut issues, and behavior issues can live better lives by eating a species-appropriate diet. Find out the dangers of kibble and cooked foods. Your Pet's Health Is Our Business "Friends Don't Let Friends Feed Kibble"
The Raw Dog Food Truth
Beyond the Bag: Uncovering the Real Cost of Convenience Pet Foods
What if everything you thought you knew about pet food was designed to sell products, not support health? DeDe Murcer Moffett and veterinarian Dr. Judy Jasek pull back the curtain on commercial pet food, revealing shocking truths about what's really in that bag of kibble.
Drawing from 25 years of raw feeding experience, they explain how the starches in corn-based kibble break down into sugars through enzymatic processes—essentially feeding your pet "cakes, cookies, and chemicals." The conversation takes a fascinating turn as they connect the dots between human health statistics and pet health outcomes. When 40% of children now have chronic diseases while consuming 70% processed foods, is it any surprise our pets suffer similar fates on processed diets?
The hosts break down problematic ingredients hiding in commercial pet foods: wood pulp masquerading as fiber, mysterious "animal digest," inflammatory seed oils, and synthetic vitamins that poorly substitute for real nutrition. They explore how environmental toxins compound these issues, with pets absorbing chemicals from treated lawns and parks through their paws.
What makes this episode particularly valuable is how it balances hard truths with practical solutions. Raw feeding doesn't require elaborate preparation—it can be as simple as defrosting some meat or providing appropriate raw meaty bones. Dogs are naturally equipped with teeth designed for tearing meat and crushing bones, able to process raw foods in ways their bodies simply can't with processed alternatives.
Ready to transform your pet's health? Visit rawdogfoodandcompany.com for a free consultation and discover why friends truly don't let friends feed kibble. Your pet's journey to optimal health starts with real food—because your pet's health is our business.
Raw Dog Food and Company where Your Pet's Health is Our Business and Friends Don't Let Friends Feed Kibble
Contact Us Today We Can Help Your Pets Live Happier Healthier Lives
Oh snap.
Speaker 2:Well, hello Raw Feeders. I'm Deedee Mercer-Moffitt, ceo of Raw Dog Food Company, where your pet's health is our business and we're friends, like my friend Dr Judy Jasik. Well, she doesn't let friends feed kibble. How are you, dr Jasik?
Speaker 1:Doing good, doing good, a little relocation out here in Tennessee. But you know that's life, it happens and it's rolling, rolling along, a little hectic. But you know what? I still wouldn't feed kibble. I don't know how hectic life gets.
Speaker 2:Even that's right.
Speaker 1:Or how busy. I get I mean I, I don't know pull some hamburger out of the freezer or something. I'd do anything, but I would not, you know, go to the store for a bag of kibble.
Speaker 2:Right, I wouldn't either. It's so funny I was thinking about this 25 years this year for me, not feeding kibble, not feeding cooked, not feeding, you know, feeding raw. And I remember back in the day, oh my gosh, 25 years ago, you know, we would get chicken backs. We would get these full beef livers and they were huge and we would put them in a blender and, oh my gosh, when you purify a liver, I mean there's so much of it, I don't know why we were purifying it. I think that eventually we figured out this was just silly, just chop it up. And you know we would do. I mean, I could just remember putting this stuff together.
Speaker 2:Ain't got time for that, right, ain't got no time for that. I will say that, you know, I look at the poop and do I need more bones? You know, do a raw meaty bone and you know our beef neck bones that we have, dr Jasek, they're big sliced up, they're big and Lazi. You know a medium sized German shepherd, right, she's 65 pounds. She can eat that raw meaty beef neck bone in about 20 minutes wow, that's pretty quick it's quick and, um, you know people are like oh my gosh, my dog's gonna choke.
Speaker 2:I'm just like. You know, have you looked in their mouth lately? It's just the weirdest thing how God created those teeth right, those sharp triangular teeth, and they, you know, they enjoy that.
