Save Your Pet’s Health! Dr. Delaney Explains.
Explore the world of veterinary nutrition with Dr. Sean Delaney on Vetsplanation. In this episode, Dr. Delaney, the creator of Balance It, shares his expertise on safe homemade pet food, balanced diets, and essential nutrition tips. Perfect for pet parents who want to ensure their pets live a long, healthy, and happy life, this episode offers invaluable advice from one of the top experts in the field.
What You’ll Learn:
How to safely feed pets human-grade food
Importance of balanced pet diets
Role of veterinary nutritionists
Benefits of using Balance.It
Common pet diet mistakes to avoid
How to create nutritious homemade pet food
Impact of nutrition on pet health and longevity
Insight into veterinary nutritional research
Tips for managing pet health through diet
Understanding pet dietary needs for different life stages and health conditions
Ideas Worth Sharing:
"I think one of the challenges that we always face, I think, in veterinary medicine as a whole and as people who love their animals is they don't live long enough." - Dr. Sean Delaney
"We help people that either choose to or have to feed human food to their dog or cat and help them do it safely." - Dr. Sean Delaney
Resources From This Episode:
Dr. Delaney's Balance It Website
Where to find specialty consultations:
VetNutitionists.com
VetSpecialists.com
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Read The Transcript:
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: [00:00:00] Are you a passionate pet parent always on the lookout for the best way to care for your furry friends? Then you're in the right place. Welcome back to Vetsplanation, where we delve deep into the world of veterinary science and pet care, illuminating the path to a healthier, happy pet. Today we're incredibly excited to have a special guest, Dr. Sean Delaney, the mastermind behind the revolutionary website, Balance It.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: A site that has become a go-to resource for pet parents wanting or needing to feed their pets human food safely. Stick around as we uncover the story behind Balance It, dive into the fascinating world of veterinarian nutrition, and explore how Dr. Delaney's expertise can help us all provide the best care for our dogs and cats.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Don't miss this enlightening conversation about blending love, science, and nutrition for the ultimate well-being of our pets. Let's get started.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Hi, welcome back to Vetsplanation everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. I have Dr. [00:01:00] Sean Delaney here with us today. I'm really excited to talk to you because I have so many pet parents that I actually tell them to go to your website. So thank you so much for being on here.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Yeah, it's my pleasure. I'm glad to be invited and looking forward to chatting.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Yeah, so you made this amazing website called Balance It. So can you tell me a little bit about it?
Dr. Sean Delaney: Sure. So we help people that either choose to or have to feed human food to their dog or cat and help them do it safely.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Yeah, and you are a nutritionist, correct?
Dr. Sean Delaney: Yeah, so as I'm sure probably your listeners are aware of, if you've been listening to you, there are veterinary specialists. So I'm specialized in veterinary nutrition, which means I'm a board certified veterinary nutritionist. That's a U.S. patent office trademarked term, like realtor and other things.
Dr. Sean Delaney: But specifically amongst colleagues, we would consider myself a diplomat of the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine, specifically the nutrition specialty.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Nice. And I'm sure you get a lot of clients. How did you decide to go [00:02:00] from seeing clients to making this website?
Dr. Sean Delaney: Yeah, I think the old adage you're saying is necessity is the mother of all invention, is really the origin story. For many years I was a faculty member at UC Davis. And so trying to use the, for those who are old enough, MS-DOS based software solution, which was very iterative, meaning you had to basically, Oh, I need a little more of this, a little less of this.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Over time, it was very, very inefficient, and made it challenging to address all the patients that needed homemade diet formulations for multiple medical conditions. And so I was fortunate enough that my brother in law was a software developer and said, Hey, maybe we can. Yeah, it's very nice. And I said maybe we could come up with something to be a little bit easier.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And I spent some time thinking about equations and did some math and ultimately came up with a nice solution that would make things a little bit easier and [00:03:00] also be able to prevent the need to hand enter every ingredient and every nutrient we wanted to use. So we had a small database, but the USDA has a very large database and we're able to automate and transfer that data to make it usable for my own purposes.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And then over time, I realized that It could be something that would be helpful to my other board certified veterinary nutritionist colleagues and over further time, other veterinary specialists, and then veterinarians, and then just the lay public. And it was not the intent to be what it is now but it has become that.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And I'm very, very grateful and feel privileged to help as many dogs and cats that I do. In about a week's time, I make about the amount of formulations through our site that I would have probably been able to make in my entire career based on the old technology that we ultimately replaced.
Dr. Sean Delaney: So I'm helping a lot more patients than I thought I ever would in my career.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Yeah, that's amazing. I'm sure there are so many pet [00:04:00] parents who are so grateful for this because even, even us as veterinarians who I'd been using it, I don't even know for how long now, but, it was really difficult for me in the beginning, even in vet school, when they'd ask us to do those, those spreadsheets, trying to figure out every single nutrient and how to balance that for every life stage.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: And so this is amazing that they have this technology now that you and your brother were able to come up with.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Yes, my brother in law, just to be correct, correct. But yes, that's okay. We've been I've known him since he was 16 years old. So it's probably brother is probably about right. But we're very fortunate that we were able to take the technology that exists now and the amount of mathematics and refine that over the last 20 some odd years.
Dr. Sean Delaney: It's gotten better. We re released the software back in April of 2023. Some of the things that I had not been able to solve, the pandemic, the silver lining was that I could spend a lot of time. And so there were some things I wanted to solve for 17 years. And I sat down and I [00:05:00] did what I learned when I was taking calculus from my math professor, he said this is a prison problem.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And what he meant by that is the only reason you would hand calculate and spend all the time calculating this is if you had all the time in the world. And so the pandemic was my, my, window into that. Redoing some math, solving some new problems making things more efficient and really pleased that I've been able to do that.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And, computers have advanced, even in the 20 years that we've been doing this. What we can do in seconds would have taken minutes. When we first started working on the supplements that complement the software. I remember the first check, had no income. It was just a, a dream or maybe a labor of love and realized on the PCs of the time we wanted to run some iterations where we could look and say, Oh, what would be an optimal supplement if we were combining certain common food steps for just health and it would take basically about two weeks to run on the computer.
Dr. Sean Delaney: So we're like, this is not going to be efficient enough for us to refine what we're doing. And [00:06:00] so I remember writing the check and buying the first Xeon servers, and I was so excited that I could run my hundred thousand iterations in a 24 hour period, and we bought two. And so I could run one day, get the results, start refining with my brother in law.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And that was our first expense, except for an IKEA desk that I still have next to me. Maybe good luck more than anything else, but was able to work through that Xeon. And now, that was about 100,000 recipes we were running through. Now we have some, with refinement, we can run that in a matter of minutes.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Both with the improvement of the mathematics, the logic, and then also the data centers that exist. And we run many, many what are called instances rather than servers to support all of our users. And it's just, I think we're all aware of technology and how it's advanced and how efficient microchips have become, and both energy wise and calculation wise.
