Transcript
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Have you ever wondered what you could do to help your dog live a longer, happier, healthier life, but you didn't really know where to start?
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Well, if this is you, you're going to want to stay tuned for today's episode, where we're going to share a simple addition to your dog's diet that will transform their lives and yours.
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You're listening to Starlight Pet Talk, a podcast for pet parents who want the best pet care advice from cat experts, dog trainers, veterinarians and other top pet professionals who will help you live your very best life with your pets.
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We also share inspiring rescue and adoption stories from people who've taken their love of pets to the next level by getting involved in animal welfare.
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My name is Amy Castro, and I'm the founder and president of Starlight Outreach and Rescue and a columnist for Pet Age Magazine.
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I've rescued thousands of animals and helped people just like you find the right pet for their family.
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My mission is to help pet parents learn all the ways that they can care for, live with and even have fun with their pets, so they can live their very best lives and their pets can, too.
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Welcome to Starlight Pet Talk.
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I'm your host, amy Castro, and today we're going to talk about mushrooms and the many, many benefits that they have for our pets.
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My guest on today's episode is Dr Rob Silver.
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Dr Rob graduated from Colorado State's College of Veterinary Medicine and he established one of the first integrative vet clinics in the USA in Boulder, colorado, in 1993.
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Since then, dr Rob has become a nationally recognized expert in veterinary herbal and nutraceutical medicines, medicinal mushrooms, veterinary CBD and cannabis therapeutics.
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Welcome to the show, dr Rob.
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Thank you, amy, it's great to be here today.
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I've been really interested to talk to you about our subject today because I know over the last couple of years like CBD has been the thing in the pet industry and for pet parents, but the idea of mushrooms for our pets is at least new to me.
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I don't know if you're finding that in your interactions with people as well, or not.
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For some, yes, it is new.
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For others, they're kind of trend leaders or you're seeing a lot of stuff online, a lot of social media chatter about mushrooms, and so have gotten themselves educated.
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It's a mixed bag.
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That's why I'm here to try to convert most people to understanding more about mushrooms so they can decide whether it's a good choice for them or their pets.
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Yeah, how did this all start for you?
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How did you get interested in mushrooms for pets and really start to realize their benefits?
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Well, I'm a holistic veterinarian of 40 years experience and one of the first in the country as complementary and alternative medicine became of more interest to the pet parent, and I'm always looking for new tools.
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I mean, that's really what all integrative medicine is about I was finding new tools to address the same problems that conventional medicine may not be doing such a good job of addressing.
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Conventional medicine is great, and I don't reject it.
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I use it all the time.
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I think it's important, but it needs to be used appropriately in context.
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And having other tools like mushrooms to improve immune system, to have anti-histemitic properties, to have calming or settling or memory enhancing properties, or to improve GI function or to improve energy I mean, these are all applications for mushrooms that I'm mentioning.
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Yeah, I think they're great tools, and so in my own practice, it has taken a while for mushrooms really to be commercially available.
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I've been using Chinese medicines for years, and mushrooms are part of Chinese medical history and culture, and so I've been using formulas that have had mushrooms in them for many, many years.
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But having products that actually have mushrooms in them as a solitary ingredients, compared to one out of 16 other ingredients in a Chinese herbal formula, is fairly unique.
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It's only maybe I don't know maybe like the last 10 years that that has happened and that's coincided with this upsurge of interest for many people in the use of mushrooms for medicinal or for culinary purposes and also, now we know, for psychiatric purposes with psilocybin.
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So, yeah, so as soon as there were mushrooms available for products, I started getting jumping in and using them and started to learn how to identify products or companies that were creating products that had actual potency to them and were safe and effective.
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And so it's taken a while to get there, and that's one reason I'm with the company I'm with now Real Mushrooms because I really believe they are and this sounds like hyperbole, sounds pretty exaggerated, but I really believe they are the best medicinal mushroom company in the world because of their integrity, because the quality of their products and because they standardize their products.
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There's a great deal of quality control that goes into their products.
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So I don't mean to give an advertisement.
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If you kind of asked how I came to mushrooms and it all fits together.
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Yeah, no, I think that's important for people to realize.
