Canine Nutrigenomics New Science Feeding Your Dog Optimum Health by Dr Jean Dodds
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Some dog food companies are less than honest about the ingredients in the foods they produce. This book will assist you in making better food choices that can impact the health of your dog.
I have fed raw food for many years due to health issues affecting my dogs. I also no longer vaccinate
This is a very informative book about canine nutrition. Don't let the book's title scare you off,it is a very easy read. THe old adage "You are what you eat" applies to your pets as well their human housemates.Some dog food companies are less than honest about the ingredients in the foods they produce. This book will assist you in making better food choices that can impact the health of your dog.
I have fed raw food for many years due to health issues affecting my dogs. I also no longer vaccinate my dogs after their puppy innoculations. I do titers every other year. So far,my dogs have not needed any innoculations, except rabies shots,for the past 8 years. My veterinarian practices homeopathy and feels less is more.
This book I filled with good advice,I recommend it to all dog owners. Know what you are feeding your best friend.
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One of the key problems with Canine Nutrigenomics is that legitimate scientific ideas are either extrapolated far beyond
Dr. Dodds' new book is a seamless blending of legitimate and mainstream science, plausible but unproven hypotheses, unlikely or "long-shot" hypotheses, and outright factual error and nonsense. She uses the language and trappings of science, but often the words she uses don't mean what they are usually used to mean, and the appearance of scientific validity is only superficial.One of the key problems with Canine Nutrigenomics is that legitimate scientific ideas are either extrapolated far beyond what the research evidence supports in order to promote dubious claims. Another weakness is that complex phenomena are simplified to make good and bad outcomes easy to predict and control. There is accurate information in the book, but it is frequently misused. There is also theory, opinion, and guesswork presented as fact and straightforward nonsense in the book, and the purpose of this article is to help readers separate these out and develop a more accurate and realistic assessment of the subject matter than that presented by the authors.
The most glaring problem with this book is that it really has almost nothing to do with the actual science of nutrigenomics. The word "nutrigenomics" is used here a bit like the word "quantum" is used by homeopaths and other proponents of pseudoscientific practices. Labeling pseudoscience with the name of a legitimate scientific field that most people know little about and don't really understand allows you to claim a legitimate scientific foundation for your ideas without having to actually explain how they work in detail or adhere to the details of the new or obscure branch of science you are borrowing your legitimacy from.
While Dr. Dodds' book is a mixture of fact and fiction, science and pseudoscience, plausible ideas and outright nonsense, overall the work is deeply misleading. It has little at all to do with nutrigenomics or epigenetics, despite the title and claims to the contrary, and it uses real science primarily to give an aura of legitimacy or authority to claims which are unproven or outright false. References are employed in a manner that suggests an academic research summary with conclusions based on scientific evidence. The reality is that the book is a collection of opinions, some plausible and some not, supported in most cases by very little evidence and in some cases clearly contradicted by this evidence. The references employed are often simply other people's opinions or, in some cases, Dr. Dodds' own opinions reprinted elsewhere.
The recommendations made for and against specific feeding practices and dietary supplements are mostly typical for proponents of alternative medicine, and they stem from ideology and philosophical beliefs rather than scientific evidence. Occasionally, such claims turn out to be true, in the manner of a broken clock which happens to be right twice a day but this has little to do with the underlying principles. And while there are a few evidence-based claims here and there in the book, and some recommendations I would agree with, overall Canine Nutrigenomics is misleading, misguided, and in conflict with the best evidence and expert consensus in veterinary nutrition.
You can find a detailed discussion of the book, and evidence-based investigation of specific claims Dr. Dodds makes in it, here:
http://skeptvet.com/Blog/2015/06/cani...
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I've been following this vet for a while now and I have read many of her articles but none of her books. This was the first one I have read by her and I was not disappointed. In earlier articles by her I read a bit of her information on thyroid problems in dogs. Though her articles I have adjusted when I give the medicine to him and what foods to avoid. It seems very consistent with other nutritional veterinarians.
