Neal: Hi everybody. This is Neal from Growlies. I just wanted to introduce the wonderful Julie Anne Lee. She's from Adore Beast Apothecary, and we're talking today about some of the history of Adore Beast Apothecary, the values that carry that company, and how to utilize some of their product lines and why they came into being. Thanks for joining us, Julie Anne.

Julie Anne Lee: You're welcome. Thanks for having me.

Neal: I really appreciate it. Now, this is what I know about some of your history. You can fill in some of my holes or completely correct me, ... As I understand it, you started out on the West Coast here in Vancouver area. I think you were a vet tech, maybe? Or something, bear with me.

Julie: Yes.

Neal: You started a holistic veterinary organization where you employed veterinarians, and ultimately led the values of that organization. At some point you left that organization, I'm not sure what happened there, and you moved to the East Coast of Canada and started up Adore Beast Apothecary, which is where I learn of you and the phenomenal products that you sell in your store that you guys have come up.

Julie: Yes, well, it's a little more complicated than that.

Neal: Fill in some holes for me.

Julie: Initially I was a vet tech, then I went back to school and did an Equine Science program because I was getting fed up with what I was seeing as a technician. I was in a really, really large hospital. I grew up in a very holistic home. We went to see [unintelligible] and herbalists and stuff. We weren't vaccinated the whole nine yards. But then when I did became a vet tech, I became very conventional, just jumped the fence onto the other side.

My grandma and my mom they never ever, ever fed commercial dog food or cat food to our animals, and none of our animals were vaccinated at all. When I started doing this, that was sort of like, "I know everything now and blah, blah, blah, blah", a super stubborn personality. They did an intervention with me at one point. My mom actually got a Governor's General Award for a dog rescue. I grew up in a dog rescue my whole life. They sat me down, they're like, "We love you, this is what's you're supposed to do and this is amazing, but since you've been doing this, everything's getting sick".

The vets never even had to come and look at the dogs or the cats unless they were going to fix a broken leg. They weren't sick. We had large dogs living until they were 17 years old like Collie Shepherd crosses, things like that.

I just didn't want to hear it, vaccinated everything and would scream and yell at my mom and my grandma about feeding raw food or cooked food or whatever. Then my own personal dog got cancer, he was four years old and I was mortified. There was no way I was going to go down the conventional route because I was just too ingrained and knew what that meant. I also had that whole holistic side.

Neal: Only four?

Julie: He was only four.

Neal: So young.

Julie: You should see. At my vet hospital in Vancouver I saw dogs that were 18 months old with cancer. What happened was I was devastated. I said to my mom, "What should I do?" And she said, "You know what to do. Take him to [unintelligible]", which was our herbalist. I did and he had a really large mass in his colon. Anyways, we wound up taking it out, but I went for my consult and they couldn't get him in for two and a half weeks. We did Essiac, anal suppositories, we were doing everything with them.

They were going to have to resect a big section because it was quite invasive. At the end of the day, I took him in and it was the size of a grape and they didn't have to resect anything. He said to me, "Whatever you're doing, just keep doing it." He lived till he was 16, but that made me go on this whole kick about, "I'm done with conventional medicine." Once Rudi recovered, he's the one that's on the majority of my packaging, is that dog because he started my whole journey with this.

I went to visit a girlfriend in Spain. I got sick in Spain, went to the hospital and I got treated homeopathically in the hospital in Spain. I was like, "Okay, guess I got to do this. This is what I have to do." It was amazing how well I responded to it. I came back and I was trying to get in to do a human homeopathic medicine course and I couldn't find one, I was going to have to go to England, put my animals in quarantine and I found out there was -Because I lived in Toronto- I found out there was one opening up at UBC. I flew out there, had my interview and started that whole process, but I didn't want to do animals anymore. I was done with animals. I was just disgusted by what I was seeing.

In the time that I was a head technician of this large clinic, the amount of decline of animals that I saw, animals really getting vaccinated and getting itchy three months later. A guy was really putting two and two together, but nobody wanted to listen to me. Anyways, I think a very long story short, I drove my professors mental because I just kept putting it into animal stuff at school. I don't know how I did this, but I was really lucky. I did a four year Human Homeopathic medicine course, and then I got into England, went to England. One of my professors was a pediatrician in England and he got me into something called the British Physicians Teaching Group, which is veterinarians and medical doctors.

I got to go to the British Homeopathic Veterinary surgeons, and I flew to England, spent three years in England doing that, and I went with them to Rajan Sankaran in India and trained with them, then I went to Greece and trained with them in a summer school. They took me under their wing. When I got back, people just heard of what I was doing. I was in Vancouver and I opened up a little practice, and the BCVMA just nailed me.

Neal: For people who don't know, that's the British Columbia Veterinary Medical Association, who runs veterinary medicine licensing in British Columbia.

Julie: Right. I'm like, "Okay, well, what do I do?"and they're like, "Well, you have to become a vet clinic," and I said, "Well, I don't want to be vet clinic. I just want to be a referral clinic, and I want to work with vets and help." "Well, you can't do." I went on this $270,000 legal trip, second mortgage my house, the home [unintelligible] and opened the first licensed holistic vet clinic ever in Canada.

Neal: How many years ago was that?

Julie: I started in 1997, I was licensed in 2000, and I had this little clinic. Within two years I opened the Vancouver Animal Wellness Hospital, which was a 7,000 square foot full-service clinic that had the best surgery, we had rehab, we had a acupuncturist, a chiropractor, and homeopathy, but we did everything. Then I bought Healing Place Veterinary Clinic, and I did a 3-year postgraduate homeopathic veterinary program in UBC, I taught.

Neal: Midst of running all those businesses.

Julie: Yes.

[dog barks]

Henry, it's okay lovie. I'm going to have to let him in. Can you hear him barking?

Neal: Yes.

Julie: Okay, hold on, one second.

Neal: It's all good, we all love our dogs. He just wanted to come in and be part of it.

Julie: Yes. He does that when I'm on the phone. He's very jealous.

