How fasting in dogs might be good for them
In a nutshell, digesting food is hard work. It takes a lot of energy. This is why you fall asleep after you stuff you face at Christmas. All spare energy is drained from the mainframe and directed to the gut to get the meal digested and absorbed. It’s thought that if you don’t eat for a bit, the body will have more energy available to do other things such as repair, toxin removal and general regeneration. Basic housekeeping really. That’s the crux of it and the science (albeit largely in rodents and humans) is strongly in support.
A fascinating study in mice revealed that if you starve mice every other day but allow them to feed ad lib in the days in between, they are not only healthier but live longer. The researchers weren’t quite sure what to believe. They then injected both the starving and non-starving groups of mice with a toxin known to affect the brain cells and discovered when later assessed that the fasting mice suffered less damage to their brains!
And it might not necessarily as rigorous as fasting every other day before benefits are seen. Another study, again in mice, reveals that feeding them in line with their diurnal rhythm has positive net effects on their general health. This too makes sense. Fasting, at least the idea of feast and famine, is a very natural part of the process for all animals, though not so much humans anymore. Your internal computer has adapted to this and has developed mechanisms to switch off the apps it’s not using and instead divert it’s power to things it can do while eating is not top of the list. This would naturally be nighttime when we’re at rest and possibly midday when we’re supposed to be lying around relaxing! Eating is for dawn and dusk.
Energy and general replenishment aside, with fasting in dogs there is a toxin-removal process that is thought to occur. For day to day running, the body can avail of two fuel sources – glucose, which is favoured in times of plenty or ketones (from fat) in times of scarcity. You hear this all the time in the gym, you want to go hungry for a while (so all the available glucose is used up) so you work out in a state of ketosis (the process of burning fat) to shed some of those unwanted pounds.
Ebbing of unwanted love-handles aside, it so happens that all the excess toxic bits you consume, inhale and generally produce through metabolic reactions, that are not excreted in your wee, poo and sweat, is stored in your fat cells. That’s where it lives. So when you burn these fat cells for fuel, you are helping the body purge itself of the nasty gunk it was holding on to. Thus allowing the body to naturally burn ketones has proven to be an excellent healing strategy. Top doctors are now recommending fasting as one of the healthiest (and cheapest!) things we can do for our health. In fact, the burning of ketones for its amazing healthy benefits is actually why the world leader in canine cancer recover, KetoPet Sanctuary, is so called. Read more about cancer in dogs here.
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The body is constantly generating new cells and killing off old ones. It’s a process that needs constant attention. But even within the cell itself the process is constantly occurring as organelles break down and new ones formed. Autophagy is essentially the process of cellular cleansing. It is a word that derives from the Greek auto (self) and phagein (to eat). So the word literally means to eat oneself. In 2016, Yoshinori Ohsumi won the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering autophagy is switched on via nutrient deprivation. During this time, macrophage activity increases. Macrophages engulf and destroy bacteria, viruses and other foreign substances but they also ingest worn-out or abnormal body cells.
It’s one of the reasons you and almost every other animal on the planet is averse to eating when you’re sick, energy is needed at the front lines so the body turns off the hunger sensors.
Medzhitov was speaking to the college radio station following the publication of his research. He investigated the old wives tale which postulates “feed a cold, starve a fever”. Turns out there’s something to it. The difference is down to whether you have a virus (cold) or a bacterial infection (fever). It seems in humans while we stop eating when infected either, we get back to eating quicker if it’s a virus. To investigate this, he injected mice with either a bacterial or viral infection and divided the mice into eating or fasting groups. Mice that ate with viral infections recovered faster. When they did their science thing and convinced the mice to eat with a bacterial infection they all died.
When you fast the level of insulin in your blood falls and this is a good thing as insulin, vital as it is as a transporter of sugar to cells, is a pro-inflammatory hormone. If you are always nibbling, you keep a constant amount of insulin in your blood, increasing systemic inflammation and possibly reducing your insulin sensitivity over time. Fasting gives the immune system a break from this activity for awhile, freeing it up to do more productive things.