Dr. Sean Delaney: But my real world experience of seeing something that, It went from, [00:07:00] hey, let's take this in two weeks, to 24 hours, to minutes in my career. It's really, a good way of illustrating it and why it is possible to do what we're doing.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Yeah. That's amazing. Now that we've had all these advancements, you said pretty much anybody can use this calculator at this point, correct?
Dr. Sean Delaney: Yeah, what I learned is, initially it was what we would call an expert rule based system, not to be too technical with folks, but that's what it was. And it was for a very, very sophisticated board certified veterinary nutritionist who had spent years. Both getting a graduate degree in nutrition and doing a residency to refine skills that, really are very, very, very high level.
Dr. Sean Delaney: How do you take those skills and make it so that the layperson who loves their animal, loves their dog or their cat, wants to do best for them, whether in health or in sickness, but doesn't really have necessarily those skill sets. Certainly we have people that might have a STEM major, they might [00:08:00] have, certain degree of understanding of nutrition, but how do you enable them to do that in a safe way?
Dr. Sean Delaney: That's not easy. Actually, it's really hard, you put up enough guardrails, that they have some freedom to pick what they want to do, to customize what they want to do, and be told when, when what they want to do isn't appropriate. That's really key as well. As I've learned, making things easy is hard.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And I think that, that's true of many things in veterinary medicine, right? And in any, in any field, sometimes when someone is an expert, it's just because they've failed so many times that they've gotten better at it. And so it makes it look easy, but it's not easy in the route getting there.
Dr. Sean Delaney: So a lot of trial and error and improve the software so that people can just go on and say, Hey, I'm interested in feeding my dog and put in some minimal information about their weight, minimal information about their sexual status, and their age, and their species, of course, to then figure out what are their energy needs.
Dr. Sean Delaney: That's a first and foremost, and then put in some [00:09:00] conditions. Maybe they're a healthy adult, maybe they're a puppy, maybe they're a kitten, maybe they have some medical conditions, and come up with a set of requirements. And do that all behind the scenes, to then say, okay, what do you want to feed?
Dr. Sean Delaney: And give them options, I referenced that USDA database, we have about 8,000 different foods that people can pick from. And say, is there a way to combine those foods in a way that could be fed long term and be done safely. Certainly in the short term, we really focus on macro nutrients. So things like protein and fat and carbohydrate and then calories, as I said, and making sure we're not under or overfeeding.
Dr. Sean Delaney: But longer term, we start worrying about other nutrients, other essential nutrients, minerals and vitamins and making sure that amino acid and fatty acid requirements are met. And so how do you combine all that and make sure that it's appropriate for long term feeding and we have I think a good solution for that with our recipe builder as we call it.
Dr. Sean Delaney: It's used by thousands of people every day and we make [00:10:00] millions of recipes for dogs and cats every year and many of them never buy anything from us. It's a free service and I'm really pleased that we're able to do that. We've realized how important that's become in our field. The version we provide to lay people.
Dr. Sean Delaney: There's a more advanced version. My colleagues still use in Academia and specialty practice and we offer that for free and support it. I work with a team of software developers every day refining what we do and supporting what we do. And we've realize that it's so important that we've actually made a change.
Dr. Sean Delaney: We are now what's called a benefit corporation. So certain States, California included, you can have a benefit corporation, which means you're not nonprofit, but you're not only profit driven, you're somewhere in between. And so you do a certain amount of good work for some stakeholder. For us, obviously it's for the veterinary profession and clients and veterinarians.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And so we offer that tool for free to people and we hope that they'll use some of our supplements because that's how we keep the [00:11:00] lights on and pay the bills. But when they choose not to or it doesn't work, we do allow people to even make recipes with a combination of supplements that are designed for humans.
Dr. Sean Delaney: So we give people the best option because really for me as a nutritionist and as a veterinarian, my goal has always been to help people to not inappropriately feed, right? People are taking the time to cook for their animal, especially when they're sick. They're doing it because they care and they want to do the best for them and without the knowledge to know that maybe what they're feeding isn't optimal or it's deficient or has an excess. You know, you put them in a difficult position.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And so I feel very, again, grateful and lucky that we can support that and I think give people a lot better guidance than they would otherwise have without what we do. Because there is unfortunately a lot of math. Nutrition, I think it was sometimes seen as a softer science. But It's chemistry and it's mathematics.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And there's a lot of important things that need to be considered to make sure that it's going to work [00:12:00] for whatever the particular dog or cat needs.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Yeah, absolutely. Especially, that's why these formulas that, that have so much science back behind them, people always talk about they're so much more expensive. I'm like, there's so much more that had to go into them.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Yeah, and I think that, we think about all the commercially prepared foods out there, whether it be Hills, or Nestle Purina, or Royal Canin, or Blue Buffalo, and some that have the therapeutic options. I don't think people realize how much work has been put into those, and how important that work has been to advance my specialty.
Dr. Sean Delaney: I don't think that some of the companies that have supported that research and published it for peer review, really get enough credit at times for how much they've advanced our knowledge. People said we should just know that. That, that's true. It would be ideal, but the dog has stopped being the model for human nutrition decades ago.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And why I say that is that some of our earliest knowledge about dog nutrition actually came from using the dog as a model for [00:13:00] humans. And so some of the early knowledge about vitamins, like the discovery of vitamin K and the need for it and came from dog studies being used to study the human and understand human.
Dr. Sean Delaney: We talk about these terms Atwater factors. So some people are familiar with it. It's the amount of calories per gram. So four calories per gram of protein or for carbohydrate or nine calories for fat per gram that Atwater factor in pet foods is referred to as the modified Atwater factor, which is funny.
Dr. Sean Delaney: It addresses the fact that commercially prepared foods use ingredients that may not be quite as digestible as human foods. But what's missed in that whole history is that the Atwater factors were actually originally derived from feeding human foods to dogs. And the dog as a model is great.
Dr. Sean Delaney: We could learn some things, but then there was a limit, probably around the 40s or 50s. We stopped using them and rodents and other species became model and human studies became available. We're actually [00:14:00] using humans. And so if we had stopped in the forties and fifties, there'd be so much knowledge we would not have now to address the unique needs of dogs and cats and to provide them with the best nutrition we possibly can to allow them to live as long as possible. I think one of the challenges that we always face, I think, in veterinary medicine as a whole and as people who love their animals is they don't live long enough. Maybe if you have a turtle or..
