Healing Cancer & Autoimmune Disease in Furry Friends

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Well it’s my honor and on behalf of our fur family we are excited to share all this information. 

Nathan Crane

Yeah I’m excited too because I’ve been so entrenched in research and experimentation in my own life and the natural and integrative health field for over 15 years now. And along the way, I’ve only researched briefly about our dogs and cats, about our pets about animals. I mean, I’ve done a little bit here and there but not the thousands of hours that I’ve put into for humans for myself and for helping others. And so I’m excited to learn from you today. I know you’ve helped so many people and so many animals over the years, I think, well I’m really excited for myself but for everybody tuning in here I think there’s a lot we’re gonna learn. But you started as a traditional that you were telling me and then you transitioned to more of an integrative approach, integrated veterinarian. Why that change? Why did you transition? What happened there?

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Well, I’ve been practicing for almost 20 years when my horse, one of my show horses and my youngest daughter were involved in an accident, and the horse literally saved my daughter’s life. So when I went to get help from my daughter’s horse I did small animal practice, so cats and dogs and I used equine vets to work on our horses. And they came back to me and they said, “Dr. Siegel we’re really sorry but we don’t know exactly what’s wrong with her but we can tell you she’s not safe to ride, she’ll never be a show horse again, and here are your two options. 

You can put her down or you can put her out to pasture.” And it was those words that nothing else could be done except my choices of putting her in a pasture or putting her down, was absolutely unacceptable. And in that moment something a woken in me and it said, “I’m gonna go find an answer.”, and I didn’t blame them for not knowing, I just knew I had to find other answers. And as I went out on that journey on my quest everything that I learned to help the horse, I ended up applying in my small animal practice to where I am today. And Lily is still alive and well in my backyard. 

Nathan Crane

And so that led you, that opened this whole door of, okay there’s other solutions available that what, you didn’t learn in veterinarian school. 

Marlene Siegel, DVM

None of this was taught in veterinary school. In fact, as I was a pioneer in this industry looking for other solutions for her, I had to go into the human world and look at what was being done on that cutting edge of the integrative world on the human side, and I took everything that I learned and I applied it to her and to my practice. But I vowed that the one thing I would never say to a client ever, is there is nothing more than I can do for you, because there’s always something that we can do. 

Even if it’s enhancing quality of life for a short period of time, that’s huge. So I delete that from my vocabulary, and I always offer people other solutions. It’s not always that we’re gonna make them live forever, none of us are gonna live forever, we’re all have an exit strategy on this planet, but the time that we’re here, we should have the highest quality of life possible. So that’s my quest to help educate people that there are other options out there, there are other things that we need to do, and most of it comes back to lifestyle. It’s epigenetics, it’s what we’re doing that is creating the problems of today, both in ourselves, in our animals, and in the planet.

Nathan Crane

Yeah absolutely, but it’s often hard to think about our animals as ourselves, right? Because they can communicate with us, but they don’t speak to us in the same language, and so they may be suffering, they may have digestive issues, they may have pain, they may have, but you go and see them and they’re gonna greet you with love and joy and happiness. They don’t come up complaining, “Oh, my stomach hurts, or my knees hurt.” or things like that. So, it’s a little bit harder when you’re just feeding them regular food, and you’re just, you think they’re fine and yet they’re suffering. So, how have you come to terms with that, how do you help pet owners come to terms with that? 

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Well, over my 40 years almost in practice now, and we’ve seen a big shift in the relationship between pets and their parents, we used to be, we had a dog, then we had a family member, and now we’re seeing sole pets. These animals are extremely important to people’s lives, it’s different than we’ve ever seen before, and I think these animals are carrying a spiritual quality that is coming to us at a time when we so much need guidance. 

And it’s really important to understand that message that they’re bringing to us, I do believe that they are our spirit guides, and when we pay attention to what they’re showing us, what they’re bringing us information to the point, there is no accident that they have a particular challenge in their lives and they’re in somebody’s life with that challenge. So, if you have a pet right now that has a challenge, just know that there’s a connection between that pet, that challenge, and the time in your life that you’re experiencing that. And it’s how you deal with it, that is going to give you the highest and best outcome for everybody. 

Nathan Crane

So I want to get into that a little bit more, maybe a little bit later in this interview, but I wanted for you to share, obviously with 40 years of experience you have a lot of experience. What are really the top three diseases that dogs are facing today? And what are the top three diseases that cats are facing today? And are they the same, or are they different? 

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Very similar, cancer number one. One out of 1.65 dogs right now will have cancer or do have cancer. For cats, it’s one out of three. So equating that to the human side, in men it’s said that it’s one out of two, so we have a higher rate of cancer in dogs than we do even in humans. In fact, they have the highest rate of cancer of any species on the planet. Cats are one out of three which is equivalent to what they say females have, so it’s a very high rate. 

