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Welcome to the official podcast of the World Small Animal Veterinary Association, where we bring you conversations with leading veterinary experts from around the globe. Each season spotlights one WSAVA committee, sharing their knowledge, research, and insights through short, accessible interviews.
Every fortnight, we speak with two experts on a shared theme, offering concise, engaging discussions designed to spark curiosity and guide you toward WSAVA’s extensive library of educational resources, webinars, and events. Hosted by WSAVA President Jim Berry, the podcast delivers focused conversations that connect you with the latest thinking in small animal medicine worldwide.
You can find more educational resources from WSAVA here: https://wsava.org/education/
Jim Berry: Welcome to the WSAVA podcast. Today we explore non-traditional diets, from raw feeding to the rise of AI generated recipes. Consider this, how do we remain the primary advocate for pet's health when a client's advice comes from outside the clinic? Our interviewer Gregg Takashima speaks first with Marge Chandler and later with Grace Lin.
Jim Berry: Let's listen in.
Gregg Takashima: Dr. Chandler, what are raw diets and have they been around for a long time?
Marge Chandler: Raw diets comprise different selections. They generally are made up of raw meats or raw poultry, not so much raw fish. Some of the owners add vegetables to that, but they're generally based around meats, raw poultry, they have been around for a while.
Gregg Takashima: So are raw diets more natural?
Marge Chandler: Natural is a difficult definition to come by. Certainly in Europe we have guidance on the use of that. I believe in other countries there's guidance on the use of that term. Processed foods can also be natural if they haven't had anything added to than outside that, so it could be argued that they could be more natural as they're obviously not as processed as a cooked foods.
Marge Chandler: They may or may not have as many things added to them as some of the cooked foods. But they aren't necessarily more natural than some of the other pet foods are.
Gregg Takashima: Some of the arguments I've heard, especially for dogs, is the wild canids, like the wolves and coyotes eat raw foods only. They don't have a human making it for them, so they're on their own.
Gregg Takashima: My dog, I wanna feed 'em like a coyote or a wolf. So what do you have to say to that?
Marge Chandler: For starters, there have been some genetic studies looking at the differences between dogs and wolves. I don't know that there's been any comparing coyotes too much, but we do know that our dogs do differ genetically from wolves and something like 10 to 12 of the areas of the gene that were affected.
Marge Chandler: I think 23, something like that are different. About a third of these do affect diet and starch metabolism, so our dogs aren't wolves, a toy poodle and a wolf, they're really not the same and don't need to be fed the same. We have changed dogs' diets over 10 to 40,000 years of domestication and eating like humans.
Marge Chandler: So they actually have changed. They don't need to be fed the same.
Gregg Takashima: So are raw diets more nutritious and or more easily digested than the good commercially made dry foods?
Marge Chandler: There have been some good studies out of the University of Illinois looking at digestibility, and it wasn't consistent for raw foods or the type of nutrients in the raw foods.
Marge Chandler: Some were more easily digestible, some were not. So you can't really make an overall statement about digestibility. It depends on which aspects we're considering. If you feed a low fibre diet that doesn't have much vegetation in it, then it will be more digestible. The stools will be smaller. But we also know that those fibre sources are beneficial for colonic health, especially in dogs and also somewhat in cats.
Marge Chandler: As far as more nutritious, not necessarily. We need to look at nutrients, not ingredients. There's certainly no evidence of them having nutritional benefits.
Gregg Takashima: A big topic I read about in all diets is are they nutritionally balanced? That's very important. The mineral content, the protein content, carbohydrate, the trace minerals, the vitamins.
Gregg Takashima: How does a raw diet adjust for that?
Marge Chandler: I guess we need to remember that there's two large categories of raw diets. There's commercial raw diets, there's homemade raw diets. Pretty much all homemade raw diets, unless they were balanced by a qualified nutritionist, they are deficient, sometimes massively deficient.
Marge Chandler: We see a lot of problems, especially young dogs and also young cats being fed raw diets to where they have calcium deficiencies, they have vitamin D deficiencies, and their bones have not developed properly. They're weak. They have fractures without any trauma, non-traumatic fractures or pathological fractures.
