11/04/2025
THE DOGS IN RED DIED OF CANCER, THEN SOMETHING CHANGED...
I did a post 5 days ago about how eerily close the results of my initial poll of 1600 dog owners on Dogs First were to the results of a study published 6 or 7 years later which found that raw fed dogs are significantly less likely to see / use the vets than dry fed dogs. When you look at the two graphs, they are nearly twice as likely NOT to see the vet at all in a year and roughly twice as likely NOT to see the vet more than once.
My poll was anecdotal. The study is peer-reviewed evidence. The poll fuels the study. The study supports, in this case, corroborates (verifies, come on guys, can we keep it together), the poll.
Why is a question for another day though theories include we are better educated so we will can smaller maladies ourselves and there is the ever building lack of trust, sadly. But when studies show raw dog food reduces the #1, 2 and 3 reasons for visiting the vet today AND the CEO of a large dog charity (Brisbane Guide Dogs) reported an >80% savings in vet bills when she changed all of their dogs-in-training from Mars kibble to raw dog food, there is clearly another factor involved.
This graph is another one of those situations. It’s purely anecdotal. It’s simply the testimony (supported by vet records, which I haven't seen) of a standard poodle breeder with nothing to gain, no affiliation to any pet food company or business beyond that.
The dogs in red died of cancer.
The dogs in green died of something else.
Guess what that dotted line represents?
Correct, she changed to raw in 2013.
Purely anecdotal, of course, but she has 20 more very healthy dogs in her charge right now, all reared on raw, so we’ll know more in time.
I love this kind of stuff. I mean, if you were a betting man, you wouldn’t say raw dog food CAUSES cancer. That would seem a poor place to put your money.
Why does dry dog food cause cancer? Well, I’m just back from Turkey after lecturing to a large room of vets on exactly this. Excluding the lack of omega 3, unbalanced omega 6:3 ratio and horrible fats in general, the lack of antioxidants and the clear presence of highly carcinogenic moulds of and bevvy of truly toxic chemicals in general, the chief culprit, in my eyes at least, is carbs.
We KNOW tumours LOVE carbs (they acually love the insulin that results from feeding high-carb diets as insulin is a growth hormone. They’re covered in receptor for it. It’s how we find them in PET scans - we make people drink radioactive juice and watch the tumours light up like Christmas trees).
We KNOW (as in, studies show...) that high glycemic (diets with lots of rapidly digested carbs ready to go) fuel a large number of cancers in humans. Petrol to flames.
We KNOW the diet advice for said humans is drop carb consumption (to nil, ideally, moderate protein, higher-fat…shift the person to fat-burning, starving the tumour).
We KNOW dog tumours are virtually identical to humans, hence we test everything on them.
We KNOW medium carb dry food (32%) doubles the insulin release in dogs compared to low carb dry food (most dry food is >50%...).
We KNOW tumor growth is reduced when you feed dogs less carbs.
Interesting, eh?
I wonder, just thinking out loud, as long as it's permitted (have to check), but if I asked you all for your vet records reaching right back into the past, would you guys send them into me (after removing any and all personal data)? Your vet doesn’t own those records, you do. If you ask for them, they have to send them to you.
All I would need is the date you shifted to raw.
This graph has little power as it’s just 23 dogs. Imagine the info I could pull from 1000 dogs, 10,000 dogs. It wouldn't be an official, peer-review study, of course (which are falling in value these days, sadly), we're just taking a look because, as with my poll of vet visits years ago, simply asking the people what they are seeing / experiencing is eerily similar to what the studies verify is happening many years later.
It's called a "retrospective analysis". In Pharma it would be called a Stage 3 Clinical Trial - after Stage 1 (in the lab, seems OK), we move to Stage 2 (test on a small, controlled population). Stage 2 will detect any MAJOR issues that happen quickly but it can't detect more subtle side effects or anything chronic that happens over time. You need much bigger numbers for that and you need at least a few years. That is stage 3. You let loose the product on the masses. Then, after a few years, they look back and assess the impact by comparing the population with said change versus those that did not receive said therapy. It's how they unravelled smoking and lung cancer, for example. It's very powerful and hence we don't get them often, certainly about "that which cannot be discussed". Needless to say, the dry dog food sector has never done one (and, weirdly, the evidenced-based veterinary sector has never asked for it). All we have is the enormous surveys by Helsinki and New York that found very similar results - harm is happening on multiple fronts.
