The problems dogs have with human food

this video is sponsored by Squarespace stay stay good dog okay thank you for meeting me in the greenhouse poptart and yes your name is poptart we'll give the internet a little bit of time to catch up with that reality so the reason I've brought you here today is that we need to talk about all the people food that I have been feeding you I really been feeding you way too much people food and we need to talk about why that's kind of a bad thing to do with dogs and we'll talk about the obvious things

like chocolate and aliums and stuff but first let's talk about the less obvious things so one thing that human food has a whole lot of that dog food doesn't have a lot of is salt right people really like salt we use salt to cure things dog diets usually call for much less salt per gram of body weight than human diets and it's not entirely clear why that is humans do sweat a lot that's how I regulate my temperature you mostly regulate your temperature through uh panting with your tongue and you do lose some uh body

water that way you also sweat just a little bit through the pads on your toes but anyway you probably lose less body water in cooling yourself your self down than I do and as a result you you Hemorrhage fewer electrolytes and so you don't need to replenish as many electrolytes in your diet and way too much salt does to you what it does to us humans it spikes our blood pressure makes us really thirsty and since you can't get yourself water from the tap it makes it a little bit dangerous cuz you might not be

able to get enough water in order to dilute all of that salt going through your system and even if you do drink enough water a lot of salt all of a sudden is going to be really rough on your kidneys to a certain extent we don't even know whether humans are able to tolerate more salt than dogs or if it's just that we're more used to salt in our diet dogs can be acclimated to higher sodium diets it's possible here would you like a little bit of come on there you go oh what a good

doggy now here's the other big thing that human food has a lot more of than uh dog food and that is fat we eat a whole lot of fat and when uh dogs eat human food that's really rich they very often get pancreatitis their pancreas has to work really hard to produce the enzymes that break down the fats but here's the thing this may be more a case of what our dogs are used to versus what they want there are studies where scientists have taken dogs and given them lots of different food options and let

them eat whatever it is that they want and you see what foods they gravitate towards now of course every dog owner with a ring camera and an out ofous job is conducting that very same experiment every single day but under scientific conditions they found that dogs actually prefer fat to meat they will usually go for about 60% fat 30% protein and 10% carbohydrates and other stuff kind of surprising right they may have a taste for fat for the same reason that we do which is just that it's the most calorie dense macronutrient and so it's

good for us if we really need food energy which modern people and dogs generally don't but back in the day we really did and we know from studies of wolves that when wolves bring down an elk or something the first thing they go for is the organ meat then they go for the muscle tissue the organs are generally more nutrient-dense and so it makes sense for them to prioritize those but modern dog diets usually have a lot less fat than that and when you get more fat than that yeah your pancreas has to work really

hard and at the very least you're going to have some really greasy poops cuz you're just not used to it but you could be made to be used to it and in fact there are scientists who Advocate much higher fat diets for dogs but you have to ease them into them right so this is paper thin you can have it now bread is an interesting case it's probably okay for you to have bread but we don't want to have too much lots of animals cannot digest starch but you can even though most wolves cannot it's

because you were probably evolved from particular wolves that were particularly adapted to life hanging around outside of human encampments and since the Agricultural Revolution humans have also consumed way more carbohydrates in their diet than they would under natural circumstances and as a result the dogs the wolves that hung out outside our camps ended up eating a lot more carbohydrates as part of their diets and the wolves that were able to thrive in that environment were the ones that had mutated such that they produced the enzymes necessary to break down starch those were the wolves that

did well hanging out outside of human encampments cuz they could Digest just all of the wheat and other grains and as a result you can get food energy from bread it is 100% possible but this is not the most nutritious thing for you and uh you know best not fill up on bread but now let's talk about the big one which is chocolate everybody knows that chocolate is toxic for dogs but why well it's because the cacao bean contains an alkaloid called theob bromide kind of similar to caffeine and theob bromide is actually toxic to