Then, when we add auto-immune disease which is number two, and auto-immune disease covers a lot of things. So it’s thyroid disease, which is very, very common in cats especially, but also in dogs. And then we add arthritis or any kind of osteoarthritic problem. And we’re talking almost 100% of the animals that we see fall in those categories. Then you add obesity, you add dementia, you add skin allergies, literally it’s 100% of the population and it’s not age dependent anymore, it used to be that we thought about cancer when the animals were in their older lifespan, and now we’re seeing cancers in animals under the age of two. Yeah, it’s astronomical. 

Nathan Crane

That’s crazy. 

Marlene Siegel, DVM

And I’ve been seeing that rise in almost 10 years. What’s worse, is the life expectancy of our animals has gone down by over seven years. So if you have a large breed dog, like a golden retriever or a Labrador, the chances are that that dog is going to live seven years shorter, than they would have lived 20 years ago. 

Nathan Crane

So what would you say from your experience is the number one cause of this increase in chronic diseases, in both dogs and cats? 

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Unequivocally it’s toxins, but where are the toxins coming from? Well, they’re coming from number one is food. And we’re feeding processed foods that are loaded with chemicals and preservatives, and genetically modified ingredients. If you have a can or a bag at home, and you were to look at your label, there is a high probability that you’re gonna have corn or soy in that processed food. And those are the highest genetically modified foods in our world right now, and that’s going straight into your pets and it’s creating inflammation. Did you want to comment?

Nathan Crane

So yeah, yeah keep going I mean, it’s… 

Marlene Siegel, DVM

So processed food… 

Nathan Crane

It makes sense. 

Marlene Siegel, DVM

The quality of the food that you’re feeding, and the fact that it’s not a species appropriate diet. So, the way I like to couch that is to say a species appropriate diet is the diet that that individual would have eaten if they were in the wild and man did not intervene. So we know that dogs are carnivores and by definition a carnivores kills another animal and eats it, doesn’t sound real pretty, but that’s how nature works. And when they did that kill they would have eaten through the abdominal cavity, they would have chewed the intestines while they were pulling them out of the body ’cause they were in search of organ meat. 

So organ meat is a very big part of a good raw diet, and when they chewed through the intestines, they would of course, rupture the intestines and then they would get that beautiful fermented effluent that would be in their mouth and that’s how they inoculated their microbiome, so they were taking this beautiful variation of microbiome from the intestinal tract already fermented done for new system, and that’s how they inoculated themselves. And of course, every time they ate a meal they would reinoculate themselves. And each animal was different probably grazed on different things, and so they had a nice variety of nutrients that were coming in, and then they found the organ meat, and of course they ate cartilage and bone, and meat and fat. And so they had this beautiful variety, even as they ate through the skin of the animal, they got some of the fiber as they were eating through the fur. 

So that was a natural balanced diet for them. Cats are obligate carnivores, so for you cat owners this is extremely important, because they have no dietary requirement for carbohydrates. Dogs had been more acclimated to man they’ve been domesticated longer, so they’re used to eating more of man’s scraps, and so they have a little bit higher carbohydrate content, but it certainly wasn’t meant to be what we’re feeding today in the standard processed food diet. Which shockingly is 40 to 60% sugar in a can and a bag. And they don’t put that on the bag you have to calculate it. 

So if you were to take 100% of what was in that bag and you subtract out that meat, and you subtract out the water, and you subtract seven to 8% for ash, you will be left with your carbohydrates, and they don’t put that on the can or the bag because they don’t want you to know that you’re feeding mostly sugar. And these are to obligate carnivores or carnivores and their normal dietary species appropriate amount of carbohydrate on a daily basis would be less than 1%. So go 1% versus 40 to 60%, obviously there’s going to be some kind of a fallback from that, and the consequence is chronic inflammation. So imagine that every bite of every meal that that cat or dog is eating, it is setting off this inflammatory bomb that the body has to deal with. It’s causing leaky gut, which when the gut is more permeable then more toxins can come through, ’cause the gateway is opened, and those toxins have to travel to Mr. Liver. 

Mr. Liver is the organ that is in charge of the inflammation your monitoring toxins. So when Mr. Liver suddenly sees all those toxins it goes, “Oh my gosh, we have to dispense the inflammatory army to take care of the invader.” So out those, all of these moderators to inflammation and then you don’t see it all the time ’cause the body has this amazing innate intelligence, so it’s gonna take care of the problem, and when the invader is gone the army is gonna go back into the barracks and take a nap. 

But, when this is happening day after day, after day, meal after meal, then at some point the body just can’t recover, the army becomes so fatigued ’cause they’re out there shooting up the enemy all the time, and then they start seeing enemies on the thyroid gland and on other organs, and that’s how we start seeing their auto-immune diseases. But it’s from the chronicity, it’s every day having to deal with a toxin that’s coming into the body. And at some point the body just goes, “Oh my gosh I just can’t keep up anymore.” 