[laughter]

Neal: Awesome. My girls are laying there quietly.

Julie: Good. Well, Henry's never quiet. Henry just about killed my partner today, but that's okay. He dropped. Never mind, doesn't matter. Sometimes I used to think that it was the worst thing in the world that happened to me. I got a divorce over it because my husband at the time didn't feel that we should second mortgage our house for me to pursue this.

[dog barks]

Henry come here. Good boy.

Neal: He's like a cat, he wants in, he wants out.

Julie: Yes, he's something else. He does this constantly if I'm not paying 100% attention to him, it's like, "Okay, no. She's supposed to be paying attention to me".

Neal: You started those organizations with the value that you learned from your West Coast hippie parents.

Julie: Yes, well, East Coast actually from Toronto. My father wasn't at all hippie. It was my mom. My dad was a really science-based architect. My mom was a Yugoslavian gypsy really brilliant but very holistic and or is. She's still alive. Henry, I'm probably going to have to put him out. I probably just going to have to open the door and then he'll be able to do what he wants.

Neal: Yes, exactly.

Julie: Yes, I practiced and had a really, really, really thriving clinic. It was when I was-- Adored Beasts came-- That was the name of my hospital. I'm going to have to put him out.

Neal: It is a great name.

Julie: It is great, hold on. Henry, you know what? You can't do that. What happened was when I was trying to get the clinic licensed, you weren't allowed to use any name that had wellness, health, healing. You weren't allowed to use it back then. They didn't have any guidelines for anything like that. Every time I would put something in they would say, "No sorry, can't use that word, can't use that name, can't use that name, can use that name." They just want to be called Broadway Veterinary Hospital. I said, "I'm not going to do that. I don't even have a surgery. I've got a wet lab that's it." Someone gets hit by a car and they come in here, I don't have-- Anyway, so I was getting really upset and I was reading this book on love and there was a whole chapter. It was called the beasts adored.

I was like that's exactly how I feel about my patients, like I just adore them and all animals, not just dogs and cats. I put in for Adored Beasts Veterinary Clinic. They said, "Well, we'll accept it but we think it's offensive." The word beast is offensive. At that point I was just so fed up. I said, "Then great give it to me. No one will come and you guys will be really happy. Just give me the freaking name." Anyways I got the name, and it just took off like crazy. I was teaching vets, and I was having meetings in my home and I would do study groups for vets in BC lots of lots and lots of vets came to my house for study groups. Like lots of the holistic vets actually now in BC. Then I got to a point where I was getting burnt out because I was on call for 17 years. I didn't have a pager on me.

Neal: That's not healthy.

Julie: No, it's not. My doctor just said, "You need to take a sabbatical." I said, "Well, I don't think I'm going to take a sabbatical. I think I'm going to shift gears and shifting gears is [unintelligible] now," because what was happening is-- That's why I lecture a lot about gut health because I started-- I did a lot of really, really, really intense cases. I still do that. I still do second opinions for vets and treat animals with cancer or different diseases but the thing I started noticing like about 18 years ago, I guess maybe longer now probably closer to 23 years ago, if I had an animal that I was treating for whatever a severe aggression, cancer, skin disease, it didn't matter. I always would be changing their diet and ultimately they would get a GI upset.

I had a thing on my clinic called a GI protocol. I would get all my technicians and we would go down to guy gardens and we would buy all this amazing organic human grade herbs and nutraceuticals and things like that and I made them. I didn't make them I had the formula the girls made them for me and we would give it. One day my really good friend, Andre has said to me, well-- She was a technician too. She said, "Can we just make these up in really big batches because you're using them all the time."

I said yes, because you know why? It's so crazy. Every time I do this the dogs with cancer they go into remission faster. The dogs with skin disease, their skin starts to heal. Aggressive dogs become non-aggressive. Something's going on here with guts and all this stuff. That was like I said 22 years ago, so that was my-- That just started my whole passion around the leaky gut syndrome. Probiotics like microbiome, the whole-

Neal: Which really leads nicely into the conversation that I want to have which is to talk about some of these products that you guys have, that the fell in the store that can help my audience. The people who come into my store because a little bit about Growlies because I doubt that you've ever heard of us on the East Coast there, but we don't sell kibble. We sell foods that are fed moist. Freeze-dried, dehydrated, canned, cooked and raw primarily with a focus on raw.

We do know wheat corn or soy in the store in our foods or treats. We'd also try to restrict ingredients from China although with supplements we find that impossible because China is basically cornered the market for supplements because I think it's a cultural history thing there where they've been doing herbal supplements or herbal, what we call supplements for herbal medicine for so many generations that they're ahead of the curve for as compared to in North America.

Julie: Well, not just that. I think that they are ahead of the curve in like-

Neal: They're still business people too.

Julie: I was just going to say in traditional Chinese medicine. I had a traditional Chinese medicine doctor, human doctor working out of my clinic that was trained in China and they're trained with animals even. There they're not allowed to-- He was hardcore. There's China and then there's China. The traditional China is really amazing. The doctors are trained to treat people, treat animals. They don't get paid unless you get better. It's this whole fascinating medical system, but then there's the American China which has been really tainted, but what they did is they bought everything. They own everything, even if it's grown here, it's shipped to China, it's manufactured and it's grown back or it's flown back.

Neal: That's [unintelligible] that is.

Julie: Then they're allowed, companies are allowed to say made in or it's from the US.

Neal: Yes, sourced in Canada.

Julie: Sourced in Canada or America. It's been an interesting journey for me too. I don't know. You've met Dion probably. Have you met my business partner, Dion?

Neal: I think the first time I met any of you guys was super zoo this year, but I don't know that I did but I may have. I met a number of people at your booth.

Julie: When I decided to do this a lot of people, my practice were saying to me like, "You should just be-- You should just be selling to us." We were selling it in such large amounts and then I'm such a-- I'm always thinking outside the box like how can I help more animals? How can I help more animals? At that point in Vancouver, there was some pretty hardcore raw stores. The stores were really, really-- People were going to stores for advice-

Neal: In a raw?

