No Blood In Meat?!?!

In this episode of Challenging Pet Health, Dr. Katie and Clayton talk about the importance of blood as a supplement. We know the discussion of blood can be icky but our experts want to break through the ick because studies show that many pets are often lacking in essential vitamins and minerals but did you know that many of those same vitamins and minerals can actually be found in blood?! During their discussion these two experts break down and explain why there isn't blood in fresh meat, what important vitamins and minerals are actually available in blood and mention an amazing new blood supplement coming out of New Zeland that can be added to your pet's food.

For more information on specific products Dr. Katie and Clayton recommend check out Dr. Katie's store at https://drkaties.com/

Check out Claytons podcast Pet Business Disrupters https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pet-business-disruptors/id1759599442

CREDITS

Executive Producer: Kathryn Rager

Producer: Jessica Leigh

Editor: Rob Bergsma

Social Media Manager: Shana Allan

Thanks to MaxLuxe Studios @maxluxmedia

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

A dog or a cat like would have naturally drank blood. They wouldn't naturally have drunk goat's milk. Like their little paws wouldn't have been able to like pump it out that well.

SPEAKER_02 0:10

If they came across some, they would definitely drink it. But it wouldn't have been available to them. Together, an industry disruptor.

SPEAKER_00 0:16

And renowned veterinarian discuss and debate, establish norms and new ideas in the pet world.

SPEAKER_02 0:22

This is challenging pet health.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Good morning, Katie.

SPEAKER_02 0:27

Hey, good morning, Clayton.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

How the devil are you?

SPEAKER_02 0:30

Uh what did you say?

SPEAKER_00 0:31

How the devil are you? How the devil are you?

SPEAKER_02 0:34

With the UK flower. I am uh devilly amazing.

SPEAKER_00 0:37

Oh, phenomenal.

SPEAKER_02 0:40

Or heavenly hair. Let me say I'm heavenly amazing.

SPEAKER_00 0:43

So flip it around. So this morning, we're just gonna cover of just the process of blood and what like why it's important. We don't talk about blood, we don't talk about the use case of blood, we don't talk about why it's important. People are literally like leaving this like enormous resource just tipped down the drain.

SPEAKER_02 1:01

Oh, I love this idea. Where do we want to start?

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Should we start off? Because again, like I think one of the most common misconceptions is when you have like your slab of raw food, um, that it's got blood in it. Um, and first of all, that's not blood in there, it's uh something called myoglobin. Um, and again, I'm not a biologist, so you know I'm I had to look some of this up because it's like, oh, what is myoglobin? Just know it's not blood, to be honest. But myoglobin is basically it's it's got the heme in it, which is why it's red, um, but it's not the same as blood. Um, and blood is just a very different product. So it's what it is effectively, it's it's like a muscle protein or a muscle juice or something like that. I don't know what you want to call it, but it's basically it's it's something which, yeah, it's high in iron, but it doesn't have the the broad mineral complex, and it's not blood. It's not blood, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:57

So it looks like so. The meat juice is coming out of the meat that either people are eating themselves or that they're feeding their pets with a raw food diet, and most of us would just inherently assume that's bloody juice coming out of the meat, and it's actually not.

SPEAKER_00 2:11

Yep. Just so people can understand, like the processing of animals. Um, when we when we slaughter animals, the reason there is no blood in meat is because you know we drain we drain the the animal of meat, uh of blood when when it's processed. Again, if you if you think back to how you would see, let's say, an enormous chiller full of like cattle carcasses, for example.

SPEAKER_02 2:37

Right, when they're like hanging in the meat locker in the cold, you know, whatever, they're hanging there and they're not drip, they're dry. Yeah, they're dry. So the blood's already been.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

So we call that extra exanguination. So all meat is exanguinated when it when it's slaughtered. So there is no blood meat, uh blooded meat. And so when you're eating your steak and you see like the blood come out, that that's not blood, it's myoglobin. Blood, obviously, yeah, just from our our normal processing techniques, is just not something we see in normal food. So, what has been happening, I think, four years is that I mean, obviously, I grew up in Ireland and we eat a lot of black pudding, which is like a blood thing.

SPEAKER_02 3:16

Black pudding?

SPEAKER_00 3:18

Have you never heard of black pudding?

SPEAKER_02 3:19

No.

SPEAKER_00 3:20

Really?

SPEAKER_02 3:21

Yeah, that's a cool and creepy name. What is it?

SPEAKER_00 3:23

So it's it's like a breakfast food.

SPEAKER_02 3:25

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

So we have it with a lot of our like eggs and bacon.

SPEAKER_02 3:28

And I take it it's not chia black pudding.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

No, it's basically it's like it's like pork blood mixed with um like pearl barley and some other spices and that sort of stuff. And then we make it into like a sausage.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

Fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 3:42

And then we chop it up and then we fry it and we eat it with our breakfast. It's absolutely delicious.