This book focuses on Nutrigenomics. It is has gained more popularity and was once considered pseudoscience. Not all agree that there is enough evidence to suggest that nutrition can influence how genes react which is the basis of nutrigenomics. It is in a sense using food as medicine. It has been gaining popularity and more papers and studies have been done. It is an interesting idea in both humans and animals. Plus, in my own experience I have physically seen how nutrition has changed my animals health throughout the years.
Dr. Dodds also runs a canine blood bank and has a test for food sensitivities which she promotes in the book. I would love to do it for my pups but it is very expensive (but some insurances do cover it but a veterinarian has to order it). It could end up being a money saver, however, if you have not gotten to the bottom of certain gastrointestinal disorders or even coat problems (like hot spots and excessive itching). It is at least worth a look if you have a pet that has issues that have not been helped conventionally. There is information on her site about this test and the book really tells you how the information you gain from this test applies. If you don't do the testing you can still gain some insight and knowledge on what to feed your dog.
I give this book 4 stars with my long winded review. The book can seem quite technical to some so I would try her articles first to see if it is someone that makes sense to you. I also suggest to library book this one (where I got my ebook copy) to see if it is something you want to keep or just something to get a few tidbits from to enhance your dog's food. Dr Dodds is at lest worth a look when you are trying to help your pet's health through nutrition.
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I work in veterinary toxicology and just had a case of an "organic" pest control company that reassured an owner that the gopher bait used in his yard was perfectly safe after his dog ate some of it and started vomiting. Then he found out that the active ingredient in the bait was zinc phosphide, which can kill a dog even in very small amounts. Likewise, cholecalciferol (vit D3) is increasing in use because it's categorized as an "organic" rodenticide and is perceived (and marketed as) being very safe for use around children and pets compared to other rodenticides. It absolutely is not--minute amounts can cause toxicity and treatment is very involved and expensive, lasts months, and complications that can still kill your pet (or child) months or years after recovery. But it's organic, so that must be ok! It turns out the organic industry is still an industry, and they'll rail against the (real or perceived) sins of conventional industry as loud as possible so no one notices that they themselves are not free of sin and are perfectly fine lying or being disingenuous to people in order to sell their products.
Other tox notes that are incorrect in the book: no part of an avocado is toxic to dogs. We only get concerned if they eat the pit or large amounts of skin as a foreign body risk. Citrus fruits are not toxic. Food mushrooms are not toxic--wild mushrooms can be. Nuts with exception of macadamia are not toxic, though large ingestions can cause pancreatitis. Garlic is actually more toxic than onion (though both take quite a bit more than people usually believe to reach toxicity), so I found it pretty funny that the authors forbid all onion but recommend moderate use of garlic. Strawberries are also not toxic. Fluoride is not actually that much of a concern, toxicologically. Also weird to be concerned about fluoride "building up in tissues" but not vitamin D, which they recommend you supplement. Vitamin D is, again, much more toxic.
Antibiotics are no longer used in the meat industry as growth promoters and haven't been for a long time. If antibiotics have to be used to treat disease, there is a mandatory period prior to harvest where the livestock animal is given no antibiotics to ensure that it is all excreted. A lot of agricultural fearmongering is just that, and usually someone is selling you a product by the end (which the authors do in this book also).
Leaky gut syndrome is not actually a real disease. Gluten really isn't a problem if you don't have an actual sensitivity/celiac. How a plant is processed can greatly affect the bioavailability of the proteins in that plant. And as long as the protein is available to the dog, a protein with the same amino acid profile is molecularly identical regardless of whether it comes from an animal or plant, and the body will utilize it identically. A lot of processing of plants done for pet foods is done to increase bioavailability of certain nutrients.
GMOs designed to allow certain pesticide use are designed that way so that farmers can use safer pesticides. Glyphosate actually had a stupidly wide safety margin. It does not actually cause cancer any more than existing in the world causes cancer. Pretty much everything has been linked to cancer, but most things are not what would be considered high risk (e.g., smoking). We would be more concerned if your dog ate salt or garlic (which the authors do recommend feeding, btw) than if your dog drank from a bottle of ready to use glyphosate spray. The undiluted stuff we could see an issue, usually from the pH causing corrosive injury.