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You know, I'm outside of Houston, texas, and the whole CBD thing has kind of slowly made its way into not only for human consumption but for pets as well.
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It's kind of made it into our community and I know from my work writing for PetAge magazine, even several years ago writing an article about CBD and you know you mentioned the idea of the obviously purity, potency, things like that is that not all products are created the same, and so just because your corner store is selling some type of mushroom supplement or you're you can find it in a pet store or find it online, doesn't mean that all products are created equally, and so it is important that pet parents do their homework as to what constitutes quality with these products and safety.
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Absolutely buyer beware.
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You know, and it's important, I think, when you look at a product to find a contact number on that label for the company.
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Go ahead and call them, contact them, ask them the hard questions you know.
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Ask them what is this product grown on?
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Is this product organic?
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What kind of quality control testing do you do?
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How do you know how potent it is?
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I mean things like that.
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If a company can't answer that, or if a company is too busy to answer that, then I'd say move on to another company, because you really need to find a company to work with that cares about communicating with its customers about the quality, its quality.
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Yeah, that's definitely, definitely important.
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So, what kind of mushrooms are we?
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And the reason I asked this what kind of mushrooms?
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And I have done a little bit of research.
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But you know, we've had a very, very dry summer here in Houston and we've just had some rain and all of a sudden there's mushrooms everywhere and it's like, obviously I'm not gonna let my dog eat whatever mushroom pops up in my backyard.
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But what are the specific mushrooms that we're talking about here?
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Well, first of all, we're not talking about any wild mushrooms.
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You know it is very unsafe for a person who doesn't know about mushrooms or for a dog to eat mushrooms that are growing up after the rain.
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There's a high likelihood of contracting a toxic mushroom, which could have very bad outcomes.
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So most veterinarians their experience with mushrooms is that dog that comes in vomiting, that was out in the backyard eating something after the rainstorm.
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So a lot of veterinarians their only experience is that mushrooms are toxic.
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What we're talking about many of the same edible mushrooms that you may be able to buy at your farmers market or your supermarket, things like shiitake, button mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, lions mane.
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These are very, very tasty edible mushrooms, very safe.
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They've been used as food for thousands, millennia, millennia, millennia, and they also have very potent medicinal properties.
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So we could start just with those simple mushrooms that are already in the food chain and talk about them as being Safe.
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And so that's where maybe a pet parent, if they want to ask their veterinarian If it's okay to give their dog a mushroom, that would probably be where you would start is talk about the mushrooms that the veterinarian may be familiar with because it's been on his Dinner table.
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You know the button mushrooms, the portobello, the crimini, the shiitake, the I don't know if you've ever had lion's mane.
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It's like one of the most amazing.
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Yeah, it's, it's.
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It comes like this big old ball.
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You can cut steaks out of it and fry them, or even bread them and eat them on a bun like a hamburger.
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Mushrooms are great food.
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They've got like 25 to 35 percent good quality protein, high fiber, low fat, low carbs.
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It's a great food as well.
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So that's kind of where what we're looking at.
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There are other mushrooms, the mushrooms that grow on wood primarily.
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There's one called reishi, there's one called chaga, which actually is part wood, and some others which aren't so edible because they're kind of chewy.
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They've got a lot of lignin in them from growing on the trees and so you can't really eat them.
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But they also have very strong medicinal properties and are very, very safe, have been used by for thousands of years by people, not used as much for animals, but now that we're getting experience using them in animals, we're seeing that they are also quite safe.
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Okay, so how would somebody decide what mushroom they might want to feed their pet?
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I mean, obviously you probably wouldn't want to go out and just Buy everything under the Sun and just start dumping it in your pets bowl.
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I'm assuming there's like certain mushrooms that have certain applications based on what you're trying to either treat or enhance in a pet.
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Exactly all mushrooms are very similar, with certain characteristics.
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For instance, they have something called a beta-glucan, and beta-glucan is a type of insoluble fiber that actually signals our immune system and gets it to be stronger, and there's quite a few studies showing the effectiveness of beta-glucan from mushrooms in improving immune system function.
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I even have one study in dogs, in puppies that are immune compromised, where they were vaccinating them and they were unable to get Protection from the vaccination because these puppies were shelter puppies that were immune compromised and you mentioned that you deal with a lot of that and and so you're probably very familiar with this.