Nathan Crane

Well it’s the same thing with humans and dealing with cancer, there are these underlying, deeper underlying causes that are continuously creating chronic inflammation in the body. Toxic exposure is one of them, stress, is another one, heavy metals, parasitic infections, the toxins from the food, water, the air. So I mean, these correlations are already scientifically documented in humans, we know this very clearly that carcinogens and carcinogens are just about every, from carpets, to paint, to the food most people put in their bodies have carcinogens in a known or probable or considered carcinogens in them that we’re just putting in every single day.

But you’re saying this is also happening to our cats and dogs. And just to clarify, I want to unpack one little piece there to clarify about carnivores versus obligate carnivores. Cause I had heard that dogs were more like an omnivore, you’re saying they’re carnivores. So, can you clarify what are the biggest differences and nuances we need to know as pet owners between a true omnivore, a carnivore that is a dog or an obligate carnivore, you’re saying as a cat. 

Marlene Siegel, DVM

So a carnivore gets there, it’s a difference in the of course the protein source and their food. But it’s also in how they get their nutrients. So a carnivore can only get vitamin D as an example from their food source. So if a carnivore is outside all day long, they’re not synthesizing vitamin D like you and I can because we’re omnivores, which means we can get our vitamin D from either our food or we can get it from the sun, we can convert that. An herbivore can only get vitamin D from the sun, so your herbivore are the grass eaters, that’s what our carnivores are gonna be eating. So if you have a herbivore that has been on a feed lot, has not been grazing out in the sun like a natural environment, and they’re not grass fed grass finished. 

Then that animal is likely to not have very much vitamin D. So when your carnivore or obligate carnivore is eating that meat that came from those animals then they’re going to be vitamin D deficient, and that’s what we’re seeing. It’s a huge issue, vitamin D is very important for people it’s the same in animals, it’s what’s responsible for your innate immune system. It has so many different effects on over 600 metabolic pathways. So just being vitamin D deficient is a problem. Well, let me go through my six steps, because I think this is gonna make more sense for people. So step number one is we remove toxins, food of course we just covered very well, we need to eat a species appropriate diet, that’s for organic grass fed, grass fed out. Water is the second big source of toxins, and so many people are feeding their animals tap water, or they use the water that’s filtered from the refrigerator, which is only filtering chlorine and iron, it’s not filtering the heavy metals and the toxins. 

We just finished a huge heavy metal study with Quicksilver Scientific and what we have found in almost across the board cats and dogs, they have a minimum of five heavy metals, if not all eight that we tested for. Arsenic, strontium, mercury, lead. I mean, it’s off the charts, so we need to be really paying attention to these sources. The third area to remove toxicity is the environment, air quality, which you just mentioned, so think about the fact that if you have mold in your house, and you get to go outside and breathe fresh air, but your pet is inside 24/7, especially our cats. So the air quality is extremely important, the things that contact their skin, we know that the skin is the largest organ of absorption and excretion. 

So we wanna make sure that whatever that they’re touching is also gonna be an organic product. So if you’re not paying attention to what you’re washing your clothes in, well yeah your pets may not be wearing clothes but they’re laying on your bed, they’re rubbing up next to you, they’re laying on your lap, hopefully you have clothes on, so all of that is going to be going into your pet as well. So all those Xenoestrogens that are endocrine disruptors, all a big issue for our pets and probably more so for them, because based on the square foot of their body they’re absorbing more toxins than we are. And they’re lower to the ground, so whatever you’re cleaning your floors with, they’re inhaling it, they’re laying on it, they’re absorbing that through their skin 24/7. 

So no wonder the toxic levels are so huge. Electromagnetic pollution, another huge area. You leave your house, your wifi is still on. Guess who’s still in the house dealing with all that wifi? And our kitties, they love to lay on our computers, right? Biggest area of wifi production. So I’d recommend people hardwire, and try to reduce test your house we’re not gonna get into that it’s a rabbit hole but you wanna learn how much EMF toxicity you have and try to mitigate it not just for yourself but for your pets. And then the last area that we talk about for pollution I call it the ants in our brain are the automatic negative thoughts. 

So if we have a lot of negative thoughts, a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety, we’re producing these neurochemicals that are giving off signals. And it’s our pets that in train to those energies. So we are literally putting them in that same high stress, high sympathetic tone that we are feeling. The biggest problem that occurs because of that is healing only occurs when we are in a parasympathetic state, which is the opposite of the sympathetic, think of them on a teeter-totter here we go. So you have sympathetic and parasympathetic, and when you are highly sympathetic your parasympathetic is turned off and the ability to heal is gone. So we have to learn how to shift into that more parasympathetic state, do you think about the average STAD day in America we have, well, this was pre COVID, but I’m sure it’s even worse now because some of the things changed, but in the pre COVID time we had to wake up by alarm clock. 

