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Vally,
I made a bowl of about 13 inches, ended up with 4 jars 4 cups each. A jar will last me for about 3 weeks, I temporarily have 3 dogs. After the jars were on the counter for about a week, they last for at least 2 months in the fridge. The stuff smells like sauerkraut and I have to admit I take a spoon full here and there:)
Cheers Brigitte
Thanks so much everyone. Ashki is doing very well, lots of energy, though still with the occasional soft poo, it seems to improve, then not, so I’m not sure what is causing the problem. We go this week for a CBC and I think we’ll be doing chemistry as well.
Brigitte, what vegetables do you use for your fermented vegies? Do you use a starter? If so, which one? Do you use celery juice too (I watched the video)? Sorry for all the questions! I’ve been wanting to try to make my own fermented vegies for awhile. I normally do not have the patience to watch videos, I can be a little impatient and would rather read an article as I can do that more quickly, that’s the one thing that drives me crazy about Mercola’s website lol. Anyway, thanks so much for your help.
Love and hugs to you all, enjoy the weekend!
tamara and ashki xoxoxo
Tamara,
I sent Brigitte this information awhile ago about lacto-fermenting a while back so I am just copying and pasting it here.
Plenty of raw diet feeders have been fermenting food for years. It’s not new, but not widely known. I have read plenty about the process. It actually comes from Korean cuisine called Kimchi, burying food in terra cotta pots for a long period of time, about 2 weeks. Usually cabbage and other aromatic veggies.
The science behind this is very basic and is the basis for all raw diets. Natural food contains enzymes which help increase chemical reactions. You may have heard specifically about the enzyme in papayas (papain) or the use of bromelain in pineapples. But all fruits and vegetables contain enzymes to break down carbohydrates. Cooking at higher temps can destroy some enzymes. My first breeder was talking about this to owners well before 1998 when we got Chance. She had worked as a young girl for a Duchess in Europe who bred show dogs. One of her jobs was to cut the grass and prepare it this way for feeding the dogs in the kennels. (She also talked about having to use hand clippers to groom, so this had to be quite a while ago, she’s in her early 80’s now!) She insisted we feed our Giants this way and provided extensive research to back it up.
So when raw diets first were explored specifically by a veterinarian in Australia, Dr. Ian Billinghurst (Give Your Dog A Bone, on my book shelf), there was a focus on providing dogs with not only raw meat but also raw vegetables. This was because he knew that they contained enzymes. What he also knew was that the enzymes in these veggies were not enough to break them down completely without the assistance of digestive enzymes. The problem is that dogs do not have the digestive capacity to digest complex carbohydrates into simple sugars! They simply lack the correct digestive enzymes and their digestive tracts are too short and fast for this process. The undigested carbs go to the large intestine where they are digested by bacteria, causing gas and diarrhea. Billinghurst knew that those vegetables that were supposed to provide all that nutrition ended up just passing through the digestive tract, unused.
Billinghurst originally put rice into the diets, a mistake he later retracted and advised against in later books. I dropped all carbs like this when he did, removing the rice etc. At this point everyone began to understand that carbs for dogs was just a bad mistake.
So what Billinghurst proposed and experimented with in Australia in the early days was attempting to break down the cellular walls as much as possible before feeding the dog to speed up the digestive process in the dog’s stomach and small intestine. Hopefully he felt this would jump start the break down of carbs into simple sugars (available via digestion in the small intestine.) He used food processors to do this job. I still do this after all these years. So my dogs get probably about a 1/4 cup of processed veggies in their meals that is processed with ground turkey and beef, plus raw eggs.
You can do this lacto-fermenting yourself, it’s not complicated, just time consuming. I don’t have the room in my kitchen to do it correctly.
This woman traces the history of raw diets and it seems to mirror all the explorations I have done since 1998. (and yes we called it BARF for a long time!)
http://www.retrieversetc.com/barf.htm
There is a link to lacto-fermenting on that page but it no longer works. I found it at this link though with a little searching.
http://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/lacto-fermentation/
my best, patrice
Tamara,
even though I have been feeding raw for over 30 years the fermented vegetables were new to me. I have bought them for a Bernese Mountain Dog breeder and they were ridiculously expensive. After a nutrition seminar and getting all that info from Patrice I finally was brave enough to give it a try and do it myself. It is NOT rocket science or brain surgery, I can do it! I did not use a starter, only a tiny bit of salt and apple cider vinegar. I don’t even have a food processor, I used my immersion blender. Not ideal but it worked pretty good. I chopped or grated the veggies by hand. White cabbage, zucchini, broccoli, parsley, spinach, carrots, celery. Most of the veggies I got organic, but not all of it. Some of the celery I chopped very long until it was almost liquid and mixed that in with about 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar and a pinch of salt. I also added some oregano from the garden. I let it all sit in a big bowl on the counter for half a day and then in small batches chopped it finer with the immersion blender. I filled those in canning jars. It took about 3 days for the “stuff” to bubble a bit. I stirred it and let it sit for an other 3-4 days on the counter. It should be always covered with a bit of liquid or you can cover it with a cabbage leaf and then loosely close the jar. It smells pretty good, I take a bit here and there, tastes a bit like raw sauerkraut and now I add about a heaping teaspoon to every bowl of food. (My dogs are 44 & 54 lbs) I think this would also be good for dogs that are on cooked diets or kibble. I ended up with 4 jars of 4 cups each and I guess it will last me about 4 weeks.
Patrice, you having German dogs should know that it is not only an Asian traditional food but also German:) Good old Sauerkraut!
Just go for it Tamara, it does not take that much time and I actually enjoyed doing it.