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This could very well be.
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A nice use in a shelter environment is to use the beta-glucan from a mushroom to Precondition the puppy so that when you vaccinate them they can achieve a very long lasting protection because the beta-glucan Primes the immune system to process that vaccination more efficiently.
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So, yes, all mushrooms have these beta-glucan.
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You could take any mushroom even the button mushrooms have beta-glucan set, would improve immune system function and use it for that.
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But other mushrooms have very specific functions, like the reishi mushroom, which is which grows on wood and it's not very edible but is probably the best, well known, longest oldest mushroom in the world I'm used quite a bit, has in it some terpenes, which are these hydrocarbon like molecules.
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We see terpenes in cannabis as well.
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When you smell the cannabis, what you're smelling are terpenes.
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When you squeeze a lemon, you smell that lemon smell.
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That's a terpene.
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Well, mushrooms have these same terpenes which in the reishi and the chaga have anti histaminic properties.
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So if I had an atopic dog, a dog with allergies, food allergies or inhaled allergies, I'd probably reach for those two mushrooms.
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Lion's mane, as I mentioned, being super, super edibly, tasty which it is, and the powder made from that Mushroom is also very bland and tasty.
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So it's also easy to give to an animal because you know animals aren't always going to take something just because it's good for them.
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It's got a taste reasonable, otherwise they're not gonna get near it, like the reishi which is so bitter.
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You know it's probably not gonna be accepted by most animals as a powder because it is so bitter, but the bitterness is part of its potency.
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So we put the reishi in capsules or in soft juice to kind of guard that bitter taste from the animal so they're more likely to take it.
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But the lion's mane we're is now the most popular mushroom in the in North America today, because if it's ability to improve memory and it's ability to reduce stress and it's ability to help with mild dementia and with cognition, older dogs I don't know if you've seen older dogs that kind of had this sort of geriatric Sinality where they may not be able to even find the dog door, they don't know where their food pole is and they just start barking out of nowhere.
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As we got older, all of our brains age and some age better than others.
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Lion's mane has been actually reversing some of the early stages of Alzheimer's and in old dogs that have this canine cognitive disorder, this geriatric senility, we are also hearing very good reports of improvements.
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Now I want to get a study going and I will.
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The company Real Mushrooms is going to be helping getting some funding together to do some studies so we can support these claims with real, objective data.
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So I have Lion's mane in a formula I made with Rashi in a soft chew which is tasty that we use for calming.
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We call it Relax Mushroom Chews.
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We put I put some tryptophan and theanine in it, which gives green tea its zen and cat in it cats like it because I put cat in it and valerian and other calming herbs.
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So that's yeah.
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So yes, certain mushrooms can have certain specific effects, just as all mushrooms have general effects as well.
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And one thing that mushrooms do that I can't quite explain, but there's something about taking them that kind of improves your sense of well-being, there's a sense of I feel good, you know, and there's something about mushrooms that have an interaction with your nervous system and with your feelings, which just seem to improve that.
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So these things happen when you take mushrooms every day for fairly substantial periods of time.
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I think mushrooms I want to say mushrooms are not drugs, they're superfoods and they're best when they're taken every day, taken regularly.
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Now you have to take them seven days a week.
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You take them five days a week because once you start taking them regularly, you know you start coasting along.
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You can have a little break and still have the advantage of the mushrooms.
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But they really should be part of I call them a lifestyle supplement because they really should be part of a lifestyle.
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Every meal you should add the powder or the capsules or the soft chew to give the animal that benefit and because the benefits are so huge, I recommend that people and their pets share their mushrooms together.
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We can share yeah.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
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Well, two things.
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Number one I just wanted to hit on that point that you mentioned about senior pets, because we have experienced that quite a bit here at Starlight Outreach and Rescue, where older animals are turned into shelters because pet parent can't manage the behavior anymore, whether it's sundowning or whatever that behavior is.
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That seems to happen at night, where the dog wanders and is staring at a wall or barking or just being very, very unsettled.
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I'm definitely going to have to try that lion's mane for that, because it's just it's heartbreaking to watch them go through that and to realize that, a they can't help it and B that's why their pet parent gave them up to just go into a shelter because they couldn't put up with it.