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: A parrot.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Yeah.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Yeah, maybe it'll outlive you. But generally the great sadness I think of having dogs or cats is you outlive them.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And for people who, you use the term pet parent, but people who consider those a member of the family, you're not supposed to outlive your children ideally. And we do that over and over again with our dogs and our cats. And so anytime we can get more time with them, I think it's so helpful and so powerful.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And nutrition plays a big role in that. And we know that deficiencies lead to shorter lifespan. Excesses do too. One of the clear ways to shorten the lifespan is to have an overweight animal, and [00:15:00] we know that that shortens their lifespan. And so providing the appropriate optimal nutrition is expanding their lifespan.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And sometimes people say evolutionarily we don't feed them the way they should be fed. And I always counter that by an interesting conversation and lesson I had with the reintroduction of the wolves into Yellowstone. And if you look at that, when they did that, a couple decades ago, and the wildlife researchers follow them and track their impact, which is a fascinating story in and of itself about how beneficial it was to the ecology of Yellowstone to have wolves back, what was fascinating though, is that the oldest wolves were like six years old. And, they had a high parasite load. Some of it was because of dentition issues from hunting and they couldn't hunt anymore. But the point of that is that, if we use the wolf as our model sometimes for how to feed dogs.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And I was the head of R and D for the first grain free low carb kind of evolutionary diet. So it's not that I'm anti that approach, but if we look at that and only [00:16:00] say that that's the way to feed, it misses the point that our evolutionary drive for success, nutritionally even, is to make sure that we reproduce and have our genes pass on.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And it isn't to be a 12 year old, a 14 year old, a 16 year old, an 18 year old dog or cat, right? It's, hey, we produce these three litters, help raise them, teach them what, how to hunt, right? Because they both were, you know, pretty much hunting and when we are done with that, then it's okay if maybe some deficiencies catch up with us or maybe some excesses catch up with us.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And so when you say it in that regard, that is not optimal for what we want out of the lives of our dogs and cats. We want to get more time out of them and not just necessarily reproductive success and carrying on those genes. And so nutritional science has had to advance and think about, okay, beyond just reproduction and beyond how do we think about how to give long term health.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And I think we have a long ways to go. I think that we've [00:17:00] learned some. But I do know one thing. And the one thing is, feeding a deficient diet, or feeding a diet that has toxicities in it, is not optimal health and is not going to lead to longevity. And when people are choosing to feed human food, and what I saw in my career when I was at the university and I've seen my career for the last 20 plus years as a specialist is they just need some help to make sure that all those things are accounted for when they want to feed it long term.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And, And it's sometimes it's preference, sometimes it's necessity that they're doing it. But I feel like we are here to help them do that well, and to help them do the math that no one wants to really want to do. I'm not sure I want to do the math all the time, but I feel it's important, right?
Dr. Sean Delaney: It's really important. And I think progress the science. The one thing that I alluded to earlier is that we do make a more advanced version of the software for my colleagues. It's widely used. And that version is used to train the new nutritionists. And I'm always very, proud of that because I feel like [00:18:00] it's having a multiple effect that they learn some of their basic nutrition. It helped them get there. And now they're carrying that on, even if they're not ever doing homemade diets again, they're doing commercial diet formulation. And so it's a multiplication of my efforts of having impact on the health of many dogs and cats.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And I think I'm sure you feel through your podcast or your video cast, if we're going to call it that. I think that one of the things that all of us veterinarians want to do and why we're called to our profession is to help as many dogs and cats as we can. That's why we do what we do, and the opportunity to do that as a nutritionist is very unique, whether it be me or any other colleagues.
Dr. Sean Delaney: We don't get limited by our one on one abilities. If you're a surgeon, you can only cut one case or do surgery as we cut as a kind of an internal, but we only cut one case at a time. Maybe you can write a textbook, which is obviously helpful, or maybe you can train some residents and multiply your efforts.
Dr. Sean Delaney: But ultimately, a lot of what you do is you can help one [00:19:00] animal at a time, and you exchange that time with that one animal. For nutritionists, we could make a formulation, and especially my colleagues that do commercial formulations. It could be beneficial to thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of different dogs and cats.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And so going back to your point about all the research and work that's been done and it's put into commercially prepared foods, it's really, really so valuable. And I bring that up and I'm glad you brought it up because I'm not trying to force people to cook homemade food. I'm not anti commercial. I think that's really helpful to understand because I think sometimes people are doing home cooking, because they don't trust the commercial pet food companies.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And I understand that perspective and I realize the freedom that controlling all the food has, maybe you have particular desires where you want to feed locally and have an impact on the environment, and lower on the food chain. Maybe there's ingredients you want to source because of religious reasons or prepare a certain way whether, Halal or [00:20:00] Kosher.
Dr. Sean Delaney: There's a lot of considerations for why people home cook. But I think if it's because they're fearful of commercial pet food. I really am not an advocate or supporter of that because I think so many animals do so well on commercially prepared pet food. And there's so many good ones out there.
Dr. Sean Delaney: But I think that's always the first line of defense that they should consider.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Yeah, absolutely. When it comes to those, I really also like the fact that they have a lot of therapeutic diets so we can really tailor it to those pets who have problems or metabolic problems, arthritis, all sorts of things. Which I think that Balance It does a really good job of doing those things too, right?
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Helping to, to deal with some of those morbidities that we have in pets.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Yeah, unfortunately not all animals stay healthy. But yeah, that's the, I guess it's it's good to be a veterinarian in that regard, but I think that veterinarians fundamentally would be happy to just see healthy animals for vaccinations and some other preventative things and not have to see sick animals.
Dr. Sean Delaney: But when they are sick, nutrition can play a role. [00:21:00] Not all conditions, not all diseases, but many of them. And in some cases, it's a primary line of therapy. Sometimes it's an additional therapy that can be worth refinement. But ultimately, nutrition is really important and every animal needs to eat.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And having those therapeutic options is really helpful, I think, to manage cases. And we help with that. Initially, as I talked about the origin, what we were doing with homemade diets, and we'll spend all our time with, with multiple diseases, even though they were commercially prepared therapeutic diets, There wasn't necessarily one that treated the dog that had pancreatitis and renal failure and was allergic to chicken, right?
Dr. Sean Delaney: It's just too many different combined conditions and so where are you left if you want to continue to feed appropriately is you have to prepare food and help make it custom. That hasn't changed. That need still exists. I think people are willing to do even more than maybe they were before and our diagnostics have gotten better.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Our other therapies have gotten better. Patients [00:22:00] with multiple comorbidities is increasing. The cases are challenging, and I think that people are choosing to care for their animals and provide that therapy longer than maybe they were historically. And so nutrition has, has come along to help support that when that's needed.
Dr. Sean Delaney: But sometimes it's just simple cases that need a nice therapeutic diet. And for whatever reason, people need to be able to find something, and we provide that resource to them. Both when there's complex cases, when there's simple cases and modifications from just what we would normally feed to a healthy dog or cat is needed.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And the math becomes more important in those situations, right? And so you're, modifying things in a way that maybe if you get it wrong, could cause some harm more rapidly or it could be more concerning or you're having to thread a needle. You have to get a very precise concentration of a particular nutrient or combination of nutrients.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And sometimes those can be in conflict with each other too. And so it's really, it gets [00:23:00] very narrowing and what seems like, hey, it must be okay, they're enjoying eating it. May not be in their best interest. And that's always the challenge is that, when we think about preparing food for ourselves as humans, we aren't usually thinking, boy, I'm a little low on calcium today. Let me put some eggshells into my omelet instead of throwing the eggshells out, right?