Marge Chandler: They often have things like spinal cord compression that's affecting their nerves. We had a case a couple of weeks ago where the kittens end up being put to sleep because we got them too late and they were in too much pain and we couldn't reverse it. We see puppies this way as well, often fed at homemade raw diets.
Marge Chandler: Now I have to say it's not the raw aspect of those diets it's that they're a homemade diet that's incomplete. It just happens to be the ones we see are most often a raw fed animal. The commercial raw diet certainly can be complete. Now, whether you'd wanna call that a completely natural diet, possibly not, or possibly, depending on which definition they're using, they need to have mineral and vitamin supplements added to them in order to be complete and some of these diets are complete and balanced diets.
Gregg Takashima: Sometimes raw diets are recommended for certain diseases like some skin diseases or dental disease. What do you have to say about that?
Marge Chandler: There have been some studies that made those conclusions, and this is where we need to examine the studies that we read very carefully, because the majority of those studies are not comparing raw ingredients with the same ingredients cooked. They're really comparing apples and oranges, so to speak. They will have completely different nutrient profiles. One of them compared a kibble diet against a raw diet. I think the raw diet on a dry matter basis was about 50% fat, and yes, that will make the coat shinier. We need to have some studies where they really compare just the effect of cooking or not cooking the food and not diets that are completely different. The claims for dental are also interesting. They'll involve feeding bones. You can't make up a calcium or vitamin or mineral deficiency by a dog chewing on a bone. If you just chew on an entire bone, you're not going to get much nutrient out of that. If you ground that into powder, then you do get the calcium and other minerals from that. Now, the argument for chewing bones is that it will remove the tartar from the teeth. There is some truth to that, bones will remove some tartar from the teeth. Tartar or calculus, which those are the same thing that's actually cosmetic.
Marge Chandler: The bacterial biofilm or plaque that causes periodontitis and tooth loss, and that is not decreased by feeding bones. The dogs can have a mouth that looks better, but they still are in danger of tooth loss. The veterinary dentists also complained to us a lot that they see a lot of fractured teeth with feeding bones, and as an internal medicine specialist, I have taken more bones out of oesophagus or oesophagi than I'd like to remember.
Marge Chandler: So there's certainly those potential problems with it, as well as intestinal obstruction.
Gregg Takashima: I've also heard some clients have pets that have GI disease, either constipation or diarrhoea or poor vigour, and then they switch to a raw diet and they think everything's better. Has that been verified?
Marge Chandler: It's certainly not been verified.
Marge Chandler: I have had those cases, but again, that answer that we don't get when that happens is if they had fed the same ingredients that were cooked, would that also have worked? My best success with the GI cases or the gastrointestinal diarrhoea cases is to put them on a novel protein diet or a hydrolyzed protein diet.
Marge Chandler: And I would say what we know is that's the answer for most of those. Yes, I have had some cats been improved on a raw diet, but I'd have loved to have cooked that diet and see if it's, I don't think it's the processing or lack of processing. I think it's the ingredients.
Gregg Takashima: Based on what you said, the claims of improved vigour and health surrounding raw diets are not verified.
Gregg Takashima: Are there any verified benefits of a raw diet in certain situations?
Marge Chandler: I have never come across any valid research that showed a benefit.
Gregg Takashima: So you would never recommend a raw diet?
Marge Chandler: I don't ever recommend raw diets.
Gregg Takashima: Okay. We know people are still gonna feed the raw diet. What are the challenges or problems of feeding a raw diet?
Marge Chandler: Well, first the challenge is nutritional, and my answer to that is if they insist on feeding a raw diet, that it at least be one that is complete and balanced. I would prefer to see them be complete and balanced based on both a computer formulation analysis and feeding trials. But if an owner wants to feed raw, I would also have them explore what steps the company takes to limit the microbes in the diet. We do know there are some things like high pressure pasteurisation, which will eliminate some. It doesn't eliminate all of the ones who are still there might grow quite rapidly. Freezing does not kill bacteria, so that doesn't count as a kill step.
Marge Chandler: But there can be potential kill steps that can improve the safety 'cause otherwise these diets are fairly unsafe.