humans too but we're much better at metabolizing it in our liver and getting rid of it whereas you metabolize it much more slow SL and so it circulates around your system a whole lot and does some damage it can make your heart race and do all kinds of other bad things to you now of course all of our more intelligent viewers know that the dose makes the poison really everything is toxic in sufficient quantity so I did the math on this and if you were to take really hardcore dark chocolate like this here you're not

paying attention so I did some math and in order for you to consume a theoretically fatal dose of theob bromine you'd have to eat about a pound or half a kilo of this very very dark chocolate because the theob bromine is only in the C solid the cocoa solid it's not in the fat so you probably have to eat like four or five of these like 90% cacao chocolate bars in order to get really really really sick though we don't want to risk it we also don't want to freak out unnecessarily and dogs get into

milk chocolate all the time in our culture because our culture in the United States generally prefers milk chocolate and there's just a lot less cocoa solid in this stuff and so as a result it can be like 10% as deadly to dogs milk chocolate can it's not a reason to give it to them I mean I'll give you just a little teeny little bit that's okay yeah not a reason to give it to them because it'll still you know make their stomach upset if they eat a lot of it and I'm probably not going to

give you chocolate on your last day right before we send you over the rainbow bridge when that day comes a lot of people will give their dog chocolate just as a a final treat but thing is I don't want you to feel sick in your last hours on this Earth so I don't think I'm going to do that aliums dogs are not supposed to have aliums and garlic is the worst one it's five times more potent than an onion aliums of course contain all of these sulfur compounds that make them strong and tasty to us

but the reason that the plant evolved them is to uh function as like a pest repellent right for science reasons the oxidizing effect of these sulfur compounds impacts the red blood cells of dogs more than people and as a result their cells die and they become anemic dogs do probably need a whole lot of it but it depends on the breed for some reason Japanese breeds are much more susceptible to this problem the point is nobody really knows how much alium is too much for a dog because it seems to depend a ton on the

breed and it's a similar thing with grapes no one knows how many grapes are bad for dogs and some dogs seem to be able to eat grapes just fine but in some dogs grapes and raisins and other grape products can cause Reno failure and nobody really knew why for a very long time until a veterinarian had a particular case where there was a dog that was reacting really badly to some Play-Doh that it had eaten and this vet looked at the recipe for the Play-Doh and found that it had tartaric acid in it tartaric acid

is found in grapes and the salt of it is known as cream of tartar we use it as like a leaver and all kinds of things in the kitchen for for some reason tartaric acid seems to be toxic for dogs but again nobody knows how much and it seems to really depend on the dog I will say Pop-Tart um your predecessor the dog we had before you Lucy she ate a whole bunch of grapes once and so we gave her some epicac to make her throw them up and the grapes came out so totally unscathed

that we could have washed them off and eaten them and again I think if you eat like one that's probably not going to be a problem but there's a real reason to risk it but probably the main reason why people food is bad for dogs is that people food is bad for people are food is terrible like it's super rich way too calorie dense for our needs and that hurts us and it hurts our dogs maybe hurts them even more because they have like no willpower I mean one of the reason why dogs are so

trainable is that U especially certain breeds of dogs like labradors we've bred out the jeans that make them feel full and so they just eat and eat and eat and that makes uh dangerous foods even more dangerous for them so when I give you people food it's usually kind of lean protein from the table like this chicken but I can't give you this chicken right now I'm so sorry because you maybe are allergic to chicken lots of dogs are allergic to the particular proteins found in chicken and it will manifest as a ear infections potentially

you're getting really bad yeast infections in your left ear which is kind of weird and so the vet told us to not give you chicken for a while and see how you do so we giving you a salmon instead you've got salmon kibble and I admit that kibble does seem kind of sad especially for every meal but don't forget that this has been precisely formulated for the dog's needs and it's probably best to lean on stuff like this as much as is reasonably possible but a little intelligently chosen human food can be just fine and

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