SPEAKER_02 3:47

Okay, I love it.

SPEAKER_00 3:48

It's it's it's sound, it sounds worse than it is, but yeah, like it's a yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:52

I mean, it sounds very nutritious. It yeah, I mean, hey, most people, unless you're vegan, bacon.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

I'll have to bought you some clonicilty blood pudding.

SPEAKER_02 4:04

Pork, yeah, yeah. I will try anything. So it sounds very nutritious, but in pets, when people think of what their dog or cat should be eating, they they just think of muscle meat.

SPEAKER_00 4:16

But what we want to do is encourage people to actually use blood products. There's a high spectrum of minerals, yes, which is not found in meat or in myoglobin.

SPEAKER_02 4:26

Magnesium and selenium, zinc, I mean, these important trace minerals are largely absent, and so many pets are deficient in trice minerals. So it's something I love to promote and talk about, you know, often as um a really important supplementation into the diet, because in today's world, a lot of our soils are so depleted, you know, so our whole food chain tends to be deficient in minerals.

SPEAKER_00 4:54

But I think also because this is something like, and again, the problem is when we take, let's say, a zinc tablet, something which has been sort of extrapolated from other things, it's not always bioavailable. Exactly. So by eating by eating a whole food product, we can get these things in in a bioavailable way.

SPEAKER_02 5:10

I I think, and then there's also the amino acids, like and so I think lysine is something which blood is extremely high in, which is a building block for like actually like processing other amino acids, and helpful for repair and regenerative um, you know, capabilities of tissues, um, which, you know, all the components in blood really are so nutritionally supportive to regeneration and repair, you know, of tissues. And the other thing that's great about blood too is it actually not only has a great complement of minerals, but it has a lot of B vitamins in it too.

SPEAKER_00 5:47

What exactly do B vitamins do? Because I'm I'm like uh I I've I've seen them. I've I get told I need to take them, but I actually don't understand what they do.

SPEAKER_02 5:55

So B vitamins, I mean, there's there's many of them, and so we could have a whole conversation about that. We probably should someday, but um, they are very involved in cellular metabolism, so it literally helps the body to create and utilize energy.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

So it's about optimizing sort of just general cellular mechanisms.

SPEAKER_02 6:14

Yeah, is that really true? Yeah, that's a that's a good way to sum it up.

SPEAKER_00 6:17

Yeah, I think so. I always like to pretend I know what I'm talking about. Um, and and look, that's the thing, is that I think what we what we do in industry is we try and mimic like something I'm gonna say ancestral animal would like be particularly driven by, and then we put it onto modern products. It's the same as us, it's like you know, we love to taste the fats as humans because we need it in our diet. So when we have that stimulation of fat, it kind of wakens something in us that okay, this is something my body craves. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 6:51

So again for an innate, often an innate reason.

SPEAKER_00 6:54

And we can and we can put that on things which we wouldn't necessarily want to eat, and like it it then makes us want to eat that thing.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 7:01

So again, it's about in enhancing and stimulating. So when we're when we're making products by using the core ingredients of something which we would naturally desire, and then enhancing it, it then stimulates us to eat a certain product, which maybe we wouldn't, and again, this is where the problem with ultra-processed food comes in, is that we're using products which in their pure form you wouldn't eat in a million years, yeah. But then we're adding we're adding something like blood or blood plasma or um you know a derivation of blood, like be like hydrosylate, blood hydrosylate into that into that environment, so then it encourages our pet to eat that product. Yeah, like as we see, there's a lot of cats end up with um like bad hydration issues, and a lot of that is to do with especially like dry food diets, because again, yeah, so a cat will not naturally look to drink water because they are um predators, and so part of their their way of hydrating would be drinking the blood of whatever they've murdered.

SPEAKER_02 8:05

I always love to explain to people that evolutionarily, you know, cats uh eating felines eating prey, the prey's body is 70% water, like our bodies, and so they're getting a lot of hydration from their indigenous diet, which is not what domestic cats obviously typically eat, so they often are dehydrated. And I've historically loved to recommend bone broth and raw goat milk. And one of the things I know about blood, and maybe you can you know enhance in the conversation, is that it also has electrolytes in it. So there's more to hydrating than just drinking water, you know. So the electrolytes and all the you know nutrients and and peptides and amino acids and things are very, very helpful as well.

SPEAKER_00 8:50

Yeah, and again, so it's highly biologically appropriate, um, very, very uh easily absorbed, so bioavailable.