Gregg Takashima: Would just cooking it or microwaving it make it safer?
Marge Chandler: It would make it safer, but it also could deplete some of the nutrients because especially some of the water soluble vitamins are degraded by cooking.
Gregg Takashima: We talked about some of the diseases you've seen by feeding raw diets like skeletal and developmental, anything else caused by raw diet?
Marge Chandler: The classic that we worry about is the increased prevalence of e coli, salmonella, listeria, a lot of pathogenic bacteria, which are not killed by freezing. Parasites are killed by freezing.
Marge Chandler: So potentially that can help. The other thing that is now we're becoming more aware of in cats, but there's been a dog case as well, fed raw poultry of bird flu and that has killed the cats where they have been infected with that. Another aspect that the University of Liverpool recently showed that not only do we have an increased prevalence of e coli salmonella, but especially the e Coli, that the antibiotic resistance of the e coli in the faeces of raw fed dogs was several times higher than in dogs fed kibble.
Marge Chandler: So we're getting into potential problems for human health and public safety, for any bacterial contamination, for elderly people, for very young people, for immunocompromised, for pregnant women, but the antibiotic resistance problem that could affect all of us 'cause we still depend on antibiotics to treat so many human as well as pet diseases.
Marge Chandler: This, to me, was some of the scariest research I have read and heard presented that we really can have a detrimental effect on that.
Gregg Takashima: If someone insists on feeding a raw diet, what can the veterinarian recommend they do to minimise it? Besides not feeding it?
Marge Chandler: Besides not feeding it? A couple of things. One is feed a good commercial raw diet that's complete and balance. Again, query what kill steps they use.
Marge Chandler: I believe that a minimum of two is required. They should prevent the faeces from coming anywhere near other people, children, elderly, immunocompromised, individuals, either pets or people. And the other thing that we suggest is the hygiene needs to be above and beyond what people would normally do with a pet food.
Marge Chandler: There was quite a high incidence of leaky packages in one study done in the uk. If you've got raw food in the refrigerator, you need to check the packaging. Ideally, the food would be kept in a different refrigerator and freezer from the human's food. They should have different utensils used for it.
Marge Chandler: We're looking at to minimise is cross-contamination in the kitchen or wherever the dogs or cats are fed to minimise the exposure of people to the pathogens that we know are in these foods. So picking a good company, one that's been around for a while is sometimes a soft criterion, but maybe one we should consider too.
Marge Chandler: Maybe one that you have some familiarity with. They've been around and have some experience that they are practising a good kill step in their factories.
Gregg Takashima: All right. I think you've answered all my questions. Can you do some closing thoughts and a summary on this topic? Maybe last words to veterinarians and veterinary healthcare team members about this subject?
Marge Chandler: I think our role as protectors of the pets are to explain to owners the potential risks of the raw diets, pathogen risks as far as the bacteria and viruses, and also the parasites if it hasn't been frozen or freeze dried, the potential for the family as well as for the pet. Often because the pet can appear healthy, it does not mean that they are not shedding these pathogens.
Marge Chandler: And I think this is something that vets need to be able to tactfully explain this to owners. We need to make sure that discussion is handled very nonjudgmentally because owners will not continue to listen to us, we need to have a bond with the owners so that we can have their trust and they will take in the information from us.
Marge Chandler: So first for me is discussing the safety issues. If there is a newborn baby in the house, if there's an elderly person in the house, you really need to emphasise the hygiene. Having handouts on the use of hygiene can be beneficial, so nutrition and safety would be the two aspects that we would hope could be covered, possibly with handouts if the veterinarians, veterinary surgeons don't have time to have an in-depth discussion of it.
Gregg Takashima: Let's talk about how we protect the veterinary staff from animals that are coming in that have been fed raw diets?
Marge Chandler: There's a couple ways of doing this. One surgeon colleague that I know does ask that raw fed diets do not come into her surgery. If they do, she charges for those pets to go into isolation when they're there.
Marge Chandler: You would need to make sure that no vulnerable pets were also in isolation. We also need to be very careful with our own hygiene if we do feed those pets raw in the clinic and make sure that anybody else coming into contact with these pets is very careful with handling the raw foods and handling the pets, not just their faeces, but also saliva as well.
