Tuesday, June 19th, 2018
While any disease that strikes our dogs is one too many, there are situations that include more than one disease at once. In cases of cancer combined with just about any other disease, owners are likely to focus on the cancer first. From a nutritional point of view, this reaction can be dangerous.
Pancreatitis (inflammation of the pancreas), and most cases of GI diseases demand a low-fat diet. Yet, the most common diets for cancer are keto and those high in omega 3 fatty acids. In these examples of disease, feeding those popular diets stand to harm the dog far sooner than the cancer will. Read more Triage Your Dog
Wednesday, February 28th, 2018
McGill University in Canada is home to professors John White and David Goltzman in the Faculty of Medicine Department of Physiology. These two men lead a team that discovered that vitamin D in active form essentially shuts down cancer cells. Before everyone starts to pop vitamin D in mega doses, or gives huge amounts to dogs, let’s get more of a handle on the mechanism of action that causes this incredibly beneficial effect.
It turns out that vitamin D inhibits production and function of the protein cMYC which happens to be the driver behind cell division and is active in elevated levels in over half of all cancers. The natural antagonist of cMYC is called MCD1 (had enough of letters and numbers yet?) and what’s key here is that vitamin D stimulates production of MCD1. So, essentially, we have more more of the good stuff to shut down the protein that drives cell division in a great many cancers.
Read more Vitamin D, Cancer, and Dogs
Tuesday, August 20th, 2013
Not every dog going through chemo has bad reactions, but a lot of them have one thing in common and that’s an aversion to eating. In the many years that I’ve been working with dogs and diets to help them, cancer patients are arguably the ones who taught me most about behavioral changes. Owners are understandably overwhelmed by the diagnosis of cancer, the schedule back and forth to the vet for treatments and follow-up, expense and ongoing fear. So, when the dog refuses to eat, it seems like all the effort and progress made to this point was pointless. But we don’t give up. Although there isn’t a one size-fits-all-solution, at least one (and hopefully more) of these things can help your dog: Read more Feeding a Dog During Chemotherapy