Julie: Yes, in a raw, in North Vancouver through carnivores, the little one that was on Commercial Drive. Oh my gosh, I forget the-- Little dog, Little Dog Big Dog. People are going and we're seeking out like stores to help them.

Neal: They come every day.

Julie: I know and when I first started my practice I was just saying to you, we couldn't do tighter tests. All my tighter tests were sent to the US, to Cornell University and it was tough with me initially. I had an article in the Vancouver Sun called Adored Beast. It was brutal, like every single time I would write something, I would have to- it was just brutal. At that point, I wrote about how probiotics were good for dogs and cats and they made me completely take it back. They fined me $3,000 for inappropriate advert, inappropriate information to the public.

Neal: BMA again.

Julie: Yes. Back then people weren't feeding dogs probiotics. It was really, really new. Like I said, doctor [unintelligible] and I sat down with Sally Lester who was the main pathologist of the lab in Vancouver used to be called Central Labs. It's now [unintelligible] We worked out the whole titer testing for animals in Canada. We did it Tuesdays and Thursday. That's the only time and the labs could do it. It was so cool. What I decided to do is at that at this point I thought okay there's all these vets now that I graduated. There's lots of holistic vet clinics. How do I hit more animals? How can I help more animals? How am I going to do this? There still isn't enough holistic vets. There just isn't, no matter how you want to slice it or dice it, there isn't.

Neal: Serious lack of them here and even ones who call themselves holistic. I had a customer come in today, if I could just rant for a second.

Julie: Yes, of course.

Neal: I had a customer come in today. She says, "I go to a holistic vet." I'm like, "Awesome for you. That's great." He said he wouldn't look at my dog's skin problems because he's on a non-unbalanced diet. I said what about your diet is unbalanced. I know what you buy for me. I don't know what you buy outside of my store but for me you actually buy some pretty good products, and you also buy supplementation to make up for any holes that may be in those products. What are you talking about? Did he go through that with you?" "No. He told me should be buying his science diet or it might have been a Kanna or it might have been Purina, whatever, it doesn't matter. He's one of his vet brands. I said how can he call himself holistic when number one, clearly he doesn't recommend fresh foods, and number two didn't even ask to see what you feed before making a judgment call on whether or not it was appropriately balanced which I don't quite know what it means. If the word holistic is being abused by veterinarians in my community today because there clearly are not holistic.

Julie: The word natural and holistic is really being abused across the board with supplements. I just did a talk in Chicago called the Over-cultured Canine. You wouldn't ever think this would be coming from my mouth because almost every product that I have has some type of a probiotic in it. We are not doing probiotics correctly, and we're causing way more harm than we are good.

Neal: We're still learning about them so much. We [unintelligible] really what should be in them.

Julie: It's not even that, is that this is what I was going to talk to you about holistic. Unfortunately, the really, really good holistic vets they take a lot of time and a lot of energy and they go and they come to my course. They go to Richard Pitcairn's course. They go and they take really good courses and they dedicate themselves to it learning, going to more conferences, going to they [unintelligible] whatever. The problem is there is no legislation for-- There's no regulating body for a holistic veterinarian. As a veterinarian, you can read a book and manipulate a dog's bark with like no formal training or homeopathics or this or that. The unfortunate part is that, with a lot of clinics now, it's a marketing tool. It's got nothing to do with their dedication to looking at holistic medicine or anything like that. In some regard, for the holistic vets that I always-- I'm always hearing this. I'm hearing bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch about holistic vets. You have no idea.

Some of them I'm fully on board with what people are complaining about and in some of them I have to try and support them because you go to school and you learn six years of university to what's in your toolbox and what's in your scope of practice and then you got a three-weekend course and you're supposed to be able to look at something that is life-threatening and go, "No, I'm not going to use the steroids." Or "I'm not going to use this." Or "I'm going to do this." What do you think they're going to do? That ownership falls on the vet association because, in my opinion, they should be-- It's the same with veterinary acupuncture in the US. They're pretty hardcore but their original teachers we human traditional Chinese medicine doctors. That's what they need to be doing. They need to be creating specific courses with human practitioners because they've gone to school way longer than any veterinarian has for that particular modality and then you bridge them together. That's what I did at my course.

I had homeopaths and I had like four-year graduate homeopaths and then I had veterinarians and they both did courses separately. The veterinarians did homeopathy 101 by themselves, just the vets, and the homeopaths did all the anatomy physiology and pathology for animals. Then they grouped together and we did a veterinary homeopathic course and everyone was like, "Oh they're not going to get along. It's going to be a nightmare and there's going to be vets." They were amazing together.

Neal: That's possible.

Julie: It was. This really upsets me because I feel like we're really missing the boat. It's really watered down. It's very watered down and, just like you said, there's all these people that say that they're holistic and they still are vaccinating or they're "Here's your steroid and your [crosstalk]

Neal: [unintelligible] vaccinating for two or three years.

Julie: Yes, and they don't even know how to read a titer. The titer is low and they don't even understand. Even if it's low they don't even have the gumption to like give Gin Dodd's a call, who's like a brilliant veterinarian and enologist. Why don't they pick up the phone and go, "Hey, you know what [crosstalk]

Neal: She's on my list. I'm going to try and get her. You can connect me.

Julie: You should. I will. She's amazing. I was the first Canadian clinic to use her thyroid panel, and I got fined for that too because I wrote about it in the Sun and they said that it was no better than-- Anyways if you come a long way but now the scales tipped on the other side which is not good because then, like I said, everything is natural. When you talk about my products, one thing that I'm really proud of is that they've been clinically tested in my hospital. All the formulas, I know those formulas inside and out. I know what they do. I know what they-- I know their potential. I know when they shouldn't be getting it. I know all that stuff.

Neal: I don't want to stop you because you're awesome, but briefly I do need to talk about a couple of your products.

Julie: Go ahead.