Dr. Sean Delaney: We don't think that way. The way we modify and we think about recipes, what do we have available? Maybe time considerations, maybe preferences for seasonality, what's delicious and we modify and we refine and we aren't always as precise with certain things as we might.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Maybe with some spices, maybe with seasoning because, oh, it's going to be too salty, too sweet, over flavored. But overall, I think the challenge in your home cooking for dogs and cats is realizing that it's more scientific in some ways because of the need to hit specific nutrient and concentrations.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And we're feeding to provide all the nutrients they need in that one meal. We don't just [00:24:00] rely on variety to meet those needs. You're gonna feed the same meal every day and day out and we don't do that. And sometimes people say I think that's ridiculous. We don't need to have that level of precision because I'll just feed variety of foods, but left to your own.
Dr. Sean Delaney: A lot of times people just don't ever get enough of those nutrients or they overshoot them because they don't feed the things that would be eaten in nature. And we do things with our food supply that is not natural. And if you think about meat as an example, when we butcher, what does really butchering mean?
Dr. Sean Delaney: It's deboning. So we're removing, you know, macrominerals, things like calcium and phosphorus. We exsanguinate, which is just a fancy word. We drain blood, we talk about halal and kosher and other things. And so there's, there's some, techniques, but a lot of that, some of that is related to how you handle the blood.
Dr. Sean Delaney: But if you think about blood and as veterinarians, we always think about fluid replacement and electrolytes. Blood is a rich source of key electrolytes. What are really electrolytes? There are other minerals that [00:25:00] we need, things like potassium, things like magnesium, things like calcium, things like sodium, things like chloride.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And so if we're draining the blood out of the meat we're eating and we're deboning it, we're losing a lot of minerals that we need to think about adding back in. And then if we think also about what we choose, we prefer to, at least in Western societies, I'll say, North America, to feed muscle meat mostly.
Dr. Sean Delaney: We don't feed a lot of organ meat anymore. And if we go back to our, maybe, I'll say my grandparents, I don't know your age with me, your great grandparents, I'm a little older than you, but um, they used to eat their liver, right? And they used to eat these organ meats, and we've gotten away from that.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And when we don't feed, especially organ meat, we lose a lot of trace minerals, we lose a lot of vitamins that would otherwise be in the diet. And when people feed normal recipes that aren't really thought about and formulated, it's very likely that they will not put back in those nutrients that would have been a prey species if they had been out there, a dog taking down, or a wolf taking down some prey is going to take in blood.
Dr. Sean Delaney: They're going to eat [00:26:00] some of the bone marrow, which has some calcium in there. They're going to break some bones open. They're going to eat the liver preferentially. I talked about the wolves in Yellowstone reintroduction. That's one of the first things they're going to eat. And that's smart because they need all those vitamins and trace minerals to produce that next litter and to allow them to produce high quality milk for their offspring and to enable them to form normally during gestation or pregnancy.
Dr. Sean Delaney: But I think one of the things that comes to mind is that when we go, okay, if we're going to leave it to our own devices and we're going to feed all these wonderful rich foods. Sometimes people say, that's great and fine, but we don't do that for humans. We don't.. We're fine, we live even longer, that's one of the things we were just talking about, unfortunately we don't live long. What's probably missed is we do fortify our foods. And back in the 10s and the 20s, I guess I have to think about last century, not this century,
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Yeah,
Dr. Sean Delaney: but, in other words, but, there were common nutritional diseases you would see in parts of the world, in the country even, in the U.S. [00:27:00] and you'd see people have goiters because of iodine deficiencies. And so if you look at salt most of the time, it's iodized salt. That's not the natural state of salt, right? Maybe if you get sea salt, there's a little bit of iodine. But they iodize that, so it's a fortification to help the population from not developing a nutritional deficiency.
Dr. Sean Delaney: We think about a lot of our grains. When you buy flour, when you buy pasta, when you buy things, it'll say enriched. What does that really mean? What is that enrichment? Well it's a fortification. And that fortification is the most common B vitamins that we would be deficient in if it wasn't. And iron, so you're not anemic and you don't have these, you can look up wonderful diseases with B vitamin deficiencies that used to happen in humans with these horrible skin lesions that would happen and develop.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And then you go okay. What about other things? Think about milk. Milk is fortified with vitamin D and often vitamin A as well. And sometimes we forget that. And that was because of retinopathies and things that would [00:28:00] happen with people and vitamin D and rickets. And, I talked about dogs and being used as a model for humans.
Dr. Sean Delaney: A lot of the early rickets prevention to figure out how do we figure out the source of vitamin D. It was to prevent rickets in children and using the dog as a model and figuring out what kind of massive doses we could give one time, like line up all the school kids or line up all the little kids and give one, because unlike water soluble vitamins that are urinated out, fat soluble stay with you.
Dr. Sean Delaney: So can we give a big dose of vitamin D? And does it have to be vitamin D3, which is cholecalciferol from animal sources? Or could it be vitamin D2 or ergocalciferol from like mushrooms and plant based sources? It turns out both work and which are safer and how much and stuff. But the point being is that we do, as humans, fortify foods for the common deficiencies and then on top of that you can go and look at what the human nutritionists are about. A lot of us do run around deficient and we do have deficiencies [00:29:00] even with that fortification of some nutrients and especially if our diet's not that great.
Dr. Sean Delaney: It can be a problem. So I think that when we want to make a homemade diet. We can't solely rely on the dog and we can't think of the cat and go, well, they really aren't eating the way they should because I'm feeding them some chicken because they're a carnivore. When you're feeding them chicken flesh, you're not eating the whole chick, right?
Dr. Sean Delaney: You're not the whole avium and stuff. And so we have to be very cognizant about fortification. And I alluded to the fact that we, short term, get calories, get protein, get fat, get carbohydrate, right? But we really need to think about all the trace minerals and add those back in. And that's where, obviously, we spend a lot of our time here. I'm sitting in a, basically a factory, making vitamins and minerals to fortify food, or making software that says, here, here's a combination of supplements you go out and buy to add those things that aren't present in the food back in.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: With your supplements that you guys make, is it just kind of [00:30:00] a, a generalized supplement, like kind of one for all dogs? Do you have them very specific for diseases?
Dr. Sean Delaney: A combination. So we have eight different supplements. We have a few for different conditions. For example, we have a low copper supplement. I have to be careful because the FDA has restrictions about how I say to the general public how products are used.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Oh, interesting.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Okay.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Yeah, so the FDA has very strict, strict rules.
Dr. Sean Delaney: So if you ever see like a Hills or a Royal Canin or a Purina, you'll see that they'll use like lettering or some kind of non obvious name. It doesn't say kidney diet, right? It'll have a letter that alludes to it. And the idea is that
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: KD.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Yeah.