Marge Chandler: That these animals aren't licking anybody's faces, that they don't expose the other pets in the clinic to the potential pathogens that they're carrying and this also means we need to be getting a good diet history so that we know that these pets are being fed raw. We do need to know what our hospitalised pets are fed.
Gregg Takashima: Okay, Dr. Chandler, that is great. So thank you very much.
Jim Berry: After Marge Chandler, Gregg Takashima is joined by Grace Lin to discuss the clinical reality of AI generated home-cooked diets.
Gregg Takashima: We're gonna talk today about homemade pet diets and why or why not, and we're gonna delve into artificial intelligence a little bit. So what are some of the reasons pet owners use a homemade diet versus commercial, especially in your area?
Grace Lin: There are several drivers and they vary depending on where you practise. In some regions, pet owners lack access to quality commercial pet food, or the available options are prohibitively expensive. There's also a strong cultural component, particularly across parts of Asia, where pet home cooking is a default way that family express love and care.
Grace Lin: And so the mindset extends to the pet, but very commonly it starts with frustration. The owners get stuck on the sensitive stomach carousel. They will rotate through commercial diets. They upgrade to the premium brands and they still see intermittent vomiting or soft stools. They feel unsupported sometimes, especially if previous vet visits only offer temporary medications without addressing root causes, like specific nutrient intolerances or incorrect feeding volumes.
Grace Lin: And so that makes them feel like homemade diet, just like the way to regain control. Pet owners often believe that if they source the ingredients themselves, the food must be healthier, cleaner, and more transparent. But is that true? We don't know.
Gregg Takashima: Can you discuss the positives of a homemade diet and maybe some of the challenges of feeding a homemade diet?
Grace Lin: Yes, there's definitely positives. There's this genuine emotional satisfaction and bonding that comes from preparing a meal for your own pet and for some pet owners, it is the primary way they express love. In areas where commercial pet food quality is poor, a carefully prepared homemade diet may indeed be the better alternatives, but cost can also be a factor, although that depends heavily on the recipe and the ingredients chosen, and also how heavy the pet is.
Grace Lin: There's also the challenges. The single biggest challenge is the nutritional balance. Formulating appropriate levels of protein, carbohydrate, fibres, vitamins and minerals is far more complex than combining just chicken and rice. If there's more than one pet in the household, say for example a dog or a cat, their needs diverge dramatically.
Grace Lin: Pet owners often feed the same core recipe. There's also problems with storage, spoilage, and safe shelf life. These problems are frequently underestimated. Handling practise can also introduce bacterial risk. There's issues of inconsistency. A home kitchen cannot replicate the standardised conditions needed to verify food palatability, digestibility, or nutrient stability over time.
Gregg Takashima: Do you ever see instances where pets appear healthier on a homemade diet?
Grace Lin: There are cases that the pet has been reacting to a specific ingredient or additives in commercial pet food, so eliminating that trigger can lead to visible improvement in their stool quality or even energy levels. There may also be placebo effect on the owner side.
Grace Lin: So they are invested in the diet and therefore they feel hyper attuned to positive changes. That being said, appearing healthier is the short term, does not necessarily mean that the diet is complete and balanced for long-term nutri physiological needs.
Gregg Takashima: So tell me, what do you think are some of the health risks with a homemade diet?
Grace Lin: The documented risks are significant and well catalogued by veterinary nutritionists. We see developmental skeletal diseases in growing animals due to calcium and phosphorous imbalances. They may be skin and hair coat issues from essential fatty acid deficiencies. They could be instances like renal complications from inappropriate phosphate intake.
Grace Lin: They could be cases like generalised wasting or immunodeficiency from broad micronutrient gaps. So the absence of entire nutrient categories such as complete food protein, essential fatty acid or trace mineral is a common screening test for what recipes to avoid. I have personally diagnosed cases where a pet presented for chronic vague clinical signs and we trace it back directly back to the long-term unbalanced homemade recipe.
Grace Lin: That's something we wanna avoid.
Gregg Takashima: Homemade diets might have a lot of challenges. Some people are gonna still make their pets their own diets. Are there any reliable and science backed references on how to make a nutritious homemade diet?