Speaker 1:But anyway, yeah, and they can swallow bone and their body actually breaks it down. Now people get so worried. You know, as we talk about these little pieces of bone in the food, you know I mean I, I feed, feed, you know your blends to my cats and sometimes there'll be a little piece of bone left in the dish, just a little big. They don't want, but they eat bunny heads. I mean they kill baby bunnies and they bring them up on our deck to show us what they caught and then they sit out there, they just start at the nose and just eat the whole thing. They tend to leave the butts. They do not like to eat the back end.
Speaker 2:They don't like the sphincter.
Speaker 1:They don't like the little sphincter. We'll find little bunny butts.
Speaker 2:I wonder why? Why no sphincter? They don't want to eat poop. Oh, come on now I feed them too.
Speaker 1:I feed them too good. Is what the problem? Right, they probably eat more of what they kill if I wasn't feeding them. But they show up. They're outdoor cats and they mainly couldn't show up at the kitchen door in the morning, their sad little faces like they haven't eaten in three weeks, and I'm like what am I going to do? Not feed them, I mean, come on.
Speaker 1:Right Just give them their little portions of raw food and then they're on their way hunting. You know they're. Yeah, I'm very happy. You know I'm listening to this book. It's it's not a, it's not a new book. It's been around for a while. I've just never listened to it. It's the omnivore's dilemma by michael pollan. It's pretty well known in like food circles and like um, um, food and and and the agricultural industry.
Speaker 1:Joel soliton you know I follow him and he I saw an, a podcast of him and michael paul and that was I was like a couple years old, but it was really good and joel really, really, you know, commended him on his book and I'm like I've never listened to that. Anyway, he goes through the whole like process of what happens to corn, to corn that's raised and what corn turns into and and one of the things I mean you gotta be really interested in this because it's it's it's a lot of detail, but it is interesting to me because we talk all the time about how not to feed kibble. Corn is one of the huge ingredients in kibble and he actually talked about how they take corn and they break it down into all of these other substances. Even xanthan gum is actually I didn't know xanthan gum was from corn, but it is, and so you know it starts out as a starch, but they process it more and more and more and what breaks the starch down into sugar are enzymes. They actually use enzymes in industry to take that corn and break it down into fructose, high fructose corn syrup, but also maltodextrin and dextrose and all these oses that.
Speaker 1:You see it's all sugar, but even the corn itself. You know it was tell people that the starches break down into sugar and that's exactly what they do in industry. They use enzymes to break the starch into sugar. He even said and I've never done this, he said when he was a kid in school. He said they did a science experiment you could take a cracker and you chew it like long enough, like at some point it starts to taste sweet because the starch in the cracker breaks down into sugar. I thought that was interesting.
Speaker 1:Anyway, it just demonstrates what we say is you're basically feeding sugar, because I don't know and we say that all the time, but I don't know if people really realize that they really are feeding cakes, cookies and chemicals to the pet and it's so bad for them right.
Speaker 2:Right, I was looking at, like any of the perina you know, perina, pro plan, all this kind of stuff. But here here's the problem. Um, with any of those. One there's excessive carbohydrate content right, just like what you were saying, that excessive carbohydrate content causes gut imbalances right. And then they use wood pulp. Here's another thing. Wood pulp is a source of fiber. Instead of just putting in real fiber of food you know whether that's veggies or something along that line Then they add in the excessive synthetic vitamins and minerals instead of real food nutrition, and they use a lot of plant proteins instead of the meat protein. And not to mention, dr Jasik, inflammatory seed oils right. And then it's highly processed. And that process is what? One of the biggest things that causes so many problems in dogs. Then we're going to see a lot of natural flavors. There's MSG, there's animal digest rice. I mean, come on, people I don't know who thought that was a good idea to put that in dog food.
Speaker 1:I was listening to. This was another Joel Salatin podcast. Just this morning they were going over the latest Maha report Make America Healthy and. Unprocessed Foods and it said I wrote down some of their statistics. They said that like 70%. Well, first of all, in kids and children, 40% of children have some sort of chronic disease 40% and that's like what's reported. How many kids have like chronic stuff? That like doesn't end up in the statistics? I bet there's a lot, because it's normalized. It's just like in pets.