Dr. Sean Delaney: It's this alphabet soup. And the reason for that is that the FDA has very specific guidance about how you can give information to the general public, because really you're making a drug claim, right?
Dr. Sean Delaney: Cause it's a treatment claim. But it hasn't gone through the normal course of what the FDA says to make drug claims, but they recognize that no food is going to go through that drug claim [00:31:00] process. And so they've carved out a very specific therapeutic guidelines. And one of those is you can't say to lay people what that product is for.
Dr. Sean Delaney: So I can say that it's for a low copper diet, but I can't say as to treat a specific disease. Similarly we have supplements that are for a low phosphorus diet, but I can't say what disease that would be as the manufacturer. Now, if you're the veterinarian, or you're not involved with the company, you can say that that's appropriate for this.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And if we're talking just veterinary and not veterinary, and I'm not being recorded, and there's nothing secretive about this, this is to meet the FDA's rules, I can say, of course, this is for this disease, if it's controlled. And they have very specific guidelines and compliance policies. But we do have products that help people with specific needs for specific conditions that can be made into a food.
Dr. Sean Delaney: We have also some products for cats when they need a low phosphorus diet. And then interestingly, you can, I talked about those Xeon servers, you can use it one [00:32:00] size fits all supplement in certain circumstances and not run into issues. If you get the formulation just right. So we actually have some patents because they are so unique and we figured that out many years ago about how to optimize it, but it doesn't work all the time.
Dr. Sean Delaney: So I talked about those hundred thousand different runs. We could get it to about 80, 85 percent optimized. So 80, 85 percent of the time it would work. And then the other 15, 20 percent of the time it won't work. And that's why we know we have human supplements and where that's helpful is to think about it.
Dr. Sean Delaney: If you have a powder, so our product is a powder, that's all the nutrients that you need to add in together. You can't separate those out. For some reason, in a particular combination of foods, you want a little bit more, let's say, vitamin D. Let's say you're making a vegetarian diet for a dog.
Dr. Sean Delaney: There's going to be no vitamin D in that unless you're using some mushrooms. But let's say you're just using tofu or something and rice and for some medical reason you need to feed, because there are times when you may feed a vegetarian or plant [00:33:00] based diet, you need a lot of vitamin D. What if the other case, you have another patient or another situation where you're feeding a salmon based diet and very rich in salmon.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Well, salmon is very rich in vitamin D. And so there's this sweet spot where you don't want to have too much vitamin D because you don't want to make it toxic because dogs are very sensitive, much more than humans, to vitamin D. But you also want to have enough and you have to think about in relation to maybe calcium.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Maybe in both cases you need about the same amount of calcium. So you don't want, when you need a lot of vitamin D, get way too much calcium, and tofu sometimes has calcium in it and so you have to be careful about not going too high on that and get your ratios wrong and stuff. And maybe on the salmon side, you actually want the same amount of calcium, but you want very little vitamin D.
Dr. Sean Delaney: So all-in-one supplements work well for a lot of cases, but you have to do the mathematics to do it. It's also why the software is helpful because dosing is dependent, not on a body weight like we think of medications. It's based [00:34:00] on what's being fed because it's going to look at all those nutrients and make sure that it's not feeding too little of them, but not too much of it.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And that's really where the challenge sometimes comes in. And you'll see people say why can't you just tell me per 10 pounds or per pound? It's. You could get a rough estimate of what it might be, but I don't know what you're feeding. And unless I know what the base foods are providing nutritionally, I won't know where the gaps are, or where things are really close to the maximum amount that's tolerable.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Dosing a supplement is an interesting calculation and how you think about it and making sure and realizing that sometimes the supplement isn't going to work, but a lot of times it does. It's good for us because that's how we, as I say, keep the lights on and have a business and, and afford the support we provide to the community and stuff.
Dr. Sean Delaney: But at the same time, I think it's important to recognize that it doesn't always work. And sometimes the combinations don't work. And one of the things that I'm very happy that we do, and sometimes it's not seen as this way, I'm fine [00:35:00] when our software doesn't work and says no we can't make something work, because without that knowledge some might think, oh it's perfectly fine to do and so it's really, really good. It looks for every option now.
Dr. Sean Delaney: In fact, it didn't used to, but now it literally looks at every option and says, is this even feasible or possible? And it can tell you yes or no with absolute certainty of this combination of ingredients will work or not. And when it doesn't work, it will give you some information as to why it doesn't work.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And I, I think that's helpful because without it, the only feedback you might have is, I like to buy this. I feel good preparing it for my dog or my cat. They enjoy eating it. They seem to eat it, but they don't necessarily know that it's not optimal. And you don't know it's not optimal. And looking at it, I have a guess.
Dr. Sean Delaney: But even veterinarians might not fully have an understanding if it's not optimal because they need the mathematics. And the only reason I have a little bit is just experience. I've seen enough , but I can't do all the math in my head, even if I'm the one that originated all the mathematics, because there's just too [00:36:00] many variables.
Dr. Sean Delaney: If you think about 40 some odd essential nutrients, and even if you have three ingredients, you're now talking 120 variables, basically, and who can add that? Maybe someone.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: I'm sure some genius can, but..
Dr. Sean Delaney: Yeah, I'm sure, but it's very unlikely that they can keep that all in their mind, and it would be very, very challenging.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And you really need the math to be done, and you need software to help you.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Yeah. And I know you have the TLC service. And that's where if I remember correctly, the registered technicians will jump in and help with some of these cases. Does that help with some of these more complicated cases?
Dr. Sean Delaney: Yeah, so the TLC service, or the Technician Limited Consultation service will play on the word how we got the initialism to match with the tender loving care is really born out of the fact that we have a challenge in my specialty. I mentioned how we're diplomats of the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine.
Dr. Sean Delaney: My colleagues in that college include internal medicine in small and large animal. There's cardiologists, neurologists, oncologists, but we're the smallest specialty by far. [00:37:00] There's only about 90 of us and a subset of those are the ones that do small animal clinical nutrition, probably 30 or so. I haven't exactly counted, but that's a rough number.
Dr. Sean Delaney: So about a third, the other third are working at pet food companies, as I mentioned and working in industry. Or working in research and don't do any clinical work or administrative roles at vet schools and things like that. And you have about 30 folks that do this work and that's not a whole lot.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And the challenge is that because of that, there's a huge demand. Recently the ACVIM prepared their annual report. And our recent addition to their specialty. And so they showed the number of requests in their directory for the different specialties. And then another one, how many specialties?
Dr. Sean Delaney: Internal medicine, I will get this wrong, small animal internist. It's at least 1,500, roughly internists that are reported versus the 30 or so. And I think most of them are clinically practicing and probably that's about accurate. And they had half as many requests, like 30 some odd thousand requests [00:38:00] to the nutritionist were like 70,000.