Grace Lin: That's a critical point long before AI comes in. There are recipes in textbooks and pet care books and websites.
Grace Lin: They were frequently found to be deficient when they were evaluated by veterinary nutritionists. So the reliable path is to use a formulation service or software designed by veterinary nutritionists, such as Balance It or to consult directly with a specialist in small animal nutrition. The WSAVA Global Nutrition Committee also provides guidelines that can help pet owners and veterinarians to evaluate nutritional claims, but be cautious with online nutritionists who lacks veterinary credentials.
Gregg Takashima: You mentioned this, discuss how artificial intelligence might be used or misused in formulating a homemade diet. So what is the attraction of artificial intelligence?
Grace Lin: The attraction is completely understandable. We use AI every day and AI simply like the way to go when you have a question. A lot of pet owners use AI as the modern doctor Google.
Grace Lin: It's accessible 24 7. It feels highly personalised and it presents itself as scientific by drawing on vast open access resources. For a pet owner who has been frustrated by the sensitive stomach carousel, AI validates their frustration and offers what seems like a precise professional solution, so the recipe it generates can look balanced and detailed, and giving the caregivers a false sense of security.
Grace Lin: In my opinion, it is an illusion of precision. It may not be the right thing to give for the pets.
Gregg Takashima: What are some of the red flags of using an AI generated recipe?
Grace Lin: AI is essentially a faster engine for an old problem. A lot of red flags like inappropriate or missing
details, they often lack critical information on ingredient selection.
Grace Lin: How to prepare the ingredients, storage of the food handling, and shelf life. So the vague instructions are prone to dangerous interpretation by the pet owners and again, there's nutritional deficiency that can happen, and we've seen recipes that can have significant gaps or include potentially harmful ingredients for the pet.
Grace Lin: There's absence of whole nutrient category, like complete proteins, essential fatty acids, vitamins, and these are major warning signs. When you see such recipe that just looks good, but you don't have the whole nutrition categories, and there's also the hallucination factors. We need to know AI models are not infallible.
Grace Lin: They can fabricate information and present it as a fact, and pet owners has no way to validate if the recipe is legit. So even if on paper the recipe looks adequate, homemade preparation can introduce a lot of risk. For example, ingredient substitution, volume variation, and selective eating by picky eaters.
Grace Lin: So again, this diet cannot be produced with consistency and difficult to assess them for palatability or digestibility.
Gregg Takashima: Yeah, so what can the veterinarian do versus homemade diet recipes and artificial intelligence?
Grace Lin: We as veterinarians should probably have an open discussion with the pet owners. We need to let them know that AI is a chef that who can cook the meal but cannot taste it, and hence it cannot predict how the individual will digest it.
Grace Lin: We need to have an open discussion with the pet parents that there is still a place for a, a veterinarian to see the pet have a true nutritional assessment. Vet nutritional assessment is a medical decision. It's not a transaction. It needs to be complete with a deep dive of a nutritional history and actual palpation, examination of the pet. This is something a AI cannot replace.
Gregg Takashima: I've always believed that. Do you have an example or a clinical case that might illustrate where artificial intelligence or homemade recipe diet was harmful for the pet?
Grace Lin: There are several instance I've seen that the pet owners come in with an AI recipe that I feel wasn't appropriate for the pets.
Grace Lin: For example, this geriatric small breed dog came in with a very emaciated body condition score. It's got very poor muscle score as well. So the pet owner got blood tests from another vet hospital that said everything is okay. He said it's got positive cPL. So the pet owner keyed and asked the AI, so what should I feed my dog?
Grace Lin: And the AI said it's got a pancreatitis, so feed it the low fat diet. And after a period of time, the pet is here, being on low calories, it's just no matter how much food they eat, it's just not enough because the calorie density cannot match the nutritional requirement or energy load, it all comes down to, the AI can tell you what cPL, a positive cPL, means but it cannot look at the patient in front of them. The patient has no clinical signs of pancreatitis. It's got no abdominal pain, no vomiting, and even on the blood work, it's got normal triglycerides. If the owner had asked the veterinarian, does my pet needs a low fat food, the veterinarian will probably have told them no.