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But it's hard to deal with.
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It's very frustrating to be woken up all night when they're wandering around.
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Well, and behavior problems are the single most common reason why animals are surrendered to shelters, and so if we can do anything to improve that, that's one reason.
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As a veterinarian, I try to teach people early on about the value of obedience training.
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You're going to have a dog for 15 years.
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You want it to be a good citizen in your household, and the time to start doing that is not when they develop bad habits, but at the very beginning, as soon as they come into your home following adoption, rehoming.
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But yeah, that sundowning is part of that canine cognitive disorder.
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And, amy, afterwards I'll get your snail mail address and let me ship to you some lion's mane for you to try.
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I think you'll find it.
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That would be great.
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Thank you so much.
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I'll send a little gift for yourself, as well as a thank you for letting us be here today.
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Sure, Now let me ask you this Is it different to get a commercially produced product you talked about the powders, the chews, things like that versus I go into a grocery store and buy lion's mane and share that with my dog?
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The difference is that the lion's mane is raw and fresh and the product has been dried and processed.
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So, for instance, the company Real Mushrooms.
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What they'll do is they'll take the lion's mane and they'll dry it into a powder and then they subject it to a hot water bath of 90 degrees centigrade for two hours.
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And what this does is this breaks down that fiber cell wall that has those beta-glucans in it that I was talking about and makes them more available to be used biologically.
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In the raw mushroom that you would eat for your dinner, it's 90% water, so you'd have to eat 10 times as much of that raw mushroom as you would of the dry powder to get the same beneficial effect, and you'd have to cook that fresh mushroom.
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I said raw mushroom, I really meant fresh mushroom.
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You have to cook the fresh mushroom anyway to derive any kind of.
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You'll get some nutritional benefit from it, but it doesn't digest very well because it's so fibrous until you cook it.
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So you need to at least saute it for maybe 15 minutes.
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Commercially we do it for two hours to get a full and complete extraction.
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Once it's been extracted and it's dry, then it becomes very, very potent.
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So that's the main difference really.
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Now, our stuff is organic, and mushrooms can be grown organically or not, so that also depends on how it's labeled at the supermarket when you get it.
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That might be a difference as well.
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And then our mushrooms are in powders or they're in capsules or they're in soft juice.
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So I came on board with real mushrooms about 18 to 24 months ago to develop their pet line, and so that's what I'm doing.
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As someone who has been developing and creating pet products for 25 years, my experience speaks to creating something that is palatable, something that's going to get into the pet, because we know that even humans less than 50% of humans that are given prescription medicines to actually take their medicines imagine how hard it is to have to chase your dog around every night or twice a day to give it some capsules.
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Yeah, I know, yeah, me too.
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So I've tried to solve that problem by either making it a palatable powder or putting it in a soft chew, or, worse comes to worse.
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We use a capsule which could be hidden in a little bit of meat or a pill pocket or cheese or peanut butter or whatever, to facilitate the administration, because if they don't get it, it don't work.
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Exactly, and that's such a good point because I just I wanted to bring that up because I know there's people that will be listening, that will think well, I can just go buy mushrooms.
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But I realized that when you purchase a product that's been processed in the way that you've mentioned, it's, like you said, more palatable, it's going to be more digestible, so your dog's going to get more bang for the buck when it comes to actually eating the product.
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And then let's just be honest, from a convenience standpoint, not all of us have the time to cook for ourselves, let alone our dogs, and so to be able to put something on their regular food, give them a little treat, I think is fantastic.
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And one other advantage of a commercial product such as real mushrooms is that we also standardize our products, so that that means that a bottle that you buy this year, let's say of the lion's mane, we standardize it to 25% beta-glucans.
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This also allows us to know how much to give as a dosage to get some kind of an effectiveness.
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If you take the weight of the animal and you take the concentration of beta-glucans, you can then figure out how much to give to address either wellness or maybe more severe conditions like sundowners, like the canine cognitive disorder or even cancer, which might take a much higher amount.
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So that means that a bottle you buy this year and a bottle you buy next year will have the exact same potency.