Dr. Sean Delaney: So you can see the absolute disproportionate number of requests and need and interest in help with nutrition to the number of specialists that can provide that service. And so although our recipe builder is available and used by veterinarians such as yourself, by lay people, by other specialists in other areas. There are those specialists that are doing those consultations and there just isn't enough of them.
Dr. Sean Delaney: So some of them have four week lead times or longer. Some just say I've got to focus on those comorbidity cases because it's not worth it for me to do simple cases. It's not worth me to do healthy animal recipes. And so there's this disconnect. And so what we decided is we could provide something in between.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Maybe you don't want to use the software yourself, but you'd like some hand holding how to use it. We had a team, we have about four registered veterinary nurses, I'll use that term. Some of them are actually technically Certified Veterinary Technicians, some of them are Licensed Veterinary Technicians, some are Registered Veterinary Technicians because of where their jurisdictions [00:39:00] are, right?
Dr. Sean Delaney: But I will use the term that I think are still preferring of Veterinary Nurses. And so we thought we could leverage that and provide that opportunity to go, Hey, they're everyday helping people use our software. You want more hand holding? Provide us with a small fee so we can support that and help you use it.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And go, Yep. Maybe you were doing this on your own and you didn't get any results that work and we could go, you're right. Or, Or, here's what we can do, would that work for you? Or, you know what, you really do need to go to another board certified veterinary nutritionist that offers that consultation service because the case is so complex.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Or, maybe things that we would want to do optimally for the multiple conditions, can't be and we have to prioritize. So maybe we have common one that comes up sometimes is if you're, have a patient that has heart failure and they're having accumulation of, or third spacing of, some type of fluid in their abdomen or their chest cavity, [00:40:00] you might be tapping that and pulling protein out and they need a higher protein to support that loss.
Dr. Sean Delaney: They can maybe have because a long term use of diuretics, or maybe some other reason, have some renal disease or kidney disease. And because protein is the main source of dietary phosphorus, we have to reduce protein in the diet to enable that phosphorus restriction, which is key to kidney disease management.
Dr. Sean Delaney: If we have those two competing needs, higher protein for the heart failure patient, and lower protein enable phosphorus restriction. How do you resolve that? How do you prioritize that? The software we have isn't going to make that decision. And so a boarded nutritionist sometimes just needs to be involved and say, we're going to make the best choice we can.
Dr. Sean Delaney: They'll review the medical records. They'll review the diet history. They'll discuss it with the veterinarian has a very important, valid, a veterinarian client patient relationship, the VCPR, the one that the FDA wants to see as well for what we were talking about earlier. And then [00:41:00] go and talk to the client or communicate to the client.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Here's how we're going to prioritize and then how we're going to monitor what we're doing. Because maybe we think this is the best option. Maybe we decided to go with a little more protein. It's too low. And now we're getting malnourishment and it's not supporting and that patients now getting third spacing because they're hypoalbuminemic.
Dr. Sean Delaney: They have low blood protein because they just didn't get enough dietary protein. And my colleagues have a huge, huge respect for them. I'm very happy. I've trained quite a few specialists. My last one recently got boarded, Yuki Okada, in the Bay Area. Probably my last resident I'm going to train.
Dr. Sean Delaney: But they do really important work that's very unique, but they're just so limited in what they can do because it takes a lot of time to do that type of work. Very important, and people are struggling. I talked to a veterinarian today that referred and said, I gotta find something else because I cannot find a solution that's fast enough because of the lead time.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Sometimes it's an economic choice. I think that veterinary nutritionists, given their training and how much time they spend on the case are under charging, frankly. [00:42:00] May not seem that time when someone says, Oh my gosh, it's $600 to do a consultation with some places. But if you realize that they're going to spend an hour or two evaluating the diet and medical record and an hour talking to the veterinarian and another couple hours formulating, writing up all that six or seven hours.
Dr. Sean Delaney: If you were to go to a boarded surgeon who has equal amounts of training and sometimes less, because it takes sometimes depending on what route you go and it takes longer to get board certified, not always, but historically it could be for some, because some of PhDs and masters. $600 for seven hour surgery would never happen, right?
Dr. Sean Delaney: You would be charged $6,000 or more, right? And so I think that, and it can be just as impactful, right? Depending on the case. And I'm not saying anything against my surgery colleagues. I value them greatly. Don't get me wrong. But I think that there's a challenge in our profession at times where services that have tangible, hands on aspects to it are [00:43:00] valued more than what's up in our brain and our knowledge and information we can share. And I'm not judging that but I think they should be equal or at times more value for what we know than what we can do with our hands.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: There's only so few, so few nutritionists.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Yeah.
Dr. Sean Delaney: That is.. That's very true and and I don't know the solution to that, frankly.
Dr. Sean Delaney: I wish I did, but I think that what I can do is to provide some good initial solutions with our software, provide solutions to those colleagues to make their life more efficient so that they can do some of the work that they're doing for others well. And then hopefully we can grow our specialty.
Dr. Sean Delaney: I trained, I said my last resident, but I trained more than my share. Given the size of our college, I've trained over 10 folks. Given that we have 90 I've, I've done my, done my part but, but I do think that we really do need to have more nutritionists because. As I said, every animal eats and it can be very impactful on the outcomes of [00:44:00] their, of their management.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And it's a nice specialty that we have. We just need more of us.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Right. Absolutely.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: You know, you were talking about like the finances of it. I actually wanted to ask you about this paper that you had written. So you wrote a paper called Home Cooked Diets Cost More Than Commercially Prepared Dry Kibble Diets For Dogs With Chronic Enteropathies.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: So it's where you actually found that it was cheaper to buy dry dog food than it was to make the dog food. But canned dog food was roughly about the same. Is that correct?
Dr. Sean Delaney: Yeah, and that's a study that came in JAVMA. Val Parker was the lead initiator on that. It had come out of some other abstracts that I was participant with Megan Shepherd out of Virginia Tech. So Val Parker is a faculty member at Ohio State. Megan Shepherd at the time was at Virginia Tech, or Virginia and Maryland Regional Occupational.
Dr. Sean Delaney: They have this, but it's physically on the campus of Virginia Tech, so we just say Virginia Tech. It's easier than the, the crazy..
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Big name they have, yeah.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Bit long, yeah. That I'm probably not getting right anyway. But the point being is that I think sometimes when we talk [00:45:00] about reasons people choose to home cook is they think it'll be less expensive for them.
Dr. Sean Delaney: So we really wanted to explore in a variety of studies, is that true or not? The hypothesis and my expectation, I think our expectations Megan and Val are both board certified veterinary nutritionist was that it is not, right? That is not a reason for you to prepare home cooked food. Dry food is going to be your most economical, even therapeutic dry food, which people say to your point earlier, it's more expensive because all the research and support that has to go in the precision, et cetera.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Even then it's not. And so we did a more expansive study looking at chronic enteropathies because usually the number one reason people will home cook when they are forced to versus choose to is for food allergy or some type of that. And so looking at that and looking and comparing it, we found that it was not, it was what our expectation, but we proved it very scientifically and I think it was helpful I was one of the authors because I don't make any money from commercial therapeutic foods, right?