Grace Lin: It could have a false positive cPL. It probably doesn't need to change to low fat food, we should pick something else that matched this geriatric animals requirement. So this is something I think there's a big gap between AI and the actual veterinarian and AI can tell you a lot of things, but it's the veterinarian that can tell you what is appropriate for the individual in front of them.
Grace Lin: A veterinarian analyses the pattern during consultation.
Grace Lin: We provide stage feedback that makes the owner feel heard and validates their concern. We need to connect the detailed history to a specific problems and the differential and diagnostic tests so it demonstrate that the final nutritional plan is highly logical and tailor made for the pet.
Grace Lin: Finally, clinical medicine requires dynamic adjustment. So whether it's a homemade diet or AI diet, they might appear complete when evaluated by some software, but the recommended caloric intake may still be mismatched to the individual. Us as a veterinarian, we should always be the one that guides them and tell them what's the precise food type, ratio and amount of fibre or food that's required by the pet in front of us, and we need to look at the pet in short term and long term by follow ups. A true medicine relies on periodic rechecks, the owner feedback and objective metrics, and we are the veterinarian that has the power or the weapon to help the pet owner to look after the pet with the nutrition.
Grace Lin: And this is something AI cannot do, and that's why we cannot be replaced. I think there's a lot of ways that an actual veterinarian is better than AI. For instance, if a veterinarian can see the pets in front of them, they can assess the behaviour of the pets. With the modern pets nowadays, especially the ones that live in metropolitan areas, they're often treated as human children.
Grace Lin: So a lot of the pet I see, they have indoor mostly lifestyles. They have lower caloric requirements, but they have high emotional needs. So a lot of the times we see pets that are over fed and still they are picky eaters. Sometimes they don't eat well because the owner is not hand feeding them or giving them the interaction that they need.
Grace Lin: The pet owner will ask the AI, so why is my cat's not eating today? Is it sick? And then the AI will tell 'em, yes, it's probably sick, if it's not eating well, it's not looking happy based on that photo. And then the AI will tell the pet owner, okay, it's probably sick, go to the vet. Whereas if you come to veterinarian and the vet can ask, how long has it been not feeling well for?
Grace Lin: How long has the appetite being down? How much percentage is the appetite being down? Is it 20%, 50%? What has happened in the last two days? Oh, you've moved house. So it could be an emotional pet that just required the pet owner to give it more attention. This is not something an AI can do. You cannot see the anxious pet.
Grace Lin: And sometimes we see pets that have diarrhoea and we ask all the questions and then we realised it's actually because it's getting a lot of stress during the feeding times. And sometimes you just need to feed it separate from the other cats or just don't look at it when you feed it, and then the cat will feel better and then diarrhoea resolves.
Grace Lin: This is something that AI cannot do. So again, there's a lot of examples that illustrate that AI is different from the veterinarian and it's something we need to educate the pet owner about and we can do that by going through a detailed history. We can do that by assessing our blood results and x-rays and tell them ultimately what we recommend nutrition, what is the best nutrition for the pet in front of us?
Grace Lin: And this is something that will gain our trust from the pet owners.
Gregg Takashima: And I understand that WSAVAs Global Nutrition Committee. Has some tools for the veterinarian and the veterinary healthcare team, how to do stage assessments, how to get the right information, how to do the rechecks. That's correct, right, isn't it?
Grace Lin: Yes, absolutely. We do have the nutrition toolkit on our website and you can find how to ask proper nutrition history, how to look at pet food labels, or simply how to do body condition scores. So there's a lot of things we provided for the veterinarians and the pet owners when they have a question.
Grace Lin: So please feel free to look at the website and use the tools. They are there.
Gregg Takashima: Thank you, Dr. Lin. I hope this has helped a lot of people. It's certainly helped me and appreciate your time on this matter.
Grace Lin: Thank you, Gregg.
Jim Berry: Thanks for joining us on the WSAVA podcast where we are transforming care, one episode at a time.
Jim Berry: We hope today's discussion was helpful, wherever you are in the world. You'll find further resources in the show notes and we look forward to sharing our next conversation with you soon.