Neal: Some that really interest me and the first one I want to talk about is leaky gut. Your leaky gut protocol and leaky gut in dogs. Let me tell you what I see and you tell me whether or not I'm in the ballpark where [unintelligible] What I see is people who come in and they say their dog is allergic to everything. They say, "We've tried the chicken kibble and then we move to a beef kibble and then we move to a lamb kibble and then we move to a fish kibble and then we move to a kangaroo kibble and every times, six months later, four months later three weeks later, whatever, they seem to be allergic to it again. It's like this weird carousel that the vets get them onto and then eventually they always end up on hydrolyzed vegetable protein kibble." It's weird to me that it's always the poultry or the fish or the animal protein that's blamed for the allergy and never the vegetable protein by the way but then they finally admit there's vegetable protein in the bag when they hydrolyze it and sell it to you as a one for allergies. They don't admit there's vegetable protein in the bag until that point. That, to me, means that makes no sense because we're talking about in the case of dogs, facultative carnivores, in the case of cats, obligate carnivores it doesn't make sense to me that they'd be allergic to their prey animals, and if they are it would be really rare. Not so often that I would have at least three or four people every month coming into my store saying this. I think that's to me that says leaky gut. That says that the mucosal layer, the membrane of the gut is harmed in some way and allowing protein into the bloodstream inappropriately. That leads me to your product. I love that but could you go a little deeper for me than that, because that's what I see.

Julie: Real allergies are rare. They're a chronic systemic inflammatory reaction, right?

Neal: Pretty immediate too.

Julie: Yes. What happens is that the-- Come on, Henry. The mucosal lining of the gut should look like a very tightknit weave. If you think of it like a tea strainer or a cheese cloth, once the food is digested in the gut, then your micronutrients and the digested nutrients, in miniscule form, pass through appropriately into the bloodstream, and you get nutrition. It goes throughout the system to where it needs to go. When the gut is traumatized, the syndrome is leaky gut, but I often refer to it as gut trauma. It doesn't really matter. What happens is that whether it's through dysbiosis, which is an overgrowth of bad bacteria, whether it's yeast, it doesn't matter. It could be drugs, it can be vaccines, it can be flea control, the stress, bad water, dry food, there's a million reasons why the gut is unhealthy. The majority of people and animals right now are walking around with very unhealthy guts.

Then what happens is the gut becomes almost stiffened or sclerotic, and then instead of the mucosal lining being very bendable, it starts to pull apart. Then the junctions become stretched, and then everything passes through, not just protein, everything passes through, drugs, bacteria. People think that your liver, your kidneys, and everything are your [unintelligible]. Your skin's your first mode of defense, but then it's your bowel. All that stuff that's supposed to be detoxifying in the gut is coming straight through and going into the bloodstream and causing havoc. Then it's a snowball effect. It goes in the body, the body recognizes certain proteins, they recognize even environmental components, pollen, grass pollen, flea saliva, whatever. Depending, the body will either attack it, save it as an antibody, and then that's truly an allergy, or it just becomes really inflamed. Protein molecules are big, right?

Neal: Yes, [inaudible] molecules.

Julie: Yes, so they often get the rap for that. Believe me, I've seen thousands of dogs on allergy vegetarian diets and they don't work. Skin disease is the number one reason for a lot to do with euthanasia, and it's why I came out with leaky gut. It's the reason I came out- [crosstalk]

Neal: Really?

Julie: Dogs die from cancer. The disease cancer kills the most dogs, but- [crosstalk]

Neal: Right, [inaudible] cancer than every other mammal.

Julie: Yes, but elected euthanasia, the reason why people put their aunt dogs down, or to be given away, surrendered to a SPCA or something, is skin disease.

Neal: Wow. That's horrible.

Julie: It's horrible. It's why I came out with the leaky gut protocol because everyone was like, "Are you crazy? Why don't you just come out with one product? Why would you come out with a whole protocol of something that people don't even know what it is?" I said, "Because they need to know what it is." Because if you don't deal with the core issue, it doesn't matter what supplement, what amazing food you feed, it doesn't matter. Your animal's not going to get better. I sold raw food in my vet hospital from the get-go. Right from the get-go. I am a major raw food advocate, but I've seen dogs on incredibly amazing, balanced raw dog food still getting sick because the gut has to heal.

Neal: How do people use the protocol? I know it's a really basic question, Julie Anne, I'm sorry.

Julie: No, it's not basic. When I first met Rodney, it was really funny because I treated his dog for a leaky gut. Because initially I was telling him how to do it, and he's like, "Are you crazy? I'm going to have 70 things on my counter." He actually came and did a video with me because when I did the protocol, the Gut Soothe has-- You would have to have 20 different jars on your table. To really heal the gut correctly, it's a synergistic process. It's not going to heal like that. What you've got to think about is, you have to calm, soothe, and heal the mucosal lining, so the Gut Soothe is for that. It soothes. It's an anti-inflammatory for the mucosal lining, that helps to heal the junctions, but that's going to take a while, so

what we really need is enzymes. We need to be breaking down the food, so that when it does actually pass through the mucosal lining, it's in a form that's way, way, way, way less reactive. Then you need to put pre and probiotics back in, but you also need to make sure that you're supporting the liver, because the portal system, the liver, kidney and gallbladder work overtime in leaky gut. They just get exhausted. Sometimes you'll see things, you can just smell it, it's just like you know their liver's not functioning correctly.

Their liver is not functioning because it's overwhelmed with the amount that it's trying to do that the guts not doing. There's a liver tonic in it that supports the whole portal system, the kidneys, the gallbladder, the pancreas. There's, like I said, a pre and probiotic. There's 14 strains, not just two or three.

Neal: That's your Healthy Gut product?

Julie: Well, Healthy Gut's got the enzymes in it, and so does Gut Soothe. Both Healthy Gut and Gut Soothe have pre and probiotics in them. Then I have an anti-vaccinosis, so we start that off first, because in homoeopathy over vaccinations is an obstacle to cure, so we do that. Then the last thing that we have, which I think has been the most amazing

contributor to the whole kit, is if you think about it, if you get cut-- Your dog's gut is injured. It's traumatized. When an animal is traumatized on the outside, we take it to the vets, they stitch it up because we can see it. We just can't see the trauma in the gut, and that's why it plays havoc, but when it heals, it scars. When the gut starts to heal, there's a scarring that takes effect. That's why when everybody would look at IBD, well, there's thickening of the gut lining, that's all just scarring. The homoeopathic formula that's in it, is to

speed up the ability of the body to produce epithelial cells and to heal.