So we had to run out of the house and it was, grab the kids and make sure they had their meals and their homework and was rushing off to school, then rush to work. And then it was not having something healthy for breakfast, and then it was your crappy lunch that you had to eat what you would call the STAD lunch, the standard American diet, because there’s hardly any restaurants that offer organic food and something healthy. And then it was pick the kids up from school and do all their extracurricular activity of course you didn’t pack anything for them to eat, so now they’re eating junk food as well, and then you get home at the end of the day, nobody wants to cook anything, you’re tired to go out to eat the sad dinner again, and then it’s get the homework done and get to bed which is usually later than what we should so we’re sleep deprived, and that was a typical day. 

But now in COVID, they’re actually higher stresses because you’re not getting to go out in some States, we’re Florida, we’re free yay, but there’s a lot of States that don’t get that benefit, and so they’re wearing masks, they’re becoming fearful, they’re listening to the news, they have all this high anxiety. They’re not able to go do their typical activities, whether it was their social things, their fun things, going even to church people can’t do that normally anymore. And so that adds this whole new level of stress, and then financial issues, and who is the one that actually comes over and tries to help you through that? Unconditionally our pets, right? 

They’re the ones that come over and they put their head on your lap or they sit next to you and they wanna be petted and unconsciously as you’re petting that animal, you start to feel better. So the worst day gets better as that animal comes over and gives you unconditional love. So it’s not that we’re intentionally harming them by giving them our stress, I think that’s part of what they showed up for, was to not only help to take some of that heaviness away from us, and lighten us up. But also to teach us so many things like, unconditional love, about being in the present moment, about giving, about loving. There’s just so many wonderful things, and for a lot of the animals that are showing up with some of their challenges, those are always, I find relatable back to their pet parent in some way, shape or form. 

Nathan Crane

That’s interesting to think about, right? I mean, I’ve always noticed this just kind of subtle correlation between a pet and the pet owner. Like whether they look similar in certain ways, right? There’s similar looks or the energy’s so similar or the you know, you see these huge contrasts, like I’ve seen big, bulky, strong men with little tiny chihuahuas, and then you get to meet them, and this person you think is this big, scary macho man is like this totally opposite and more like his Chihuahua. And it’s so interesting, you see those correlations when you pay attention 

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Yeah. 

Nathan Crane

But, whatever challenges that the animals going through you’re saying, oftentimes there’s a correlation with the owner as well.

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Yeah, not just physically but also spiritually as well. So the second area that we help people to master is making sure that they have all the essential nutrients that they need in the body to do its job. So I mentioned vitamin D as an example, because so many of the animals that we test for vitamin D deficient and 99% of traditional veterinarians don’t test for vitamin D. We test vitamin D, magnesium and B12. We look for inflammatory markers, we look for cancer markers because we wanna know, is there something under the hood? Because they aren’t able to tell us in our verbal way. And they mask their symptoms especially cats, they mask symptoms a long time before they start to exhibit it, ’cause that’s the nature of who they are. 

So we have to be a little more proactive to be for those deficiencies and those excesses like heavy metals to make sure that we are not dealing with that. And it’s really frightening when I did that study I knew there was gonna be a problem, I just had no idea how bad it was. And we have animals that are off the chart for mercury. Well, we know how bad mercury is for us, so you can imagine the debilitating fallout that these animals are experiencing just because we didn’t know to detox them. So a lot of the failures that I see in the Western allopathic traditional world is because these things have not been addressed, they haven’t stopped doing the toxins, so what was Einstein’s famous quote? “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” 

If we wanna stop the pollution to the body and we wanna allow the body to heal, we have to stop doing the things that are causing the problem. Then we have to make sure all the essential nutrients are on board so that they have the ability to run their metabolic pathways. We don’t think about the body has all these cogs and wheels and chemical reactions, but that’s in essence what it is. So try to run your car without gasoline in it, or try putting water or salt in your gas tank. 

You know, of course it’s not gonna work, but we do that to our bodies, our bodies and our pets bodies are these resilient machines that are trying to survive, they’re trying to hang on long enough so that the good times come back we were designed to do that. But when it never changes at some point you can’t keep going. So number one was stop the pollution. Number two, was make sure all the essentials are on board. And number three is heal the gut, you have to heal the leaky gut, you have to get the right microbiome to come back into the body. 

Otherwise the body can’t do its job. And the number four is detoxification, we have six organs of elimination for us and our pets. So we have the kidney, the colon, the lungs, the liver, the skin, and the lymphatics. And I know even in the human world the lymphatic system is so under utilized, and yet between the lymphatics and the liver I think those are the two most important organs of elimination, we need to do a lot to help support them because our bodies just weren’t designed to endure the level of toxicity that we’re enduring today, we have a lot more work. And then number five is making sure that the mitochondria, those are the powerhouses that run our body, they make the energy, that they’re able to do their job, that they have all the things that they need to do their job, that they have all the things that they need to do, to make more of them so we can make more energy. And then last but not least we work on those trapped emotions, which are the spiritual and emotional attachments to the disease that we’re seeing. 