The authors spread a myth that has been debunked since a Congressional investigation in the 1990s about euthanized pets being in byproducts used in pet food (they're not). Byproducts and rendering plants DO have to comply with FDA regulations, they are just not inspected to the same extent as plants that produce food for human consumption and the authors deliberately mislead with a quote there about exemption of the plants from the same rate of inspections used as evidence that the industry is totally unregulated, which is false. Many people feed byproducts as treats, raw feeders feed byproducts as part of regular diets, but a pet food manufacturer uses byproducts and everyone panics and thinks their dog is going to die if it eats the food. By products are safe and provide nutrition for pets, and also help keep our food system environmentally sustainable so we don't have to farm more animals for pet food and we're not sending usable parts and carcasses to landfill.
The NutriScan product they're selling does not have much evidence of being accurate. ( https://www.veterinarypracticenews.co... ) It's not something I personally would waste money on. If you want to know what foods your dog is allergic to, an elimination diet is still the standard and most accurate means of doing so. Keep in mind that owners tend to blame allergies on food because of articles and books like this one, but most allergens are actually environmental and not food allergies. Also, do not formulate a homemade diet without consulting a veterinary nutritionist--someone who actually has advanced education in nutrition or is a boarded, licensed nutritionist. Deficiencies and toxicities from badly formulated home diets are a real risk here, and can be a nightmare to treat. Complications can be lasting.
Obesity has two major causes: too many calories, not enough exercise. It doesn't matter what form the calories take. Coconut oil that the authors recommend? Very high in calories. Feed your dog a bunch of extra coconut oil to get them to lose weight and watch them balloon.
As a veterinary professional, can I just say the cancer stuff breaks my heart? A lot of people try this "alternative" stuff FIRST when cancer (or many other diseases) are most treatable using evidence-based treatment. Then, when that fails, they come to us for evidence-based, conventional treatment when the disease is too far advanced now to be helped by any treatment, and get angry with us because we can't save their dog. We want to. And in a lot of these cases, we could have, if we could have started evidence-based treatment early.
I can't stress enough that you would never ever supplement your dog with vitamin D without your vet running bloodwork to see if there really is a deficiency. Again, vitamin D toxicity is a nightmare. Vitamin D is more toxic than a lot of the things the authors warn people about, like trace amounts of glyphosate in food. It is not something you should ever supplement without a documented deficiency and recommendation of your veterinarian.
Vaccine sensitivities are extremely rare. Flea and tick meds are so low in concentration that getting enough of it to cause a seizure inducing toxicity is very hard to do in dogs (cats are more sensitive and can get life threatening seizures if you use a higher concentration dog product). The dose makes the poison, which the authors don't mention and that is the most irresponsible and infuriating thing to me about this book as someone who works in toxicology. Your dog is more likely to die of distemper or parvo than it is to have a seizure inducing sensitivity to the vaccine. A species appropriate flea and tick product at the correct therapeutic dose is extremely unlikely to cause seizures, while diseases and anemia from fleas and ticks is actually more likely, depending on your region. Seizures due to toxicity are also severe and progressive. A dog that got a flea and tick product a week ago and just had a single isolated seizure had a seizure disorder unrelated to the exposure. Some products can trigger seizures in dogs who already have an underlying seizure condition that has not yet presented itself. This is a condition that likely would have developed at some point in any case. People don't realize this, but seizure disorders usually start to show themselves between 1-3 years of age, regardless of exposures to preventatives or vaccines. That's just the timeline of how these disorders develop as the animal grows.
I've had people confidently tell me that my nutrition professors and textbooks were hired/written by pet food companies. They weren't. Then I get "well that must be an exception." It isn't. My professors weren't trying to sell me books, supplements, or questionably reliable medical diagnostics. They were independent researchers who worked for the University. I'll trust them over celebrity vets who want to distinguish themselves from their profession in order to build their own brand and sell their own products and services, thanks.
FYI, wonky lab values are wonky lab values. Kidney disease is a natural process. A chronically elevated BUN will start to affect the kidneys. "Natural" isn't always positive or healthy.