Dr. Sean Delaney: Prepared foods I don't have involvement. I [00:46:00] have a vested interest in some ways in saying, yeah, homemade food, let's go homemade food because of the supplements, right? And so I think it was important for me to be involved with that and have obviously the academic involvement as well. But we were very thorough and it's clear that dry food is the most economical way to feed.
Dr. Sean Delaney: There's probably one exception to that with renal dry foods. There's since some very specific scenarios that we saw in the abstract that maybe it's cost comparable, but what's missing in that when you make that cost comparable is your time, right? We can't calculate someone's time and so if you put in your time and think about how much time is it going to take for you to prepare that food, then it will not be economical or cost comparable.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And so dry therapeutic food is always your best option if you're trying to control your costs. Exclusive wet food feeding is going to be more expensive than home cooking again. And then not included, but just as a little side, we had a comment in the discussion. Fresh frozen, which are really mostly just frozen.
Dr. Sean Delaney: It's not really fresh. It's freshly frozen, but still frozen is going to be more expensive than [00:47:00] all of them because there's a lot of costs involved with logistics, keeping things frozen.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Shipping things.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Shipping things and stuff. So it's not really surprising that that's the case.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And so I think that if cost is driving someone to home cook, really, in most scenarios, you shouldn't be considering, consider dry food. And I think, people feel at times like, oh, I don't like something that's in the commercial dry food. I hear that all the time. And it's usually because they don't understand what they're looking at.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And so we talk about a dislike of the word byproduct. It has a bad term. People, byproduct, byproduct. But I want to talk about that for a moment. Is, we talked about the wolf and we talked about being reintroduced. What's the first thing you eat? What's going to have the most vitamins and most trace minerals? Liver. What is liver if you're putting it in a pet food? It's byproduct.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Right.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And so some companies have gotten clever of saying, gizzard, heart, they break out all the different byproducts, liver. Now, [00:48:00] maybe some say, I don't want any chicken feet, but that's cultural. I have, Chinese friends who, that's a delicacy.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: They have that all the time.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Exactly.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Right? And, and so I think that when we think about the nutritional aspects of this, some of the things that we think of as byproducts are the most nutritious, that we want to use. And in therapeutic foods, it may be really important, and I want to get to that. I have formulated therapeutic commercially prepared foods, both when I was at Natura. We never launched it, but then even with balance it, we had some therapeutic foods and what you find is that if you need to hit something very, very precisely like we were talking about before, you need to know exactly what those ingredients are.
Dr. Sean Delaney: How do you get really precise about ingredients? The more you refine or process, bad words, but the more precision and consistency again. And what I mean by that is if we were looking to make a let's say kidney diet. We talked about the need to restrict and control phosphorus. Brown rice is very wholesome, [00:49:00] right?
Dr. Sean Delaney: It sounds like a great ingredient, but brown rice hasn't been milled, hasn't been processed. And so it has some of the husk. It has some endosperm. That inner portion is super nutritious. Why we like brown rice, what makes it brown and isn't just the starchy center that we think of with white rice that's been polished and been milled.
Dr. Sean Delaney: That's super phosphorous rich, and it makes it really hard to make a phosphorus restricted diet because you are also introducing it. And someone says why are we even using grains? The point being is that we need to dilute out protein. We talked about the protein is more rich in phosphorus.
Dr. Sean Delaney: So we have to do that. Well, you say why don't we just feed all fat? A lot of dogs and a lot cats can't tolerate just a whole bunch of fat. It's not optimal. They may have issues with tolerating that. Or it's really really cost prohibitive because we know that certain fatty acids in too high or in the wrong ratio have inflammatory effects that cause faster progression of kidney disease.
Dr. Sean Delaney: So we want what's called a [00:50:00] lower N6 to N3 fatty acid ratio. Those fatty acids that we would want to get from using a whole bunch of animal fat may not be low enough in that ratio, may throw that ratio off. So we can't just throw in more fat. So we use carbs to get the ratio. To get the protein down faster.
Dr. Sean Delaney: So we're using it, but what does it look like to, Oh, the first ingredient is a grain. Okay let's talk about grain free. I won't even get into any of the issues that have been raised by that. But what I will say is that we can't use legumes because legumes are very protein rich and phosphorus rich.
Dr. Sean Delaney: We'll go, okay what if we could use tubers? Sweet potato, potato. They're very potassium rich. Potassium is something else you want to control in renal disease. So you can see how you fall into grains, and then you go, okay, grains have to be listed first because we have to use the most to dilute all these other things and control these other components.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And then you go, we want to be polished, so we don't bring in other nutrients we need to control because of the mineral controls we need to do. And then you go, geez, I really want to have a nice calcium to phosphorus [00:51:00] ratio and not have too much phosphorus. A lot of the sources of proteins that we can get it for pet foods, if we're making a pet food has to come from what isn't being used for the human food supply.
Dr. Sean Delaney: We talked about the human food supply, right? We butcher, right? We remove the flesh becomes somewhat cost prohibitive to do that. And there's another aspect that I'll get to. So we, what do we get? We get what's called mechanically de boned. So let's say you have a chicken carcass and you've taken all the nice pieces off where you might have the chicken back you'll spin it, or you'll do something to get the little pieces of rib meat out of the chicken.
Dr. Sean Delaney: You're still getting a little bit of bone fragment. Even though that's pretty high quality and it's still from a human source. Or you're going to use other means. You're going to get calcium phosphorus component and bone fragments in it. So as you reach for a meal or a byproduct, it becomes hard.
Dr. Sean Delaney: So what do you go, hmm, I'd like something nutritious that can be butchered and not bring in a lot of calcium with it. Well, Liver. But it's byproduct, right? So you get into this really [00:52:00] interesting discussion at times. About what is it you are fearful of versus what is needed by the patient. And so I've had many, many consultations where people are coming to me for a homemade diet and are adamant about a homemade diet because they are fearful of the therapeutic foods and the ingredients that are used in them.
Dr. Sean Delaney: But if we talk through them, they realize why it's being done, why it's beneficial, and they still have their choice. Happy to support them to make a homemade diet, but maybe what they perceived as being bad isn't as bad and maybe there's a reason for it in that particular. And then you have to, kind of, you're at least more informed about the decision you're making. And maybe if there was inherently, because I deal with this a lot guilt, unfortunately, of, oh, I don't feel good about feeding this food. Because that's an important part of the human animal bond is how do we feed?
Dr. Sean Delaney: And there's guilt. Maybe the guilt can be removed to go in this particular case. In this particular condition. This is actually [00:53:00] optimal, and it's okay to say I can't afford to feed a human grade homemade food. It's okay to say I don't have the time to do it. It's okay to say I just don't have the comfort level in the kitchen.