Neal: [unintelligible] to you?

Julie: Yes, and it's got Arnica in it, to decrease the trauma, but it also has something called Biocorneum, which is something that's specifically to break down scar tissue.

At the same time, we're trying to get it to heal, we're also breaking the tissue down so that when it does heal, the junctions actually seal rather than having all of the scarring.

Neal: You say this can be added with food, whereas homeopathics often are not, and you learned in India that that's just not true.

Julie: No, if you saw what they did with homeopathy in India. I know because I have worked with thousands of animals in rescue, and when they're feral, or they're wild- [crosstalk]

Neal: Yes, you're not going to get a tube in their mouth, or a proper- [crosstalk]

Julie: No, you're giving them their remedies in their food and their abscesses go away. Or cattle. If I'm treating a herd of cattle, they get it in their water bin, or they get it in their food, whatever.

Neal: Right. By the way, I do love the names of your products like, Love Bugs, and Easy Peesy. They're phenomenal names because they see what they are. Easy Peesy, you could figure out what that is. Well, let's go to that one, your Easy Peesy protocol. Tell me about that one.

Julie: Easy Peesy protocol came, again from my clinic, seeing so many cats with crystals, crazy, crazy amounts with crystals. It is a powder that helps to-- a lot of cats too though. They have something called interstitial cystitis or non-bacterial or sterile cystitis that comes from a stress-induced problem. Many cats are stressed like cats are stressed in the max.

Neal: Well, they're supposed to be more than one cat in the household. They're supposed to be more than one litter box per cat. There's the water.

Julie: Million different [crosstalk]

Neal: There's so many different things we don't even consider with cat.

Julie: They should be eating off of a plate, not in a bowl.

Neal: [crosstalk] exactly. Because of the whisker fatigue. There's so many things about cats people just [crosstalk]

Julie: People just don't know.

Neal: They're so cold.

Julie: Yes, no kidding. You're preaching to the converted. I feel like cats [unintelligible] I love cats.

Neal: Yes, likewise.

Julie: They really get a bad rap. There's not [crosstalk]

Neal: We don't care for them right. We're not told how to care for them right.

Julie: No, I'm hoping it's coming because we didn't care for dogs right either.

Neal: Correct.

Julie: We were, whatever. We were terrible with dogs and horses, and I'm hoping that's going to change too. Easy Peesy, the powder helps with the pH balance. It has NFL glucosamine in it so it is an anti-inflammatory for the smooth muscle of the lining of the bladder. Then it has a homeopathic remedy in it that works so incredibly well for breaking down crystals. It's not something that-

Neal: The liquid that comes in out.

Julie: Yes. It's not a protocol to give if your cat's blocked. That's a life-threatening problem that needs to get to a clinic. The amount of times I've seen that, and then they just reoccur and reoccur and reoccur. It's a really incredible product. I don't think I've ever had a case, but the crystals didn't dissolve.

Neal: In our store, we say to people with cats, especially cats with crystals, but we say to all cats, there's no dry foods that's good for cats.

Julie: Oh, my God, no.

Neal: When I was on the board for felinenutrition.org, which by the way is a phenomenal organization, the vets on that board all said that they really shouldn't be allowed to sell dry food for cats anymore.

Julie: No, but that's not even them. It's like the American Veterinary Feline Association. I think was like 10 years ago, said that cats should not be eating dry food.

Neal: Really.

Julie: The number one reason for kidney failure.

Neal: It is.

Julie: It clinically dehydrates them.

Neal: They're just not evolved to manage 7% moisture in their diet.

Julie: No. They can't drink. Their tongue is like a tongue depressor. There's no flipping it. No. Well, you know as well as I do, they originated in Egypt then they-

Neal: In North Africa. Yeah.

Julie: Yes. They didn't have access to water so how did they survive? Through the blood of their prey. That's how they absorb their water. I'm not saying that cats should see beyond, I'm just with this protocol, these protocols only go in certain stores. There's a lot of stores that we turned down. My concept is that any cat that's on the Easy Peesy protocol would not be on dry food.

Neal: Yes, and so [crosstalk] is what diet do you recommend or certainly if they can't go to raw, because cats will often be hesitant to get that mild-flavored raw, moving to canned is often quite easy and we recommend [crosstalk]

Julie: Really easy. Or then they usually love, they'll usually really like dehydrated or freeze-dried. [crosstalk]

Neal: Both of those. I actually recommend people make two or three days' worth of the product at a time in the fridge. That really well rehydrated because cranky bits floating in water is not hydrated.

Julie: No. Oh my gosh. No. At my clinic I used to teach people. I was so determined. I would get them to take their dry food and roll it with a rolling pin and then take the rod, make little tiny meatballs out of it and roll it in there dry-

Neal: That's awesome.

Julie: -and put it on a plate and it's incredible. [crosstalk]

Neal: They get addicted to the chemical attractants. It's like the cheesy dust on cheeses.

Julie: I know.

Neal: You wouldn't eat that boring puff of whatever it is.

Julie: I know.

Neal: Without the cheesy dust. A cat would never eat kibble without the [inaudible]

Julie: I know. It's gross.

Neal: It's gross. Moving on. The kitty cats moist food, Easy Peesy protocol. Let's help them with that. [crosstalk]

Julie: All of these products, too, can be preventions. If you have a cat that-- it never hurts to have them on it twice a year. The same with the leaky gut protocol. It's not going to hurt a dog to go on a leaky gut protocol for [crosstalk] protocol. It's never going to hurt. It's definitely there for sick animals. That's the focus, but it's not going to hurt. All of the products are made to rotate, so you can do a leaky gut protocol, then you can just rotate it through so you can go through a jar of Gut Soothe, run out of it, goes through a jar of Healthy Gut run out of it, go through jar of Love Bugs, run out of it, go back. Then we have our new-- Did you get our new one yet?