Speaker 1:I think people just get used to seeing pets that are inflamed and overweight and and that's sort of the new normal but, 70% of the food that they're eating is processed and that's that's why and a hundred years ago they said that there was like virtually no processed food and kids were not chronically ill. There was no out. You know people. You know like our age I mean a little older if, if you think back, you didn't know kids in school that had like allergies and stuff like that, like you didn't, you didn't see that stuff because they weren't eating all that, all that processed food. So this is actually coming out in the, in the maha.
Speaker 1:You know statistics for people. You know they're processing the same stuff. It's all the corn, it's, it's. I think it's all the same stuff, whether you're eating Doritos or Twinkies or Purina dry dog food, I think it's. It's just, it's just all the same stuff and it's having the effects in this. You know chronic illness, it's not the. You know people are like well, my dog's skin is itching. Well, it's all this chronic inflammation that's in their body and their body can't, can't process all these unhealthy foods and they're getting all these chemicals and all these sugars are inflammatory. You know it's this whole inflammatory cascade that's that's causing it. I just thought it was really interesting, the statistics, because it parallels what we see in pets. It's exactly the same thing.
Speaker 2:So when you go to a restaurant to eat, how, I mean, how processed is that food? Right, it looks like it's, you know, real food on a plate, but how processed is it really? Do we know?
Speaker 1:I mean it depends on what you get. But I mean I have heard that like, like say you went to like McDonald's and got got a burger. You kind of don't have any idea what's ground up in there. I think if you go and you get a steak, yeah, you know what a steak is.
Speaker 2:That is a steak.
Speaker 1:However, the sourcing. So this book I'm listening to um michael pollan. He actually, he actually goes to a farm and buys like a young steer and follows it through, um, it goes to the feedlot and kind of follows it through with that. You know what that process is like and he gets into how unhealthy eating all that corn. So they feed a lot of corn in the feedlots to cattle to make them fat. Basically, marbling is fat, you know. So you want marbling in your steak and that's fat. Basically, marbling is fat, you know. So you want marbling in your steak and that's fat. So basically they go there and they feed them all this corn just to make them fat.
Speaker 1:But it's not healthy. It causes all of these digestive issues. They don't digest. They're meant to eat grass, not corn, and so it makes them very acidotic, causes all these problems. The average feedlot animal couldn't live more than a year. I mean, literally what they're feeding them is killing them. They just slaughter them before they die, you know, on their own it's really pretty sad. So that you're eating that kind of beef. That it's a very. It has a very different constitution than even though it's not processed. It has a very different constitution than say you know a grass fed, grass finished beef but you know anything that's in a, let's say, breaded or you know any sauce. You don't know what kind of thickeners are they using what you know what's in the. You know any sauce. You don't know what kind of thickeners are they using. What you know what's in the. You know these different sauces or salad dressings or things like that.
Speaker 2:There's probably all kinds of you know processed stuff in there yeah, and even like garlic mashed potatoes that everybody loves to eat with their steaks, right? So, um, I don't know I what does he give? A solution like what the world's gonna be able to do, because you know they run farmers out of business, then they spray all the food with pesticides and herbicides. And why? Why does he talk about why this was all done? Obviously we understand the money aspect side of it. Is it because are they saying there's too many people? We don't have enough food for the world? What is? What is the? You know it's it's.
Speaker 1:It's interesting. So one part of the book. He goes to actually visit a farmer and the farmers are not making out good. I mean they are having, they're struggling. Matter of fact, this farmer he visited they were living off of his wife's income. She had an off-farm job and that's what they were living off of. And this farmer told them that most farmers are so far in debt. They go out and they buy all these fancy machines and then they're just subject to whatever the market price is. So the farmers are not making out well.