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It won't change, the amount won't change and that's very convenient for veterinarians, and veterinarians have been extremely excited about our line of pet products because of that standardization and because that created this dosing algorithm which seems to work, and vets like that.
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It's very numerical, they can do nigs per keg, they're comfortable that it's organic, that it's very clean and that it's consistent in potency.
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So that's a very positive thing for this.
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Yeah, definitely for sure.
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So we've been talking sort of about dogs, but you did say animals are mushrooms.
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I mean, is that something we can give our cats or other animals, other pets that we have?
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How would we know?
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Yeah, absolutely no.
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Mushrooms are universally applicable to all species.
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We even put beta-glucans in earthworms.
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People that are growing earthworms for fishing or for gardening beta-glucans improve that.
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They put beta-glucans in trout farms and fish, and so we're using beta-glucans instead of antibiotics for growing animals, because they find that antibiotics would promote more efficient weight gain and beta-glucans do the same thing, because they protect the animal from infection.
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The animal doesn't have to use energy to fight off infection.
00:22:19.762 --> 00:22:21.547
It can use energy to grow instead.
00:22:22.115 --> 00:22:36.040
So, yeah, for instance, there's another mushroom called cordyceps, and maybe some of your followers have been watching that Netflix horror special about the cordyceps mushroom that infects humans and turns them into zombies.
00:22:36.040 --> 00:22:37.518
I tried watching that.
00:22:37.518 --> 00:22:39.282
I got through like 15 minutes.
00:22:39.282 --> 00:22:40.346
It's too much of a zombie.
00:22:40.346 --> 00:22:43.355
I don't really like those zombies things, but a lot of people do, but anyway.
00:22:43.355 --> 00:23:00.914
So the cordyceps mushroom has an ability to protect kidney function, and so I've got a study, starting now with some vets that I've met at the Holistic Conference and at the Hospice Conference that are going to be sharing with me some of their kitty cat patients that have chronic kidney disease.
00:23:00.914 --> 00:23:12.164
We're going to be giving them cordyceps and measuring the improvements in their blood, and there's some studies in laboratory animals that have chronic kidney disease that they give cordyceps to.
00:23:12.164 --> 00:23:13.166
That shows improvement.
00:23:13.166 --> 00:23:15.521
So I'm hoping we're going to see that in cats.
00:23:15.934 --> 00:23:21.694
But one nice thing about the cordyceps that we're talking about in terms of palatability is it's very tasty.
00:23:21.694 --> 00:23:28.007
The cordyceps mushroom is a relative of morels and a relative of truffles and it has a lovely taste.
00:23:28.007 --> 00:23:29.969
I think it tastes a little bit like toast.
00:23:29.969 --> 00:23:32.643
It's very palatable.
00:23:32.643 --> 00:23:39.381
I put a little powder on my finger and my little Maine Coon kitty that we have new in the household, licks it off.
00:23:39.381 --> 00:23:40.317
It's so tasty.
00:23:40.317 --> 00:23:41.980
So we're doing that.
00:23:41.980 --> 00:23:47.244
And then I've got some equine vets because horses get a disease called Cushing's disease.
00:23:47.244 --> 00:23:48.185
We call it PPI.
00:23:48.267 --> 00:23:48.788
It has it.
00:23:48.788 --> 00:23:52.102
I've got a 34 year old apple.
00:23:52.102 --> 00:23:52.483
That's got.
00:23:52.624 --> 00:23:53.045
Cushing's?
00:23:53.045 --> 00:24:03.384
Yeah, so we've got a couple of very experienced equine holistic vets giving cordyceps to their patients who have Cushing's disease and we're going to take measurements.
00:24:03.384 --> 00:24:14.234
It's a seasonal disease, so we're waiting for January to start with the blood testing, but we're going to measure ACTH and insulin and we're going to see if the cordyceps is making a difference.
00:24:14.234 --> 00:24:21.742
You know I'm trying to get numerical evidence to support making claims that it could be good for Cushing's and horses.
00:24:21.742 --> 00:24:30.865
But we know Cushing's and horses is the gateway to laminitis and a lot of other inflammatory conditions which are very disabling and oftentimes can be terminal.
00:24:30.865 --> 00:24:39.345
So I hope we can find some benefit because the current pharmaceutical they use to treat that does not work very well from what I understand.