Neal: Well, when I met you, it wasn't available in Canada yet and you're talking about Fido's Flora. Yes. I'm excited to see this. This is a kind of a Love Bugs or probiotics that were actually cultured from dog's flora. Is that correct?

Julie: That's the first one in the world.

Neal: That's amazing. I love it.

Julie: I was teaching at a vet university in PI, and I was teaching about gut health and this really, really, really smart vet, she was just amazing. She stood up and she said, I love this. My mom has been into this. My mom's been talking to me about this, and I'm totally, I'm totally sold, but I have a question for you. Is it true that all probiotics that we use for animals that are on the market right now are human researched species for humans? I said yes. She said, why? Why don't we have species-appropriate?

Neal: Such a simple question.

Julie: I said it is. I looked at her and I was like because no one's done it yet. It just hasn't been done. Then I was like, Oh gosh, there goes my roof on my house, there goes there. It's like I knew driving home that I had to step up that bar. I said to her, we know empirically that the ones that we've been using work so long as you're using a really diverse, using two or three probiotics is almost worse than using no probiotics because you can unbalance the gut with friendly flora really bad.

Neal: Would that be like SIBO, you know, the SIBO which is the small intestine bacterial overgrowth.

Julie: You would not believe how much SIBO there is. SIBO can be caught. Leaky gut can be caused by too many probiotics and not enough correct species oriented or probiotics and not enough species oriented prebiotics.

Neal: What's the difference between a prebiotic and a probiotic?

Julie: Lots. Tons. Let me just finish about Fido's Flora. Anyways, Fido's Flora was a research bought from a company out near you guys. He got ahold of me and we talked and I was like, we've got to do this. Look, we have to do this. They were already doing it and so I just got involved. What they did is they got canine feces, they cultivated it, they fermented it. They went through the whole process of creating a probiotic strain, isolating probiotic strains. There was 11 isolated. Out of the 11 there was two chosen, and they were chosen based on their ability to withstand and stay viable in a dog's acid gut.

Neal: Out through the stomach. [crosstalk]

Julie: From here out of the back end. We'd have never known that with human probiotics. We've never known it that has actually. I always say we do know because, empirically, we see the difference. We see how well dogs do want it. That's why once said to this vet, we know they work, but you're right, we need to step, we need to raise the bar with this and we need to be looking at species oriented. Other really cool thing that you're going to love is this whole fear tactic around that saying that you can't feed raw food because they're going to give people [unintelligible] and Clostridium. This probiotic completely inhibits those three bacterias.

Neal: Because it outcompetes them.

Julie: Yes. It blew us away to see, when with the study in the research, and it was amazing because we could prove it because it's right there with this massive study, but it makes sense because dogs shouldn't be getting E. coli, Salmonella, and Clostridium. They should be naturally be able to inhibit that, so it makes sense probiotic does that.

Neal: This is where I want to add that we would not have any risk of E. coli if we fed cows correctly.

Julie: No, we would-

Neal: If they ate grass, there's no E. coli problem.

Julie: You know what? That's the whole natural versus nature like I've wrote a big article for dogs naturally called Nature Versus Natural. It's very different. It's very, very, very different. It's a different beast altogether. Anything can be natural, and too much of natural, like, fish oil is not natural anymore. Anyways, and then the other thing it does which I found very interesting it is its ability to modulate the immune system. Prednisone is an immune suppressant and many, many, many dogs are on prednisone [unintelligible]. That's because many, many, many dogs have autoimmune disease. The majority of dogs have autoimmune disease. This one probiotic has an immune-modulating effect which means that if the immune system goes too high, which is what happens in autoimmune, it brings it down. If it goes too low, it brings it up.

It's incredible. The larch does the same thing, our prebiotic. Anyways, then we did in-lab study and then we did a live study and often they don't match, and they completely matched. It was really exciting, and I was over the moon about it, but your question about pre and probiotics. Probiotics are the bacteria and prebiotics are the food for bacteria.

Neal: It’s really what they live on essentially, right?

Julie: It's what they live on. Indigestible or non-digestible fiber is food for probiotics, for bacteria.

Neal: In SIBO, you often want to mitigate the growth.

Julie: Oh my God, yes. There's two things that happen. I'm going to really rush through this. It's that in the over-cultured canine, what's happening is that every five seconds you're turning around everything's fermented everything's got-- Everything and it's brothers got bacteria in it now, but we don't feed dogs indigestible fiber and people aren't eating enough fiber anymore in their diets. Everybody's on paleo and like high-high protein not enough-- I just [unintelligible]. Not enough fiber for the amount of fermentation and probiotics that we're taking.

You have two different, really fast, you have two different types of species or our categories in the gut. One is called transient and one is called native. Native is what your dog or your cat or you are born with, transient go in and out. The transient bacteria are like if you think of the gut as a city, transients are like the people coming from the subdivision come into the city do their work and they leave. They don't live there.

The native ones live there. They've like set up home. They've been there for the long haul and they live in the lining of the gut. What happens is if we're piling in all these worker bees of bacteria, they have to eat and so the transients are eating and eating and eating and then they're leaving, but the native ones are staying there. They only can eat what's there. If they're starting to starve, they eat the gut lining, so they actually cause leaky gut. Too many probiotics without the correct prebiotic can actually cause leaky gut syndrome.

It's happening lots and that's what's-- I'm thrilled that there's so much news and research about gut health. I've been begging for it for years and years and years but now it's flipping the other way like we talked about. With SIBO, SIBO is very, very different. SIBO is in the small intestine. I did a lecture in Chicago about SIBO and the thing with SIBO is that it shouldn't have the same-- That's their small intestine. It shouldn't have the same bacterias as your large intestine.