SPEAKER_02 8:57

That's one of the things I love about it. Yep, easily absorbed, like when anybody, ourselves or our pets, eat meat, there's a fair amount of digestive process that has to occur in the digestive system to break down all the connective tissues and muscle fibers and all of that, and glean the nutrients out of that, the amino acids, the you know, building blocks of proteins. There's a lot of digestion that needs to occur for the body to use that, absorb it, utilize it. Um, and when they're consuming something like blood, it is so bile that it's alright, it's already just ready to absorb. There's like not breakdown process that needs to occur, like eating muscle meat.

SPEAKER_00 9:38

And so again, I think it's one of those things that like um blood has like, like I say, in industry is something we use um as a palatin as well a lot. So a palatin being a flavor enhancer. So if you take a lot of let's say lower-end pet food like kibbles, especially, they'll spray it with things like blood plasma and um so but in a high hydroized form, so we call it beef hydrosylate or like plasma, blood plasma sprays, and we'll spray that onto the kibble.

SPEAKER_02 10:09

I knew they were sprayed with what they call animal digests and things like that, but that's different. I didn't know that's different.

SPEAKER_00 10:15

This is aware that they use plasma. Yeah, so again, so if um there's a very big brand of cat treats, for example, um, which um is basically a wheat cookie, to be honest. They're just basically just garbage, but they're sprayed with with um beef hydrosylate. Okay, which is very palatable.

SPEAKER_02 10:36

So the cats like them and eat them, and then people keep buying them because my kitty loves it.

SPEAKER_00 10:41

Yeah, my kitty loves it, even though it's literally like there's nothing in it which is actually biologically appropriate, but the the flavor stimulation is there, and again, if you think about it, like in their sort of natural form, the blood is like an essential part of their diet because they need it for their hydration. So, what we're doing is we're mimicking that and then spraying it on something which isn't biologically appropriate. Um, so yeah, thanks for that. Right big companies, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:12

Tiny, tiny effort at something that's biologically appropriate.

SPEAKER_00 11:16

Yeah, but but yeah, so we use we use blood a lot as a palatant. So, like, yeah, it's it's very, very palatable. Um, it's a great way of getting like your pets to eat things that they wouldn't necessarily like the taste of in it in its pure form. And so look, there are products out there, like and I think like look, Teutonics, which comes from New Zealand, is one of them, which is which is a that's I'm excited about this product, which is a venison blood product, but they spray freeze dry it. So again, it's not high heat treated, so it it retains the nutrients. Um, and like I say, it can be then made like then shipped and then into in the powder and then turned turns into a blood, a blood drink, which is especially for dogs which are performance dogs in terms of what can they actually drink. There's there's not a huge amount of options. I mean, I know we people often use things like goat milk, for example, but again, goat milk is quite calorific. Like it's calorific.

SPEAKER_02 12:16

Is that a word? That's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 12:18

Yeah, well, yeah, like if it isn't it's not a cleatonism or a no, no, no, no. It's quite calorific, and like and also it doesn't have the natural properties of something like blood, because again, if you look at biological appropriateness, a dog or a cat like would have naturally drank blood, they wouldn't naturally have drunk goat's milk. Like their little paws wouldn't have been able to like pump it out that well to go.

SPEAKER_02 12:42

If they came across some, they would definitely drink, but it wouldn't have been available to them, like obviously their prey having blood, fresh blood. Yeah, exactly. You mentioned that this product is created in New Zealand, but it's such a sustainable um concept and a wonderful supplement product for pets that, as you said, is freeze-dried, you can just mix water into it and add it to the food like a gravy, and it is such a uh fantastic uh food topper that you know provides all these things we've just been talking about that are so helpful.

SPEAKER_00 13:14

But also just as a palatin, even if you drop the nutritional value, which is high, and the hydrational value, which is high, just as a palatin. If you've got a really fussy dog, it's just such it's an it's an amazing thing just to put on top of your dog's food. The dogs go crazy for it, and it's it there, it's a completely like natural concept, yeah, to be honest.

SPEAKER_02 13:34

And hydrating, like we talked about. But I understand that venison blood is unique compared to other mammals' blood because of a component in it called IGF one, which is insulin-like growth factor one. And this growth factor is metabolically so helpful in the body and helping tissues repair.

SPEAKER_00 13:55

Yeah. The reason IgF one is so strong, strongly present in deer compared to one other animals is because of their growth antler growth and their antler dropping. So they drop their antlers and it grows back quickly. So we used to use like antler powder and antler velvet for that exact reason. For dogs with arthritis, four dogs which were had like mobility issues. Yep. And again, it's the same, it's the same thing like IgF1, which is in both of those products.