Nathan Crane

No, it’s so fascinating to hear this because I have a nine module masterclass I’m teaching on cancer coming up here in July, and in across the nine modules, I literally teach every single one of these things for humans. The slightest difference is the diet, everything else is exactly the same, right? And so I wanna, I’d love for you to focus on that for a moment is one, let’s start with dogs and then cats. So for dogs, what is your take on the kind of dried bagged food the normal kind of kibble type of thing, but an organic brand or a brand that is free from grains and supposed to be a healthy brand, what is your take on that? And then also, what is the ideal diet for a dog to help prevent reverse these chronic diseases? 

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Important conversation. So number one, any canned or kibble diet is going to be high in sugar. So remember organic simply means that there is a reduced number of toxins in there, but it doesn’t mean it’s healthier. I remember when my kids were little when we were going organic, they’ve always found the junk food aisle in Whole Foods. “But mom, this potato chip is organic.” 

Nathan Crane

Right, right. 

Marlene Siegel, DVM

They didn’t realize that even potato chips back in the day before we had GMOs were still junk food. So it’s still junk food it’s just now it’s organic junk food but we wanna get away from the sugar, that’s number one. Number two, we wanna get away from the toxins that are in the food, the preservatives and the things that are just very non-supportive of the body’s immune system. But you mentioned grain-free diets. So a lot of people got on that whole grain-free bandwagon, thinking that was going to be the right choice to make. Well grain-free is not sugar-free, that’s number one. 

And we’re seeing a huge uprising in the amount of animals having cardiac diseases, cardiomyopathy in particular, because there’s something happening in these grain-free diets that in dogs is blocking their ability to make taurine. So dogs normally have the ability to make taurine as a product in their metabolism. But for some reason when they’re eating these grain-free diets they’re getting cardiomyopathy they’re becoming taurine deficient, and we don’t have an answer yet as to why exactly that’s happening. I think it has something to do with the glyphosate interfering with the shikimate pathway which is the pathway in the environment that allows the microbes to be able to make those aromatic amines those are particular sulfur based amino acids that we need in order to be able to process other things. 

So when you think of a protein, this is for your audience a protein is made up of individual amino acids, it’s sort of like a pearl necklace, all the little pearls are the individual amino acids that when put together in the right sequence make the different proteins. So you as a human have a certain sequence of amino acids that make up your muscles, and then there’s a different sequence that makes a dog a dog, and a cat, a cat, and the sheep a sheep. And so it’s how they’re put together, but when we have an interference in that sequencing or there’s errors in the protein folding, then we’re going to get a misreading and we’re gonna have problems. 

And so I think that part of what we’re seeing has to do with a level of toxicity, the inability of these organisms to make the amino acids that we need in order to process, or something’s happening in the dog, cats we have always known are obligate in the need for taurine ’cause they can’t process it themselves. So that’s why they’re an obligate carnivore, you asked me what was the difference is because they have to have meat in order to achieve the taurine and probably many other nutrients that we’re not even talking about in their diet. 

Nathan Crane

So one of the things that I’ve learned about in just the last couple of years about the dry food for dogs, is that there it’s typically cooked in these massive pressure cooker vats at 400 plus degrees. For four or five, six minutes at a time destroying all the enzymes and basically turning what used to be a form of living food into a completely dead food, is that true? 

Marlene Siegel, DVM

It’s absolutely true, so it’s enzymatically dead is the way I describe that. So we have, in our saliva we have amylase, and amylase is the enzyme that helps to digest our carbohydrates. Dogs and cats don’t have amylase in their saliva because they were never designed to eat carbohydrates. Now we have a backup organ as our dogs and cats do, which is our pancreas. So when they were designed to eat a raw diet, raw meat means that the enzymes are still living. 

Enzymes are just proteins, and they’re still living in that food when you’re eating food uncooked. So for a lot of people, hopefully they’re eating, they’re eating salads and they’re eating some vegetables that aren’t cooked. So we’re getting some enzymes in our diet, but if we’re have a dog or cat and they’re eating nothing but processed foods, they have no enzymes coming into their body to aid in their digestion. So the only thing that they’re using to digest is their pancreas. Well, it’s a finite amount of enzyme that is housed in there, so imagine everybody that every meal it’s just taking that enzyme down more, and more, and more out of the pancreas to the point where it can’t keep up. Then you add all the sugar that’s happening in their diet. And Mr. Pancreas is in charge of releasing insulin which is your sugar modulator. And it knows that the body’s not supposed to have high sugar content, so you get this big sugar spike when you’re eating this processed kibble diet if your carnivorous. 