A lot of it happens because something happens that slows down the motor neuron of the small intestine to move the food appropriately through. It sits there too long basically. When it sits there too long, the food stays there and all the bacteria starts-- It blows up with bacteria because it's not moving through fast enough. When you're adding bacteria, even good bacteria, to that and lots of probiotics do that. Prebiotic I'm very, very [unintelligible] about prebiotics, but you don't want to use anything. In my opinion, you don't use probiotics or prebiotics when you're trying to treat SIBO.

It can look similar to leaky gut. That's the whole thing that I just did in Chicago. How do you tell the difference between SIBO and leaky gut, and lots of people don't know. You have to really work on them completely opposite. Your food has to be different than leaky gut, you can't-- You have to be really careful like you know what you're doing when you're trying to treat SIBO, but to prevent it, this is what I mean. We don't do enough rotation and we don't feed enough still species oriented meaning. Sometimes dogs would be eating a lot of fiber. They'll be eating lots of fiber and they'd be eating meat and they'd be eating bones and they'd be eating all this up.

Then, sometimes, they're hardly eating anything and they're just eating muscle meat and they're not getting fiber and they're not getting bones and they're not getting-- I think changing there for me more than balance, for me it's-

Neal: Variety.

Julie: -diversity. Yes, diversity of bacteria, diversity of food. Gut health is fascinating. It's really fascinating and we only see and read a very small portion because the majority of research has been done in the large bowel with everything. Not a lot's been done in that. I think things like GERD, things like, well, EPI. I would say that the majority of dogs that have pancreatic issues like that probably have leaky guts, I mean, probably have SIBO.

Neal: Okay, then just because we're running out of time.

Julie: I know.

Neal: I really want to talk about a product I love by your company Owies and Oopsies. That's an exceptional product. We use it for hot spots or any kind of abrasion on the skin. What are your thoughts on that one or what do you think about-- I'm excited for it.

Julie: I've been using it for 25 years.

Neal: Yes, witch-hazel and calendula you can't go wrong.

Julie: And Hydrastis is the big one. It's the key that a lot of people don't know about which is goldenseal. Goldenseal, for me, is incredible. It's ridiculously expensive to buy and it's getting hard to find, unfortunately, because they've over-cultivated it, you know. Not cultivated but over-harvested it. What I like about it I'm always thinking about cancer. I'm doing a big canine cancer research with Dalhousie University right now, and cancer is one of my focus and so is skin, and so is the gut. Those three things to me are all intertwined.

When you're treating something on the skin, I always looked at the possibility of the skin being traumatized and then morphing into something that it doesn't need to morph into. Either with a horse, getting proud fresh, with dogs not healing with, with a lesion that-- I don't know. I think about mass cells. I think about all kinds of stuff like that. When I first started making, that's a long-time, this was one of the very first things I ever made.

Neal: Really?

Julie: Yes, we used it in surgeries, we used it on dentals, when we would do dentals.

Neal: It tastes horrible though, wouldn't it?

Julie: Yes, it'd be awful. It would be terrible, but I would just really, really dilute it and just dab it on the areas that were really bad.

Neal: I'd like to get people to use it on their paws when they're complaining about paw problems, like that product on the paws.

Julie: Yes, and our Jump for Joynts, people can't get their head around it because it's homeopathic.

Neal: I am going to admit I don't understand homeopathic. I don't get how they work, they don't make sense to me, but we have an audience that comes to us that says that they want them, they need them and I insist I carry them, but personally I don't get them.

Julie: Well, it was main [unintelligible] in my hospital. Homeopathy was the main modality. I remember this little Dachshund coming in one day. It had been stung by a bee and it's no-- it was in anaphylactic shock. Its nose was above its eyes. You couldn't even see its eyes because its face was that swollen and its tongue was blue and was hanging out and people were freaking and they came running in the back and this was when I had the big hospital, and everyone's running around for the crush kits and I'm just leaving them to do their thing and I grabbed homeopathic Aconite and Apis and I just put it in my hand and I literally spit on my fingers, took it and just started rubbing it on the dog's gums and I just kept doing that the whole time. By the time they got, the woman said to me, if she hadn't seen it, she would never believe it. She said it was like someone stuck a pin in his nose.

Neal: And deflated him.

Julie: By the time they got the actual epinephrine into him, it was probably 40% to 50% better that quickly. It's phenomenal like it's an energy medicine. It's like if you think of acupuncture or quantum physics or anything like that, it's secures-like, which means that let's say you had hay fever and your nose was red and you'd be sneezing all the time and your eyes are itchy and runny. Well, what does that sound like? It sounds like cutting an onion. That's what happens to people. You give something that's called Allium Cepa, which is a homeopathic onion. It's likes secures-like, so you give. Homeopaths think that the body can heal itself with anything given the right tools and the right information.

Well, if you give something to someone like Apis as bee venom, that's what I gave this dog. I gave this dog bee venom. When you give it to them in homeopathic preparation, there's no crude substance, it's just the energy's left because it gets diluted, diluted, diluted. It's phenomenal and the Jump for Joynts that I had, I created that for torn cruciate limb ligaments. We had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of [unintelligible] never had to do surgery. Never had to do, I think-- I don't even know how many hundreds we would put casts and braces on them and then we would do rehab and then I made a Jump for Joynts and that was homeopathic.

Neal: [unintelligible] stops it from moving so that they're not going to reinjure the joint.

Julie: Yes, and it depends. If it's completely suffered, but it's rare that it's completely suffered. It's rare.

Neal: Yes, just in flame.

Julie: Yes, or partially torn. It's a partially torn one. It's really incredible for arthritis and it's really nice because it's easy on their stomach, doesn't have MSM or anything like that in it and it's an awesome product for arthritis.

Neal: Now the other one that's missing from your catalog, and I want to know why, is fish oil, you do a hemp oil, which I very much like, but you don't do a fish oil. Why now?

Julie: You really want to know? [chuckles]

Neal: Okay with it. Yes, I do and the reason is because I do know there's a lot of nasty stuff that happens out there and that people in like, for instance, recently in your neck of the woods but I think it was in Newfoundland. There was two or four million fish that rotted in the ocean for months and then they collected them and they admitted right on the CBC, and I did a talk on this a week ago on my video podcast thing that I do for my store. Then they admitted right on the CBC, the next thing they were going to do is turn all that into dog food and fish oil. They sat in the ocean for months and rotted, millions of fish.