SPEAKER_02 14:23

And apparently antlers are one of the fastest growing tissues in the body. I mean, they can grow one or two centimeters a day. So they often have a lot of IGF one circulating in their bloodstream where other mammals, depending on their stage of life, would not. And the interesting sort of um aspect to spin on that too is one of the reasons why I was so excited to see that there's a product on the market that supports this, you know, concept and offering blood to pets as a you know nutritional part of their diet is that aligns so well with Chinese medicine, food therapy, you know, which I'm Chinese medicine trained. We we used to talk about or we do talk about with food therapy, supporting the body to be healthy with food, is something called blood tonics. And the word blood tonic in Chinese medicine, we use that a lot. Like you tonify something, tonify means to strengthen it. And so it's really interesting that I talk about blood tonics all the time, and never thought about actually drinking blood to strengthen, you know, the blood or the body. And we now, you know, know with all this research behind, you know, the new concepts of this, that it is so strengthening and reparative and regenerative for the body, keeping the muscles strong and and vitality up.

SPEAKER_00 15:45

And it is also worth pointing out as well that when we talk about like feeding animals on different protein types, that like when we think of something like steak, for example, it has got a high myoglobin load. So, again, you can get the iron from the myoglobin as you can from blood. But then when we look at, let's say, poultry, things like chicken, things like turkey, there is minimal myoglobin. No one ever says, Oh, let's let's do a nice um medium rare chicken steak, you know. So, because again, it's like cook it thoroughly, yeah. So if you have got if you are feeding your cat or dog um on poultry-based foods, um actually use And a lot of people do just solely poultry, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:28

They like don't even go outside of that category. And I love variety, but obviously poultry is often pretty highly represented in feline diets.

SPEAKER_00 16:36

Yeah, so and even dog diets too. The the the iron content is gonna naturally be very low in their diets, like compared to let's say a red meat, a red meat diet.

SPEAKER_02 16:46

Foods like organ meats, you know, um oily fish, eggs, those things we try to bring into the pet diet as strengthening, you know, their body and their tissues. And back in human traditional ancestral tribes, they literally right in the field after you know making a kill and and killing an animal, they would save portions of that, these prized possessions of organ meat as opposed to the muscle meat to bring back to the village. And they would prioritize them for the groups of people that needed them most, like the sick, the elderly, and the pregnant, because they were known to be so strengthening. And we now, you know, know with all this research behind, you know, the new concepts of this, that it is so strengthening and reparative and regenerative for the body, keeping the muscles strong and and vitality up.

SPEAKER_00 17:39

Yeah, and it's funny because I think it's like the the raw food thing has gone down the uh it's like we talk about raw food and you know ancestralism and this sort of stuff. I think it's we we become quite tunnel visions into this is really super ancestral, but actually when we when we actually then break down what's going into the product, um probably not as ancestral as we'd like. So right. And I and I think just adding blood is an enormous is an enormous benefit to anyone sort of love it, yep. And the problem is is because we waste blood and blood is like looked at as being icky, it's not being properly valorized.

SPEAKER_02 18:18

Yeah, I would say icky, like people think of drinking blood, like it's yeah, like lucky and satanic and Dracula and Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 18:25

And like we know, it's like it's like why would you drink blood? Yeah, it's kind of been given a very negative, you know, but again, pets like would have 100% drunk blood. Yep. Um, but again, it's about how do we then get something which is like now considered to be a waste and valorize it and say, look, actually, this is something we should be consuming. This is something which should have a value behind it.

SPEAKER_02 18:49

Do you know why blood is actually drained from the animals when they are, you know, slaughtered and processed for food? Why do why do they remove the blood?

SPEAKER_00 18:56

On the one hand, obviously, if you it is an adjutant to like keeping the meat fresh, so meat can be kept fresh for longer when the blood's blood's removed, the less hydrated it is, that would it would preserve longer. It preserves longer, but also it's about it's about product valorization as well. When you're processing an animal, so you have to take it apart to process it effectively. Every part of that process will cost money, and so blood, there's an extra layer of complexity because everything else is a solid, blood is a liquid, it has to be collected in a hygienic fashion.

SPEAKER_02 19:32

An expensive step.

SPEAKER_00 19:34

That that's an expensive step when you're talking about mass production, and so if you don't actually have a a um valorization for that product, then you're better off wasting them, just from the economic perspective.

SPEAKER_02 19:49

And in order to justify the cost of doing that, they have to have a market for it.

SPEAKER_00 19:54

You have to have a market, and nobody's ever really built a market for that outside of you know delicious black pudding, to be honest. Outside of that, let's go, let's go off and get a nice black pudding. I tell you, if there are some black pudding. It's a real big thing in the part of Ireland I grew up in clonicilty black pudding, people battering them, covering it in cheese, all kinds of stuff. But like I just like it fried with my breakfast.

SPEAKER_01 20:19

Fried with your breakfast, okay. Yeah, you make me breakfast soon. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

Make it and get you some clonicilty black pudding, yeah, absolutely.