00:24:39.434 --> 00:24:40.760
I'm not much of an equine vet.
00:24:40.760 --> 00:24:45.124
I've done some work there, but that's why I'm reaching out to equine vets to help me with this.
00:24:45.124 --> 00:24:52.886
So, yeah, I'm working on all the species and I talk about dogs, but cats are one of my favorites, as are horses.
00:24:52.886 --> 00:24:53.468
I love them all.
00:24:53.468 --> 00:25:02.359
So I just want to be sure that we can create mushroom benefits for each species and find out what those are specifically.
00:25:02.359 --> 00:25:03.342
That's my job.
00:25:03.342 --> 00:25:04.085
That's what I'm doing.
00:25:04.085 --> 00:25:06.059
I'm having a heck of a great time.
00:25:06.582 --> 00:25:08.940
Well, that's great, just helping all kinds of pets.
00:25:08.940 --> 00:25:10.321
We always like that for sure.
00:25:10.321 --> 00:25:38.855
So I know that one of the things whether it's human physicians or veterinarians that can be a challenge well, it's probably a blessing and a curse, I guess in some instances is that those of us pet parents or human beings are getting out on the internet and doing all of this research on Dr Google and then going to our vets and our doctors and saying I should be doing this, I should be doing that, and you've mentioned several times about holistic veterinarians working with mushrooms.
00:25:38.855 --> 00:25:49.974
But if I go to a traditional veterinarian, how do I kind of talk to my vet about mushrooms in my pet's diet, and do you think I'll face resistance?
00:25:52.248 --> 00:25:58.330
You might because, as I mentioned, probably the only experience you're conventional vet has is with mushroom poisoning.
00:25:58.330 --> 00:26:00.096
So they think mushrooms.
00:26:00.096 --> 00:26:13.133
I was at a conference a couple of years ago with a very respected veterinary pharmacologist talking about mitochondrial disease or something like that, and she says, of course we know all mushrooms are toxic.
00:26:13.133 --> 00:26:16.269
It's like, ooh, so my work's cut out for me.
00:26:16.269 --> 00:26:23.857
We're looking at doing a safety study which might be helpful to convince vets that they are safe.
00:26:23.857 --> 00:26:25.711
And it may be that.
00:26:25.911 --> 00:26:35.470
And sometimes the veterinarians who are not holistically minded oftentimes look at their clients who come in who are interested in that, as being a little funny because they don't understand it.
00:26:35.470 --> 00:26:38.992
They're very rigid and that's OK.
00:26:38.992 --> 00:26:41.632
I mean, there's different strokes for different folks.
00:26:41.632 --> 00:26:47.798
So one certainly I'm more than happy to talk to that veterinarian directly.
00:26:47.798 --> 00:26:53.457
I'm more than happy to email them and send them studies that we have that support the effectiveness.
00:26:53.457 --> 00:26:57.454
We don't have any published safety studies in dogs, cats or horses.
00:26:57.454 --> 00:27:02.056
We've got some in laboratory animals that show huge amounts of safety.
00:27:02.664 --> 00:27:04.815
The mushrooms that we're using are not toxic.
00:27:04.815 --> 00:27:13.609
They're identified as being edible and safe and have been in use for 30 or 40 years at least from this company and have been in use for much more.
00:27:13.609 --> 00:27:19.032
So it takes some discussion, but yeah, that can be a difficult thing.
00:27:19.032 --> 00:27:27.211
The nice thing is that mushrooms aren't going to interfere with anything that your veterinarian has recommended for your pet.
00:27:27.211 --> 00:27:39.038
So, although I do think it's important to disclose to your veterinarian everything you're doing, because it's not going to affect whatever that veterinarian is wanting you to do for that animal.
00:27:39.038 --> 00:27:52.929
So it's a yin and yang right now and really we need to get this some sort of a published study going that would help to support veterinarian's confidence in the use of our mushrooms, to know that they are in fact quite safe.
00:27:54.153 --> 00:27:58.276
Yeah, because that's something that they often will rely on or because that's what they've got to rely on.
00:27:58.276 --> 00:28:07.634
I mean, it's like I've got to have some valid, reliable source to say this is good or not good or valid or not valid.