Even more impressive, recent studies suggest that such fasting may also promote recovery after acute spinal cord injury. Compared to controls, fasting rats with damaged spinal chords showed they recovered better, had smaller injury-site lesions and increased neuronal regeneration over rats fed more liberally.
The internet is now rife with literally dozens of very solid articles on the subject of fasting. You will find a plethora of studies on Google Scholar that document the benefits of this practice in humans, including:
So yeah, safe to say there’s probably something to fasting in dogs! 20% off for new customers to our shop. Use code NEWCUSTOMER20
Fasting Will NOT Cause Your Dog to Starve!
But isnt fasting equivalent to starving my dog? Such is the approach numerous dog parents employ when first hearing about it. We know they have their dogs best interests at heart, which is why well dispel any myths surrounding this eating pattern. Fasting has nothing to do with starvation but abstinence: your dogs food intake will be reduced for a short time to allow their body to divert energy towards other bodily functions.
Through intermittent fasting, your dogs digestive tract gets a short but well-deserved break, while their kidneys get to rest from dealing with the nitrogen waste resulting from meat. We know your furry friend would like nothing else but to see a mountain of meat in their food bowl, but a well-timed dietary break might serve them more than you can expect!
3 Ways Raw Feeders Incorporate Fasting
At first, I was nervous about fasting my dogs. I worried that theyd be hungry, that Id have to avoid sad puppy eyes all day, or that theyd get hunger pukes. None of that happened. Our dogs are fine.
If youre worried about fasting your dogs, there are three ways that you can incorporate fasting into your dogs diet:
1 – Fast your dogs once a week; feeding them a slightly heavier meal the other days to make up for the loss. The day of the week isnt important; consistency is key.
2 – Fast your dogs by feeding them once a day; the rest of the day mimics fasting as the gut resets itself. And feeding dogs once a day makes meal planning easier. When you feed once a day, you want to feel 100% of the food in one meal. For instance, if your dog eats two pounds of food daily, then youll feed a 2-pound meal instead of dividing the food into two 1-pound meals.
3 – Allow your dog to self fast; if your dog doesnt feel like eating, allow him or her to take a break. My dogs have self-fasted on occasion. Usually when they have an upset stomach or because theyre not hungry.
Dog Fasting: Is Intermittent Fasting Safe For Your Pets? – Dr. Berg
“Feeding pet dogs just once a day might keep them healthier as they age,” says a headline in New Scientist this week. But when we look under the headline, it’s pretty clear that there’s not much support for this claim. It’s more of a hypothesis that dogs might benefit from intermittent fasting. After all, intermittent fasting has been a hot concept for human dieting over the last several years. So researchers decided to dig into survey data to see if they could find any associations between less frequent feeding (once daily) and a dog’s health.
But this research has not yet gone through peer review and it has significant limitations. Thus, the authors themselves write:
“Given the limitations of this cross-sectional, observational study, the results of this investigation should not be used to make decisions about the feeding or clinical care of companion dogs.”
Alex German, a professor of small animal medicine at the University of Liverpool, tells us that this study has merit, but the splashy headlines are a little premature:
“The authors have done a good job and I look forward to seeing further data particularly when the cohort is more established and they have more objective measures (than owner reports) at their disposal.
“Not unexpectedly, there are many weaknesses which, in fairness, the authors do acknowledge in the discussion.”
So the best advice is to stick with what’s working for you and your furry friend. Fetch by WebMD says that there are several healthy ways to feed your dog. But they go on to say that “it’s best to do it twice daily at 8-12 hour intervals.” In fact, this is the most common recommendation you’ll find.
However, it’s not based on a lot of research, and that’s why German tells us this very preliminary finding is actually interesting:
“This is the first time, to my knowledge, that associations between feeding pattern and health have been examined in dogs. So, it is novel and the study does have merit.”
The bottom line here is simple. Novel research is great. Limitations of observational survey research and self-reports from pet owners are real. So splashy headlines about intermittent fasting diets for dogs are unhelpful.
Click here to read this preprint, here to read the coverage from New Scientist, and here to read a commentary thread from German.
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