Why does your pet’s gut health matter? How can you improve it? We will address these questions & more in the article below! So, grab a cup of tea & get ready to learn how to better care for your carnivore’s gut health!
What is Gut Health?
When we talk about “the gut” we are typically referring to the small & large intestines. The intestines play an vital role in the digestion of the food that you feed your carnivore. The gut also manages a huge variety of other tasks like hormone creation & regulation, immune function, converting some nutrients into unique compounds & loads more! You may have also heard the term “microbiome.” This largely refers to the micro-organisms living in the gut that create the “gut health environment”. First, let’s talk about the intestines & then cover the microbiome in a little more detail.
The Intestines
Your pet’s intestines are made of semi-permeable membranes. In a healthy gut, this membrane allows tiny particles of digested food into the bloodstream to be shuttled off to where it needed to support, heal & build the body. However, this barrier can sometimes become too permeable allowing larger & larger pieces of less digested particles to pass right into the bloodstream. This is known as a “leaky gut.”
These larger particles can trigger the immune system causing inflammation & a variety of symptoms–including allergies. Things that make the intestines overly permeable include chemicals, herbicides, pesticides, fragrances, over-vaccination, a poor-quality diet & stress just to name a few. Thankfully, healing a leaky gut is relatively simple, though it may take some time depending upon the severity of the issue.
How to Help a Leaky Gut
Now that we know a little bit about how the intestines work & how they can become compromised, let’s look at what we can do to improve & help heal a leaky gut. There are lots of supplements & protocols that can assist in healing a leaky gut. For this article, we will focus on raw foods that help support the integrity of the intestinal wall. These are great options to add to your pet’s diet to help prevent or help heal a leaky gut.
The semi-permeable intestinal walls contains a lot of collagen. In addition to minimizing your pet’s exposure to things that harm their gut permeability (chemicals, over-vaccination, poor diet, etc.), adding collagen-rich foods can be a game changer! Feeding things like skin, foods with a lot of joints (like chicken or duck feet), trachea & bone broth are all excellent ways to help heal & support a healthy intestinal lining. Check out our bone broth recipe!
Feeding raw pancreas can also be very helpful. Pancreas is plentiful in digestive enzymes that can help the body digest food faster. These enzymes help reduce the size of food particles. In turn, this will decrease irritation as they pass into the bloodstream.
The Microbiome
The next thing to consider when looking into gut health is the microbiome. Yes, it’s true! The gut of your carnivore (& yours too) is filled with a variety of microorganisms including bacteria, yeast, fungus, viruses & more! Before you get concerned about this, these little things perform a large variety of essential tasks in the gut like the aforementioned breakdown of food. While a few of these microbes are not so good, most are very helpful. It is also important to note that others are good in small amounts & dangerous in large or overgrown amounts. (For example, some yeast is normal, but an overgrowth can lead to a fungal infection called Candidiasis.)
When thinking of the microbiome, variety is the most important thing to consider. As an example, you would want a microbiome to be more like the Amazon rain forest with its 7,500 varieties of butterflies among numerous other flora & fauna. We do not want a microbiome that is like a kitchen garden with perhaps 12 varieties of butterflies and a very countable amount of flora & fauna.
The larger the variety of gut microbes your pet has, the healthier they will be. In addition to helping your pet digest its food, these microbes also help to protect the body & fend off invaders. Think about it, your pet is constantly taking things into their mouth. Whether through licking objects or themselves or eating questionable items, their activities result in all sorts of microbes entering the body & gut–some good & some not-so-great. However, if your pet’s gut is well populated with good microbes then there is less room & less food for bad microbes to take hold.
Helping the Microbiome
So, how can you increase the variety of microbes in the gut? What is the best way? Probiotics! Probiotics are helpful & healthy microbes. These are the things that you want populating your pet’s gut!
There are lots of different ways that you can get probiotics into your pet. There is a huge variety of supplements, fermented foods & foods with naturally occurring probiotics. It might be easy to think that you can just purchase a probiotic supplement & be done with it. However, supplements have a very limited variety in them, often less than 10 different strains of probiotics. Giving that same supplement day after day, month after month & year after year can cause your pet’s microbiome to become a kitchen garden instead of a rainforest.
Don’t get me wrong, probiotic supplements have their place & can be very helpful, especially if your pet has recently taken antibiotics. However, if you choose to use them long term, be sure to use a variety of different products containing different strains of probiotics so the gut does not get overwhelmed with a few strains & has plenty of variety!
By far the best way to give your pet probiotic is to give them in the form of food! Food sources of probiotics have way more variety of probiotics in them & change from batch to batch. For instance, if you make kimchi or sauerkraut at home and tested each batch for the microbes it contained each batch would be a little bit different. So, what foods can you feed your carnivore that will help support the microbiome? Let’s take a look.
Raw Food
Feeding a truly raw diet is one of the BEST ways to get a variety of probiotics into your pet. Cooking foods kills the beneficial microbes as does HPP (high-pressure pasteurization). So, if you are cooking for your pet, giving them a brand of raw that uses HPP or feeding any sort of cooked food, you are missing out on the wonderful benefits of feeding a truly raw diet filled with beneficial microbes!
You may already know that feeding a variety of foods in any fresh food diet is essential. But when we talk about gut health & the microbiome, food variety becomes even more important. Each type of protein is a little different nutrient-wise. Some have higher fat, some contain more iron, some more copper while others have more vitamin A, etc. As an example, if you feed Goat, the nutrients in goat will feed & support different microbes than feeding Beef. Each protein that you rotate through feeds & supports different varieties of probiotics in different ways in addition to bringing different probiotics to the gut party!
Tripe
Another wonderful addition to your pet’s diet for supporting the microbiome, is Green Tripe! Tripe comes from the stomach lining of ruminate animals. Green tripe (not bleached or cooked) contains loads of wonderful probiotics! Remember, variety is still key, so feed as many types of raw Green Tripe as you can for maximum effectiveness. We sell Beef, Goat & Lamb Tripe. You can learn more about tripe–plus get a collagen-rich recipe made with tripe–here.
Raw Goat Milk
Raw Goat Milk is a wonderful addition to your pet’s diet. It is filled with digestive enzymes, 
probiotics & easily accessible nutrients. You can also ferment Raw Goat Milk into kefir (see our recipe) for added probiotic benefit! If you can find other kinds of raw milk & your pet can tolerate it, they will add additional gut support because they will all contain different sorts of probiotics & nutrients!
Summary
Your pet’s gut health is incredibly important! The gut helps to digest food, ward off invaders & support the whole body. Sometimes, however, the gut needs help. Thankfully, there are lots of easy ways to help boost your pet’s gut health including feeding a variety of raw foods, raw goat milk, collagen-rich foods & probiotic-rich foods.
Resources:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6661368/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/12/051205163236.htm
https://www.dogsnaturallymagazine.com/what-are-the-best-probiotics-for-dogs/
https://www.dogsnaturallymagazine.com/6-best-probiotics-for-dogs/
https://www.dogsnaturallymagazine.com/probiotics-how-to-waste-money-on-your-dog/
https://www.dogsnaturallymagazine.com/probiotics-vs-prebiotics-does-your-dog-need-both/
https://www.dogsnaturallymagazine.com/6-prebiotics-for-dogs-get-the-most-out-of-probiotics/
Hey there. My name is Rilla Banks. I got my first dog, Wellingtin, in 2012 & discovered raw feeding in 2015. Wellingtin, taught me a lot & ispired an obession in me to learn about all things dog. So, that I could give him the best life possible. I am delighted to share with you what I am learning!