Nathan Crane

Not because of added sugar, but because the carbohydrates in the diet. 

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Which is simply the carbohydrates, which is, it turns out to be 40 to 60% sugar once you metabolize it. So now you get this insulin release and it’s trying to regulate the blood sugar, and if that was a one-time event, not a big deal, but it’s every bite at every meal, not a surprise that at some point early in life we’re seeing these animals become insulin resistant and that’s why they start to become obese, because they can’t deal with that sugar anymore. So it starts going into your fat cells, right now that’s how you’re storing all that extra sugar is in their fat cells. The other problem with the kibble diets is that they’re dehydrated, and if you think about a natural species appropriate diet, your cat goes out and kills a rabbit or a mouse, and that animal is made up of 70% water, just like we are. 

So 70% of the water intake that they were designed to get came from their diet. Cats came originally from the desert they’re from Egypt. So, they were designed to be able to thrive on a low water intake because in the desert you can’t find a lot of water out there, and when you do it needs to be running water, so instinctually they know as a cat that running water is gonna be safe water, stagnant water is gonna be full of all kinds of nasty things and it can kill you. So for many cat owners, they’ve always wondered “Why does my cat come running over when I turn the faucet on?” or “Why did they like it when they take their foot and they start swishing in the water?” they’re looking to see if the water is moving, it’s an instinct. So having towers for cats is always a good thing by the way, that’s a nice little tip there. So we wanna feed them on the water side, we want the water to be structured, highly filtered, in my world I like it to have some hydrogen in it, but at least highly filtered and structured is incredibly important. And that is not what we see coming out of our tap, that’s dead water. 

Nathan Crane

So are you saying, the water piece is huge? I’m glad you brought that up in it did, yeah my cat. Every cat we’ve ever had loves coming to the sink and playing with the water and just observing it. And so you just clarified something there that I think everyone tuning in who’s ever had a cat is like, ah, there’s an aha there. 

Marlene Siegel, DVM

And the number one cause of death in cats is kidney disease. If you think about the job of the kidney it’s filtering all the toxins as they go through the body. Well, if I had a cup of water in this hand and at a swimming pool on the other side, and I had the same amount of toxin and both which one is going to be more harmful to you if you drink it? The cup of water where the toxin is more concentrated or the pool where it’s a lot more diluted? Now you take these poor little cats and they’re already dehydrated by nature. And then you make them more dehydrated ’cause you take 70% of their water source away, they don’t have the instinctual drive to drink more water, they haven’t evolved yet there. And so now you get this dehydrated animal eating toxins and that toxin becomes even more damaging to their kidneys and that is the number one reason why we see kidney failure in our cats. 

Nathan Crane

Wow, so are you saying that dogs and cats actually their design, I would say they’re intentional designed, their conscious design of their bodies actually does not need, or should not have carbohydrates ever? Like they don’t need fruit and vegetables at all? 

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Well, technically they would have eaten those in the intestinal tract already fermented for them of the animal that they were eating, ’cause they would’ve gotten some of that in their mouth.

Nathan Crane

Sure. 

Marlene Siegel, DVM

So there is a small amount that they would eat in the way of carbohydrates, but they were already fermented and broken down for them. That’s the key difference is that when you and I are eating carbohydrates, we’re supposed to choose 60 times to pancake batter, making sure we’re mixing it with our saliva, so the amylase is pre digesting that and breaking it down, and then we swallow it. Cats and dogs don’t chew their food, they tear and gulp. It really annoys a lot of pet parents because they buy all this expensive food and they go, “But they didn’t even taste it.” And it’s because they’re not supposed to, if you think about it logically, you’re a carnivore, you’re out in the big wild outside, or you’re in the Serengeti plain whatever, and you have to chase your food down, it’s not just gonna come to you in a bowl. 

So you’ve now made a big commotion as you’ve chased that food down, you’ve caught it, you’ve struggled with it, you’ve killed it, what are you going to attract around you really rapidly? Other carnivores, ’cause they heard something’s going on, there may be a free meal out there. And so they come looking well, you have a very limited time to tear, gulp and swallow and get out of there, ’cause you can’t just drag your whole carcass with you usually. So they tear, gulp and swallow and then they go off to their den or their hiding place, and that’s where they do their digestion. So it makes sense why they don’t have, because in nature they would have been somebody else’s meal, or they would have lost their meal to other predators. So as we think about how does nature solve problems? 

The more we can go back to mimicking that, granted they’re not hunting out in the Serengeti plain because they’re in our households, but principals like making sure they’re eating a species appropriate diet, or getting into a raw diet, but raw diet is not taking a piece of chicken from Publix or Kroger’s and throwing it on the ground. That’s got a lot of pathogens in it and it’s not balanced, they need the right proportion of organ meat, bones, fat, and then meat, their skeletal meat. And that proportion is important. The other thing that I think is very important since we can’t judge the quality of foods that are, even if it’s grass fed, we don’t know the quality of the grasses that are out there. 