Speaker 1:Then there's like government subsidies, so they kind of survive on subsidies, like the government will pay them to grow certain things, but most of the corn they grow. It's not like you go to the grocery store and buy sweet corn, it's it's industry corn. It goes into high fructose corn syrup because that's where the money is, that's what the food industry wants. So I think I don't think the farmers are making out very well. But the processed food industry is because they buy this corn cheap and they process it and they put it into all these processed foods. And the medical industry makes out really well because it creates a lot of, you know, really sick people and I don't know when I get, I'm sure he'll talk about solutions.
Speaker 1:We're still talking about problems right I'm about a third of the way into the book, so probably at some point we'll get back to talking about um, talking about solutions, but it's it's really eyeopening, like what really happens. I I was watching another um show on you know how, how contaminated farmland is getting with all the pesticides and everything, some of them even to the point of being like super fun sites, like they're telling people people like are getting these. It's like the cancer rates are really huge in some of these big like farming areas and they are going to eventually tell people it's just too toxic for you to live here because they're spraying so much in the form of pesticides and herbicides. The ground itself is just getting so toxic. It's a big consideration here where we're looking, because a lot of areas in rural Tennessee that you know they split up farms. People sell off their farms and they split them up. Well, you got no idea what's in that ground. You know how it's been sprayed or there's no guarantee that somebody in the farmland next to you is going to spray.
Speaker 1:We went and looked at this one house and right next to with the land, they just put in some sort of row crop. We don't know what it was. I think maybe beans or something, but they're out out there spraying. It's going to, you know, come over into my garden. So you know, you, you have to be really careful. But the same chemicals are ending up in these dry foods too. That's the other thing. It's not just that the ingredients are bad, is that they are actually toxic, because these chemicals they spray it on these grains to dry them before they harvest them. So not only are the initial ingredients bad, but then there's all these chemicals. It's like no wonder our pets are sicker my dog keeps saying.
Speaker 2:She keeps coming over to my door in my office here and she's like let me in there you know, that's another reason, like when, uh, we won't live, and I know a lot of people love this, but we won't live on a golf course right or near a golf course because they're spraying, yeah, and, and I was talking to a guy whose wife and I can't remember what kind of cancer she had, but his daughters were super and are super active in golf, right, and they play golf all the time, they're in golf tournaments, all the time they live on a golf tournament, and I asked him this question because his wife passed away and I was talking to him and I said how do you, how do you feel about the pesticides?
Speaker 2:And he said, well, there's pesticides everywhere. And I was like, okay, you know, it was sort of like I, I, this is my life, my girls play golf, I love living on a golf course. Therefore, I'm probably just not going to think about that. And and and you know, I, I get it, we all do that to some degree, right, we're like I'm not giving up this coffee that could have mold or aflatoxins or something like that, right, so it's a, it's a tough one, but, yeah, I, I will not live on a golf course.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't. I wouldn't either. That's one of the things you're looking at. I was telling you earlier, like we like houses that are kind of like looking at this house that's like surrounded in woods and okay, maybe we're a little antisocial, but mainly we don't know what our neighbors are doing.
Speaker 1:They want to spray roundup on their garden, okie dokie, because we've got 100 yards of woods between us and them and it isn't going to affect my garden, so that's huge. Um karen, our nutritionist, she lives up in the same area. We're looking and they have acres, they have like 75 acres and she said that you know they could lease that out for hay ground but they have never found anybody that would come in and hay without spraying it, without coming in and spraying the weeds. It's just like we're not going to allow all those, all those chemicals on our, on our ground, because you can just, you know, the land out, let somebody come cut it and bail it and, you know, be a little little, nice, little income stream, but just that we're not going to allow those chemicals. There's nobody that'll cut hay and not use you know all the chemicals. So I think you know people we talk about.