Brigitte
Patrice, I also read Dr Billinghurst’s book and used that idea years ago. I have pretty much always used a juicer to juice the different fruit and vegetables and poured some of the juice back into the waste pulp and that pulp is what I add to Bingo’s raw meat.
The fermenting process, now that has me a little concerned as my kefir experiment didn’t work, so I’ve given up on that and gone back to powdered commercial probiotic. I’d like to try and buy a small quantity before embarking on the process, but other than sauerkraut, I can’t really find it without onion. I’m going to keep looking.
Vally
Note in this page:
http://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/lacto-fermentation/
near the bottom, they talk about using whey in the process instead of salt or to cut down on the salt. I haven’t tried this, but that is a lot easier for my brain to wrap around. You could try their recipe which looks super easy to follow and appears to attempt to keep the process relatively sterile.
I was introduced to Kimchi many years ago when a photographer in the news department brought his dinner to work and heated it up in the microwave. His wife was Korean and she made Kimchi. I can tell you that it was a horrible experience for all of us at work when he heated that dinner up. It smelled something akin to rotting garbage/sewage. So this wasn’t a positive introduction to me and I don’t think I would ever touch the stuff.
Now, on all the dog lists I have been on for years, the experts use real tripe, not the white stuff (which is super washed) but green, either fresh or canned for dogs. That stuff is reported to have such a wretched stink that it makes the eyes water. But apparently dogs love it and actually seem to get better from digestive disorders. I guess if I had to I would suck up and use it for that reason….
I always felt that Billinghurst was trying to say to owners, look you may not necessarily be able to completely replicate what a canine gets in the wild, but you can give them a model of that diet with what you have available in your budget and in your neighborhood. It has always been an approachable diet keeping that in mind. He was trying to mimic eating a small rabbit, little bits of fruits and veggies already digested in the intestines, small easily crunched bones, organs that have important nutrients like B’s E’s etc, high quality flesh and a little roughage like fur to keep it moving.
The main criteria is that there MUST BE some form of calcium to balance out the phosphorous in the meat. You can use raw meaty bones, or crushed egg shell or calcium carbonate tablets. But if you don’t get calcium in a meat diet, it is totally unbalanced and will cause illness. People have a hard time wrapping their brain around raw bones since they have been brainwashed to believe this is dangerous. Guess no one told wolves that they were not supposed to eat raw meat and bones…
Vets will usually either argue with an owner endlessly that this is dangerous or they will just nod their head slightly and not say a word. My vets don’t lecture me. But I remember when Cassie was in for her well visit recently and Dr. M looked at her teeth and was surprised that an 11 year old’s teeth could be that clean and white. She has a few small stained spots in the back but her gums are perfect. I try not to rub it in but it is a nice payback for all my work.
my best, patrice
I clearly have to get my hands on that Billinghurst book! the poodles get Meaty bones, Turkey necks work great, I cut one in half, the big part for Enzo, small for Ripley. Chicken necks are almost to small for my boys, they tend not to chew too much and just swallow them. I don’t think that is the idea:) Chicken backs are better, but the turkey necks are best for us. I guess everybody has to try out what works best for their dog. Cleo the Standard Schnauzer finally got a real bone from me. Her mom has been giving her those disgusting Denta Stics. Unfortunately I can’t get her to take the bones. She sucks on them a bit, chews a bit and then just leaves them. I guess she is into junk food. There is really nothing better to clean a dogs teeth than those meaty bones.
Patrice I will try the whey in my next batch of fermented veggies, even though I use very little salt I guess that would be better.
One thing from that nutrition seminar that confused me a bit, I seem to remember that the dogs digestive system is actually to acid(?) for probiotics to be beneficial.
An other thing to keep in mind when feeding raw and seeing a vet that is not familiar is that raw fed dogs can have different blood results. A friend of mine had her Australian Terrier’s blood checked and the vet told her he is close to be into kidney failure. There was nothing wrong with the dog. His blood results just showed differently than a kibble fed dog.
Sorry Tamara, I seem to have highjacked your thread with nutrition stuff, maybe I should have started a new topic.
Good night,
Brigitte
Brigitte,
Dogs lack the enzyme that humans have in our mouths that starts the digestion of carbohydrates when we chew. I remember a science class many years ago when we were given crackers and told to keep chewing them until they tasted sweet. That is the work of the enzyme on the complex carbohydrate changing it into simple sugars before it even leaves our mouth.
Dogs don’t really chew their food. I’ve watched them plenty of times. A chicken thigh will get 3-4 hearty chomps and down it goes. So their mechanical breakdown of food is minimal.
Dogs have a very acidic concentration of hydrochloric acid, more acidic than humans, to compensate for the lack of mechanical chewing. Gastric acid’s job is to break down proteins into amino acids. In dogs there is a further benefit of the higher acid environment to provide chemical breakdown of the bones and meat in addition to the mechanical work being done by the stomach. And in all healthy dogs this high acidic content protects them from bacteria and viruses. No wonder dogs can eat junk and seem to survive it ok! Their tract is very short and you can see what went in the morning sometimes even later in the day. Food just zooms through the small intestine compared to humans.
But we all know that dogs on prednisone are really super prone to stomach ulcers, it’s the downfall of that highly acidic environment.
I’ve read of the problem with probiotics. If I remember correctly it was preferable for them to have a more durable capsule so it could survive until it reaches the small intestine?
There was a research study done that showed, among other things, that nearly all dogs on raw diets tend to have a higher overall BUN, HCT and Creatinine. Dr. Dodds performed this study and I probably found this out from her since Chance’s bloodwork was showing this and it alarmed me. Here is the first summary I could find that shows this data. There are probably better presented results somewhere.
http://www.dogsnaturallymagazine.com/normal-blood-values-and-raw-fed-dogs/