Are they getting their micronutrients, are they getting the macronutrients? We don’t know because there’s so much variation. So I think in today’s day and age it’s extremely important to make sure that the supplements we’re using are making sure that the essential nutrients are in the diet, whether we have to provide them as a supplement, that’s fine. But an essential nutrient is defined as the nutrient that the body cannot manufacture in sufficient quantities on its own.

Nathan Crane

You know, I wanna get into that a little bit deeper but I wanna just share my own personal experience with my dogs, for example. I’ve never taught them or stop them from embarking upon their own instinct to hunt animals. I’ve posted something on my social media a few years ago and my somebody had seen it and then commented and was very upset that I was training my dogs how to hunt. It was illegal to kill rabbits and things like that. And it was just silly, because they didn’t understand what was really going on. When we go out running in the mountains or hiking, my dogs are naturally, I’ve never trained them to do this this is their instinct, they’re on hunt patrol, that’s like their purpose when we’re out in the mountains and I’ve seen it early on, so I never stopped it. 

And sometimes they’ll catch a rabbit, and when they catch a rabbit, they’ll kill it and they’ll eat every part of it just like you said, they love it. They’ll eat the bone, they eat the fur, they eat the intestines, it’s disgusting to me, but they love it, it’s their instinct, that’s what they want, they know that’s what they need. I mean, they’ll eat the brain, the carcass, all of it, every piece of that animal they’ll eat every part of it. And that’s their total instinct, I’ve known that. 

So, I feed them raw meat, I feed them bone, but I still to make up more of their diet, I’ve given them dry food and dehydrated food that’s got like berries and enzymes and probiotics, and fruits, and vegetables, and things like that in it, but I want them to be the healthiest possible and live as long as possible. So as a pet owner, what are those proportions I need to know, what do I really need to be feeding them for ultimate health? How much meat, bone, organ, fat, versus how much supplement and do they need any of these dehydrated or fresh fruits and vegetables since they’re not getting it from the fermented stomachs that they tear into? 

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Those are great questions, and what we do for pet owners we have a food calculator, of course we have our own raw food company. So people can go onto the website and just educate yourself, that’s really step number one is just become educated. 

Nathan Crane

That’s evo, is that the evolove raw, evoloveraw.com, is that the website? 

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Yeah, so it’s actually love spelled backwards and forwards.

Nathan Crane

Oh, there you go. 

Marlene Siegel, DVM

The first evo L is the love backwards, and then it’s love forwards. There’s a lot of sacred geometry that came into that. So the proportions are variable for the individuals and their needs, if we have a cancer patient or an animal dealing with a chronic degenerative disease, we want them to be more ketogenic. So we’re gonna have a higher fat content, so we make sure they’re burning fat as a fuel source and not sugar. And then we have a lower fat in a higher protein diet for those animals that are thriving and healthy and don’t have any challenges. What’s really important is to understand where your pet is in their life and in their health issues or challenges, and then be able to work with a practitioner to find what is the best in the way of the macronutrients is what I call the essence of my diet is the macronutrients, the meat, fat, bone and organ meat. 

And then the supplementation is your essential vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids, and we can go down a whole rabbit hole on fatty acids, and you and I didn’t talk about this, so I’m hoping I don’t step on toes but let’s open the conversation of the right fatty acids. And I work with a company that deals with what are called parent essential fatty acids. And those are the two fatty acids, the mega-3 and omega-6 that actually make up the cell membrane, they’re very specific. And our bodies have these enzymes that are, they’re designed to be able to take those two omega fatty acids, the omega-3 omega-6, parents essential fat, and metabolize them into the derivatives like the DHA, and GLA and all those other derivatives as you need them. What happens when you’re taking fish oil supplements. 

Number one, most of them are answered. Number two, they’re high in mercury ’cause they’re coming from a fish base, and we’re seeing that in our animals with high mercury, and it is, you can’t even argue that. And then number three is you’re giving derivatives, you’re not giving the parent essentials which come from plant-based products. So the fatty acids that we send home with our pet owners are those parents essential fatty acids. 

Cats are lacking a specific enzyme that breaks that first step down into GLA, so we added GLA into our fatty acid supplement, so we make sure that we don’t have to worry about whether or not they have enough enzyme to break that down, we just provide that, so there’s no fatty acid deficiency. But they’re able to break down the rest, as their body needs it, which is all about balance. And that’s, I think the whole conversation here is we can live in this world, if we learn how to balance what we’re doing, we just can’t be all swayed to one side or the other same as medicine, right? There’s the allopathic world, and then there’s the holistic world, and they’re both awesome. We need to figure out how to do that integrated center where they take the best from both sides. So don’t throw out one side or the other and think that neither one has value ’cause you have to pick one or the other camp, you don’t, you blend them together and that’s why I think in my practice, we are so successful. We see cancer cases, my cat’s about to come into the picture. 