Dr. Sean Delaney: I don't have the cooking skills to do it, right? And it's okay to reach for the commercial food. And that's going to be a much, much better choice than picking a food that maybe otherwise for a healthy animal that has that protein source that's in the first ingredient or that has, you know, the ingredients you prefer or seem more wholesome, and for a healthy animal, perfectly fine.
Dr. Sean Delaney: But now that we're in a case where there's a medical condition, we have to really treat food as a medication, and be much more precise, and maybe make some choices, and prioritize some ingredient selections that otherwise you may not want to, but are the right ones for this particular condition, and to treat what you're trying to treat.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And, ultimately, make the animal, the dog, the cat, feel as good as it can for as [00:54:00] long as it can, because that's everyone's desire, right? We're doing this to find something that isn't going to make them feel bad. It's going to not hurt the disease that they're doing because food should be enjoyed.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Food should be something that if we can, is looked at and seen as pleasurable. And I know we're probably wrapping up our time, but I'd take a little story if I could. So I talked about training people, and I'll call out Sally Perea, who's one of the nutritionists at Royal Canin.
Dr. Sean Delaney: I worked with her for very long, she was one of my residents when I was at UC Davis. And I remember an internal medicine resident having a case, and she formulated up one of these special diets that we were taught, homemade diets and lots of comorbidities in this dog and things were going well.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And she got a call from the resident internal medicine cause she was doing her residency and said, yeah, things were going really well, but the dog died because of your diet. But the client is really happy. So none of [00:55:00] this is making sense. Like she's, oh my God, what have I done?
Dr. Sean Delaney: Did I misformulate something? What's happened? What, why is the client happy about that? Why are What, what is going on? She goes I got to tell you the story. You formulated this and the dog had not been eating well. And it was the main reason, it was the main reason some people decided to unfortunately end the lives of their dogs and cats because they aren't eating well.
Dr. Sean Delaney: So it's a really key decision criteria for them. You formulated this appropriate diet, they started making it, dog was eating really well, loved the food. In fact, loved the food, whenever the food was put down, would come running for the food, unlike before. Really sick animal, had a lot of medical conditions, I said.
Dr. Sean Delaney: So what happened was, been going on for two or three months, being fed this food, being managed as best could, but it was a life threatening and life ending type of disease and disease processes. Client makes the meal that my resident, Sally Perea, now works at Royal Canin, high on R&D for them. [00:56:00] Puts down the bowl, dog hears the bowl come down, starts running across the kitchen, midway through, collapses and dies.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Oh no, oh.
Dr. Sean Delaney: The client was so thrilled because she was doing everything she knew she could, and up until that moment, dog was not eating well, had been eating for a few months well. And she said, It died in happiness.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Exactly, knew it was going to get food. And yeah..
Dr. Sean Delaney: And, and that human animal bond makes me almost tear up with thinking about that story, but it's the core as nutritionists we're doing the best we could creating something that was appropriate, enjoyed, and extending the lifespan as best we could with the tools we have. And I always think about that case.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: That's amazing, I love that story.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Good one to end on.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Right. Exactly. Dr. Delaney, do you have anything else you want to add for us?
Dr. Sean Delaney: I don't. I just want to thank your listeners to listening me stream of consciousness. I hope it was somewhat [00:57:00] interesting at times and moments. I want to thank you for inviting me. If whether checkout balance it or not, I do encourage you, if you ever need a consultation the two places to go for my colleagues.
Dr. Sean Delaney: VetNutritionist.com will take you to a directory where you can find nutritionists. It's on our site, but we don't have a relationship with any of those nutritionists, but it has a nice, here's where you can find them, phone numbers, here's what they will offer. Some of them have what their costs are, if you're trying to price shop, et cetera, where they are regionally, if you want to keep in the same time zone or VetSpecialists.com.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And that's the one that ACVIM I referenced that has all the requests that come through. And you can find not just my nutrition colleagues there, but you can certainly find, as I said, neurologist, oncologist, internal medicine specialists. I think I said all the different ones that didn't leave any of them out.
Dr. Sean Delaney: But I would remind your listeners as well. I think you're a general practitioner..
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Actually I'm an emergency vet, which is..
Dr. Sean Delaney: Oh, I did not know that. Oh, really? Yeah.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Which is funny 'cause I use your, like I said, I use your website all the time. I've talked [00:58:00] to people constantly about it.
Dr. Sean Delaney: I apologize.
Dr. Sean Delaney: So as a criticalist, as we would call you, I'll call you a criticalist if that's the way, or an emergency vet. I think that it's really important as fellow specialists that the veterinary specialist, the veterinarian relationship, the client relationship, the patient relationship, we work together well.
Dr. Sean Delaney: And I think it's important to remember that there are different phases of when you might need help, but the key is to remember that whether it be the veterinary nurse we talked about. The veterinarian, the veterinary specialist, whether it be in emergency, critical care, nutrition, surgery we brought up, all of us, our vested interest is to try to help the patient we have before us.
Dr. Sean Delaney: We all recognize that we have our limitations. Sometimes it's not us that can help, but we can help you find that resource. We really, I think, I'm so grateful every day that I'm a veterinarian. I wanted to be a veterinarian my whole life and I'm pleased I get to be a veterinarian. And I think we are a community [00:59:00] of such caring people that want to help dogs and cats.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Whatever means we do it. But, emergency veterinarian who decides, I'm going to have a podcast or a video cast, not your normal thing. Or whether it be a nutritionist decides, I'm going to go work with software developers to make, do mathematics, right? We don't know exactly what's going to be our exact path.
Dr. Sean Delaney: We all know we have a calling to help animals. And please reach out, if you have a listener, to your local veterinarian. They will help you. Veterinary nurse practice. They are, at times, very busy people. Recognize that. Be kind to them. We have an issue amongst our profession, the challenges that we face, because we all, not just nutritionists being busy, all of us being busy.
Dr. Sean Delaney: Be kind to us, but know we are here to help you.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Dr. Delaney. I really appreciate you being on here. I learned, I actually learned so much today, so I really, really appreciate it.
Dr. Sean Delaney: I'm glad to hear that. Thanks so much.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: All right, thanks.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: A huge thank you once again to Dr. Delaney for gracing our podcast with his invaluable insights and to his brother in law for creating such a [01:00:00] phenomenal resource. I find myself recommending their website to pet parents almost on a daily basis and I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to share this all with you guys as well.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: A special shout out to Shawn Hyberg for his superb editing skills that bring this podcast to life. And to Kelly Dwyer for her stellar work on the website. Exciting things are definitely coming on the horizon as next week we'll be diving into the world of feline behavior with Dr. Cerná, affectionately known as the Crazy Cat Vet. Her dedication to cats is nothing short of extraordinary, and I can't wait for you all to hear our discussion.
Dr. Tyler Sugerman: A heartfelt thank you to everyone in our listening community. We'll reconnect next week, but until then, never forget the importance of keeping your pets happy, healthy, and safe. See you next time.