Higher amounts of salmonella ingestion and shedding do result in greater risk to the public and dogs with compromised immune systems. This is just basic common sense. Sure, the GI tract sheds salmonella normally at low levels, so there is always a low risk of contamination. That risk increases as the amount shed increases, because you become more likely to encounter more bacteria than your immune system can effectively fight off. The FDA has also found bacterial contamination is far, far higher in commercial raw brands than in conventional pet food. That's not mentioned because this whole book is very carefully cherry picked, and then at the end it tells you not to listen to anyone else who might know more than you about the subject. Convenient. Don't listen to experts, they say, except for them. Also buy their NutriScan product. But they're not shills like other vets. They don't really want your money (but please buy their products).
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This book explains perfectly how what you feed your dog, affects the dogs entire body and health. What you put in you get out.
So why not five stars? Aside from all of the things I liked, I had two major issues with the book:
1) There was absolutely NO mention of toxicity, and in particular heavy metal toxicity , and it's effects on genetic expression and overall health (something that is especially impactful).
2) The disappointingly tiny amount of information on nutrigenomic approaches to behavioral conditions, which is the biggest reason I purchased the book to begin with. Dodds limited the section to basically pushing Tryptophan and Tyrosine supplementation, which, depending on which source you chose to listen to, may or may not be a safe thing to do. The research I've done on my own indicates there are innumerable environmental and nutritive factors that can play a major role in behavioral epigenetics/nutrigenomics. Just spend five minutes researching Autism and nutrition/toxicity and you will learn 100x more regarding this subject than is covered in this book (http://www.tacanow.org/ is a great resource for this info, btw).
I realize that you can't cover everything in a single book, but in my opinion this was really dropping the ball, as canine behavioral issues are exponentially increasing without any sign of slowing, and I believe this is due largely to 1) nutritional deficiency (i.e., Tryptophan and tyrosine are amino acids in which deficiency is known to cause aggression, yet are destroyed during kibble manufacture due to high-heat processing), and 2) heavy metal toxicity (http://truthaboutpetfood.com/heavy-me...) and it's effect on genetic expression, causing detectable and increasingly common health side effects such as candida yeast overgrowth and food intolerances (http://candidaspecialists.com/heavy-m...) as well as hormonal and thyroid problems (http://www.naturalendocrinesolutions....).
I feel like I'm the only person aware of or paying attention to this info, and I'm so frustrated because I'm dying to learn more about it. (Please somebody make a book on this so I can read it! ;-) )
Overall, however, I really enjoyed this book and found it to be a wealth of information regarding general health. The section on nutrigenomics and cancer was especially informative and very well put together.
The book, as a whole, has a very user-friendly layout, is easy to skim, and the more scientific aspects are broken down into layman's terms so that anyone can understand.
I would whole-heartedly recommend this book to every dog owner, and even those who are interested in learning about nutrigenomics for their own health.
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What's great about this book as well is that it doesn't belittle the person that chooses to continue to feed a processed kibble diet. You can add certain functional foods to the kibble and still enhance the dogs diet. They do recommend that a raw, whole food based diet is best, but give ideas to incorporate good foods into all canine diets, be it a kibble, canned, cooked or raw diet.
I personally have seen the transformation in my own dogs diet once we got rid of kibble and processed foods. He is on a complete raw or BARF model diet and hasn't been healthier. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in canine nutrition as a professional, or even the average dog owner that just wants to learn to feed their pet better. An excellent book that is easy to understand and laid out really well. ...more
My disappointment came from the lack of interaction with Dr. Dodds and the minimal information regarding nutrition - avoid rosemary and oregano - which I already knew.
I then consulted with the co-author regarding nutrition. She was very friendly and helpful. She suggested Dr. Dodds' food sensitivity test before we go any further with nutrition recommendations.
Between the consult with Dr. Dodds, the thyroid panel, the food sensitivity test, and the fee for a nutrition consultation, we would be looking at just under $1000. Our dog is definitely worth it (and believe me, we have spent many times more on her), but I must admit that I am a little wary. We recently eliminated kibble and upgraded her diet to primarily home-cooked meals. We also give her quite a few supplements. I may wait a bit and see if our changes to her diet show any benefits to her epilepsy before we go through any more tests.
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