Nathan Crane

Perfect, we can’t be talking about our furry friends… 

Marlene Siegel, DVM

This is Echo. 

Nathan Crane

Without an actual one, joining us. 

Marlene Siegel, DVM

I don’t know if you can appreciate this, but he is 19 years young. And he has no muscle wasting, he does have arthritis in his spine, because he’s only been a raw eater for the last say 15 years. But yeah, he’s just a 19 year old thriving cat that still has tremendous vibrance, let me put it down here a little bit so you can see him. 

Nathan Crane

So for your cat are you doing, is it basically just the raw meat and organ and bone and things like that with the supplements, is that pretty much all you give your own pets? 

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Yeah, and then he gets his fatty acids. So, when you think about eating fruits and vegetables what is it in the fruit and vegetable that you’re getting? It’s not the berry, it’s the phytonutrients in the berry. So our supplements have those phytonutrients in them that are ground down and powdered, so that they’re getting that variety. We’re coming out with some new supplement lines that are very targeted, another rabbit hole we can talk about on another maybe another episode would be talking about things like salvestrals. These are natural chemicals that are produced by fruits at the time that they’re ripening. 

So when they’re ripening on the vine these product lines called salvestrals are ripening in that fruit, and their job is to keep predators from eating them, but they provide chemicals for us and for our animals that are anti-cancer. So they actually help turn on anti-cancer pathways which by the way, how amazing that is that we have these pathways that are already in our body, and when they see an abnormal cell, these foods that we’re supposed to be eating in our natural diet, turn these pathways on, so we never see the abnormal cell because it has that program cell that the apoptosis that tells it, “Hey, you don’t belong here you need to go ahead and die off.” 

So our bodies have the natural intelligence, the only reason it’s not working is because we have too much toxins, we have a deficiency of the essential nutrients that tell our body how to run those metabolic pathways. And so we’re kind of like these lone warriors out there and we’ve lost the communication system. Our microbiome isn’t able to talk to the mitochondria anymore, because those pathways have been cut off. So we have, what I do is I create the programs for the pet parents so that they understand all of these different mechanisms in depth, and they’re empowered to be able to make better choices. So if it came down to one crux it would be knowledge. 

We’re only, pet parents do what they’re doing because they want to do the best for their pets. There is no pet parent out there that I’ve ever met that says, “Oh I’m so excited to feed my dog kibble today and have it die sooner.” we don’t do that. And veterinarians don’t wish ill on their patients either, but if they don’t have a broad enough toolkit because they haven’t had that outside education, then they don’t know what to do, and they’re left with that, “I’m sorry, there’s nothing more I can offer you, for your animal that keeps having chronic relapses.” But I love those cases, because I know I can fix them in a matter of a few weeks, if the owner is willing to change the lifestyle, that’s the key you can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result. 

Nathan Crane

So if somebody wants to work with you, actually how do they connect with you?

Marlene Siegel, DVM

They could either go to our hospital site or the Dr. Marlene website and they can contact us. I do online consultations, I do online webinars. My pet program is the absolute best start. It’s very inexpensive, it’s a three hour, very intensive program that covers everything that you and I talked about and about another two hours more so it’s very, very heavy. And then after they watch that program, I consult with them on actually implementing the program. So the two major things that we do wrong, I’m sorry, the two major things we do wrong. Number one, we don’t know what to do. And number two, we don’t know how to implement it. So I have fixed both of those. 

Nathan Crane

I love it, so where can people get that program? 

Marlene Siegel, DVM

They have to call my office pascovet.com. And the phone number is 973-2929. And I also have a program for veterinarians and it teaches veterinarians how to integrate alternative medicine into their practices. Also extremely robust. 

Nathan Crane

Fantastic, so pascovet.com, you can connect with Dr. Siegel and her team there, also evoloveraw.com. There’s links to the food, the supplements, the amino acids, I’ve been looking through some of that stuff myself to get for our pets. And Dr. Marlene Siegel, DVM, you can connect with her there as well and reach out to her. So I just wanna say thank you so much for helping clarify some of these confusing things that we often run into. And I know you’ve had tremendous success helping all kinds of pets to bounce back from these chronic health conditions. And I just wanna thank you for your time and the great work you do, and for being here and sharing all this great wisdom with us, so thank you so much. 

Marlene Siegel, DVM 

Well, thank you for including our fur babies into your conversation, ’cause I think it’s gonna touch a lot more people, so thank you so much.

Nathan Crane

And I wanna thank everyone for tuning into the Conquering Cancer Summit. Please share this with friends and family, together we truly can make a difference for the future of humanity in ending the cancer pandemic. Thank you, and I wish you ultimate health and happiness be well.