While not directly related to life/health extension, this article shows, if true, a very interesting phenomena with no explanation at present.
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For what it’s worth, our 1 year old city dog was starting to get a bit portly (a fairly typical issue for city dogs) so I put him on a low carb (“keto”, but higher protein) diet of homemade chow (some kind of fresh meat mixed with olive oil and/or coconut oil, and shredded cabbage); he had been eating a “science-based” kibble (pellets) which the vet insisted was the best food for any dog. In roughly three months of “keto” he dropped from 26 pounds to 18.6 pounds. Energy is great, coat is great, he is happy and so is the vet. And he loves the food. He essentially eats what I do (I’ve been on it for 1.75 years and highly recommend it). I’ll probably start him on pulsed Rapamycin when I start it on myself (working my way up to this).
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Of course, have you seen what kind of junk they put in pet food sugar grains rice etc
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My nephew has a dedicated reptile room. I wonder how rapamycin would do there?
I used to work for some people who developed and sell a better pet food. A slowly evolving field.
There’s a large pet product convention every year here in Las Vegas. I need to go and see it. Pet life/healthspan extension is in the embryo stage.
Is there a place where I can find a recipe for the chow? My mother’s dog is getting portly, so I would like to suggest this to her. Thanks …
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For my dog’s “keto” chow, I essentially use three ingredients, with the weights based on your dog’s “ideal” weight (I’ll give the weights I use based on my dog’s ideal weight of 20 lbs.):
o. 195g of some sort of meat per day: the recipe I originally used specifies 80/20 ground beef (the dog will need the fats for energy) but I substitute all kinds of meat including cubed beef, pork, chicken, turkey, etc. 195g is something like a 4” diameter circle maybe 1” deep, loosely packed with meat.
o. Some healthy oil. I use coconut oil and/or olive oil. You can probably use butter, too, but I haven’t. I use maybe a tablespoon. If I use leaner meat I put in more oils, and Vice versa: I gave him veal wurst the last two days (we ate it, too) around one hotdog size with no oil (it has plenty of fat). If you worry he’s not going to the bathroom I put more oil in and that seems to work.
o. Some fiber. I typically use shredded cabbage, just around half a “handful”. I’ve used lettuce as well. He also likes carrots and celery but since I’m trying to limit carbs I avoid too much carrots.
These are all mixed together to make a “chow”.
I feed him twice a day, but you can probably do anything that works for you. We may eventually add a multivitamin if it is necessary but he appears very healthy to the vet, and his coat is shiny and healthy, and his energy is very good.
When I was trying to reduce his weight I cut this down by 2/3rds and gave him homemade chicken broth during the day as well (which he loved).
This all worked very well. He loves the food, and I’ve seen him avoid kibble spilled on the street.
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Thanks very much. I’ll suggest this to my mother & see if she thinks it could work.
Vets recommend pet foods that have been thoroughly tested in clinical trials. That narrows it down to basically a handful of companies–Purina, Iams/Eukanuba, Science Diet, Royal Canin. The dry forms are all baked extruded junk high in AGEs that meet nutrient requirements. I whined to the vet about this and he said, more or less, yes, you are right, you can feed them homemade, but 1/3. The biggest issue with homemade tends to be the calcium/phosphorus ratio, which most people don’t bother with.
So I do 1/2 homemade, 1/2 commercial. I also strictly limit their portions and walk them several miles a day (unless it rains) so that they stay lean.
The vet said the biggest problem with pet nutrition by far is overfeeding.
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I know it rubs 80% of the people on this list the wrong way, but I’ll say it again. Your pet cat or dog is a carnivore and they need organs and bones and raw meat. Throw them a pigeon or a rat or something once in a while and you will add years of healthy life. Also Rapamycin, but that’s later.
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Do you have a reference for that? Or any credible evidence that organ/bone/raw meat diets lead to longer lifespans? The evidence I’ve read indicates that such diets can be dangerous due to parasites.
On the other hand, we do have direct evidence that dogs evolved to adapt to starch. Different breeds of dogs have different AMY2B copy numbers, conferring increases in starch digestion.
The genomic signature of dog domestication reveals adaptation to a starch-rich diet
Yes, I see a parade of overfed dogs being walked every day.
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No reference, nutrition is a strange field, you can do whatever you want.
I raised a litter of greyhound dogs with my father in law decades ago. They later raced and one of them did really well. When they were small I went to a local dog food plant and asked the nutrition guy what I should feed the young greyhound dogs. He looked at us with a straight face and said their plant based food was essentially identical to meat and so there would be no difference. He believed it.
My father in law knew lots of people at the track and the trainers just laughed. They said the dogs had no prayer on that crap and we had to buy a frozen ground raw meat slab from a certain place and feed a certain amount every day. That’s what all the dogs got.
When I started growing mushrooms, I heard there was one of those places where you can go and expose things to radiation for a short time to sterilize them in Sioux City (hour away). So I called and tried to get them to do it for me for a bag of corn. It would save pressure cooking for 3 hours so I thought it was worth a try. Their rates are based on the amount of stuff they’re doing for you and the fee would have been outrageous for me. I was surprised so I asked him what they usually do. He said pet food almost exclusively. I think 3 pallets at a time, and they only leave it in there for a few minutes.
I realize the food that maximizes performance is not necessarily the one that maximizes longevity.
It’s hard to know who to believe on these things, but I try to go as close as possible to the food of the ancestors. The ancestors did not eat processed, irradiated plant proteins.
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My 12.5 year old Doberman has been on Smallbatch raw food for about 7 years now and she’s never been overweight once in that time. Everyone tells me she doesn’t look or act 12.5 years old. She poops once a day like clockwork and never has the butthole juice (anal glands) leaking out. I think it gets expressed when she poops now because her keto shits are harder than they would be with kibble.
She gets 4mg Rapa twice weekly. I know she isn’t going to live forever but she’s enjoying life and happy due to diet, exercise, and Rapa.
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