Speaker 1:Where does cancer come from in our pets? I always ask where do you walk your dog? I mean, lots of them go to the parks, golf courses, a lot, certainly wintertime. You know a lot of people you know walk their dogs on golf courses and and these nicely groomed like sports parks or school playgrounds, I mean anywhere there's like it's finely groomed lawn and there's no weeds, there's, there's chemicals there and you don't get their nose right down in that stuff sniffing it up so yeah a lot of this comes from, gets in their feet and well, not only does it can it be absorbed up through their paws, but they go in and then they lick it off and they and they ingest it.
Speaker 1:At least we're out wearing shoes and, you know, wash our hands, you, you know, usually throughout the day, but dogs don't do that, you know. So I think they have a huge, huge exposure to these chemicals and people just need to be aware. I mean, if people choose to ignore it, right, that's their prerogative, I guess. But I'm with you, I, I want to be. I feel like our best chance, you know, having a good life is to insulate ourself from that as much as possible and and our pets, because they're so much more susceptible to it.
Speaker 1:Plus, if you have a like a you know, like I thought about like maybe getting bees after we move, because because we need more bees, and um, they're very relaxing. Beehives are very therapeutic. You know, you kind of sit, you can listen to them kind of humming in there doing their thing and, um, they're pretty interesting. I've been learning a little bit about bees but you know you, you can't have that if you're spraying, you know, a bunch of bunch of chemicals around. So, um, yeah, I think it's a. I think it's a, I think it's a. It's a huge issue and people may choose to ignore it, but then that's why people get. You know, people can get cancer and dogs get cancer and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:I will say this that in the and then we got to go. But in the Arizona area it's so hot that most people have. They don't have grass.
Speaker 2:Right, nothing grows, probably not even the weeds grow there, right, and they, they, they have you know rocks or gravel, you know yards and stuff, so at least you don't have a ton of those. However, there's a lot of golf courses here. You don't have a ton of those, however, there's a lot of golf courses here. And so, yeah, it's a, it's a. It's a. It's a tough thing that we're facing and I don't know what the solution is, so I'm hoping that your book isn't quite depressing, and isn't? You know, there is a good solution somewhere.
Speaker 1:I want to mention this really quick. This is another. You can tell this in a lot of podcasts. This one they were talking about is called fireside.
Speaker 1:So it's an herbicide that it kills the plants by dehydrating them. It just it's like a, it's some kind of organic acid and it just breaks down the coating on leaves so that the plants dehydrate. But it's not a harmful chemical and in fact they've done testing on the soil after they use this and it actually improves the healthy bacteria in the soil because the plant just naturally decomposes. So you can spray it on your weeds and it basically they just dehydrate but they decompose naturally into the soil. So they say it actually improves the soil. So for people like you know, like I know, like here, like on our driveway and stuff, I mean, things go like crazy here in tennessee that grass growing up all the time so and you can't really pull it. There's not a whole lot you can do about it if you're not spraying. But you know something like that that would. At least it wouldn't be a chemical. I actually bought some. I'm gonna like see how well it works and it's called fireside fireside.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, I haven't heard of it. I'll take a look. Yeah, that's a good one. I don't have any weeds but um, but, yeah, but you know, but up in colorado, you know, up in the mountains. Um, that would be a great one to use.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I think that's the name I'll send you the link, in case I'm saying the name wrong. I'll let you know.
Speaker 2:Sounds good, all right. Well, we got to jump, guys. Thanks for listening to the Raw Dog Food Truth. Tell all your friends about it. If you have any questions, you can certainly email us at rawdogfoodandcocom. Info at rawdogfoodandcocom. Thanks so much, everybody. Get over to rawdogfoodandcompanycom, where your pet's health is our business. Get your free consultation right there with Brian. Just sign up on the website Rawdogfoodandcompanycom, where your pet's health is our business. And what, dr Jacek? Friends don't let friends feed kibble y'all. We'll see you guys next week. All right, bye-bye. Oh snap, find out how you can start your dog on the road to health and longevity. Go to rawdogfoodandcompanycom, where friends don't let friends feed kibble and where your pet's health is our business.
Speaker 1:Just snap.