Julie: But not only that. Okay, so here it goes.

Neal: Please.

Julie: Okay, in my clinic I was doing fish oil long, long, long, long time ago, like 20 years ago, and I saw differences. Like really saw differences in dogs, arthritis, and everything. I'm not anti-fish oil, but I'm almost anti-fish oil and when everyone was using shark cartilage, I would refuse to. My motive is I love all animals. I love the environment. My products, we're not going to be killing white leopards to get a particular thing. I will not use shark cartilage because it's disgusting what they do to sharks. I'm not going to jeopardize one animal for another.

Neal: [unintelligible] meet your values.

Julie: Yes. When it came to fish oil, you can read about how it's rancid, how nine, like something like 87% of all fish oil is rancid before it even gets bottled because of the high heat that they have to. It's no longer natural. It's a processed product. It's not just you're eating fish oil. If you're getting it from a company that's very greedy and really needs to get as much oil out of it as possible, greedy or I don't even know what you want to call it.

Neal: Pocket-driven.

Julie: Maybe whatever. You're going to get some of it's chemical extracted. Some of it is heat extracted, but in any case, at that temperature, it becomes rancid before it's even bottled. You can't smell it, it just is. It's oxidized, so that's one thing. For me, there's two bigger things and one is that it's killing the ocean. We aren't going to have any whales in 10 years. I have a friend that's just off Vancouver and he is a wildlife expert and he's dedicated his whole life to it. He said, "People think we're joking. We're not going to have workers in 10 years."

Neal: Yes, residents are dying.

Julie: They're dying and that's because we have no fish. They're starving to death. I sit back and go, okay, something's really, really wrong here. First of all, when you read how much fish oil a human is supposed to have for cardiovascular health, you would have to eat like 60 pounds of fish a day. That's not natural. That's a Band-Aid. That's a natural Band-Aid like why is there so much inflammation? How come we're not getting down to, why would someone need to eat 60 pounds of fish a day to keep their heart healthy? For me, there's too much mercury in the water. There's too much and I am doing a study now so I'm not going to be able to say yes or no 100%, but David Suzuki said to me, "Why are you feeding fish oil when you could feed phytoplankton?"

I was like, "Well, what's phytoplankton?" This was when I had my clinic and he's like, "Well, that's how a fish get Omega-3." If fish didn't eat phytoplankton, they wouldn't. They don't naturally have Omega-3. They get it through eating phytoplankton.

Neal: How come they need like shovelfuls of plankton of those super greens to get a natural--

Julie: Who? The fish?

Neal: No, dogs and cats and stuff, wouldn't they need like a shovelful a day of phytoplankton in order to get the daily recommended dose of Omega-3 fatty acids.

Julie: Well, see this is what I'm doing now because you can't measure a cellular entity like that. That's the difference between natural in nature. You can't say there's this many milligrams in this. We don't even know. The amount of omegas and Omega is in an Omega-3, the different kinds of Omega-3 in phytoplankton is incredible and we don't even know what they do. We don't know what all the threes that it actually has even does. When you look at it, the delivery system, in my opinion, is very different. I'm a very empirical proof person, and I'm very touchy-feely. I look at my animals; I don't just look at blood work.

I never did, not even in my hospital, because I used to see blood work that looked horrific and the animals were amazing, doing amazing. Then I'd see animals that were clearly super sick and their blood work looked normal. When you feed phytoplankton because it's a whole cell, you've got amino acids, you've got superoxide dismutase, you've got protein, you've got five, it's a cell in itself that is complete. When you take that and the other thing is bioavailability. it's 100% bioavailable because it's the size of a red blood cell that goes through the mucous membranes. You have all of these wonderful products and foods and all this stuff, but how much is actually available? How much does your dog actually, are you absorbing? Exactly. I only know. I don't tell people that it replaces fish oil. I tell people that I don't give my animals fish oil. I give them phytoplankton and I give them hemp. They have a really diverse diet, but for people that are on what I say is use this and a really, really high quality fish oil and use less of it. I just think we supersize everything too much. We're just so ignorant of our wastefulness compared to what do we really need or how much do we really need.

It took me eight years to find a sourcing of phytoplankton that I liked, because I didn't want to take it from the sea to starfish again or turtles. It's grown on land. They take the water from the ocean, they filter the water so they take all the heavy metals and everything out. It's grown in sunlight so it doesn't even use energy. Then once the phytoplankton is fed and it proliferates like crazy, which is amazing, the water is put back into the ocean clean.

It's this wonderful synergistic, ethical and I know for me, I don't think it's just fish. It doesn't work just like fish oil. It works on a cellular level to feature nucleus. It's like you're eating something whole compared to eating something completely fractionalized and processed.

Neal: That makes sense to me. Also, it's the kind of thing that would feed mitochondria, would feed the [crosstalk]

Julie: It does. You can't say, "Is it like fish oil?" It's a completely different- it's in its own class. It's not even a superfood. It's a little entity.

Neal: Yes, it really is too.

Julie: It feeds the ocean.

Neal: Yes. I guess I got you longer than-- Thank you very much.

Julie: You're very welcome.

Neal: Is there anything you want to say to my audience to finish off? Oh, and then lastly, I did want to ask, have you seen Dr. Ian Billinghurst's latest book Pointing to Bone at Cancer?

Julie: I haven't read it yet, but I heard it's amazing.

Neal: I got to tell you, it's pretty phenomenal. It's a meaty tome. It's wonderfully done. I highly recommend it.

Julie: Okay. He's really cool guy. He's amazing guy. When you look at when everybody started, we're like in the trenches kind of people. I've known him for a really long time. He's incredible. He's amazing.

Neal: What is the final [crosstalk] give to people about Adored Beast? If this is the last, the only 35 seconds that they get of the video or two minutes of the video, what is it you would say?

Julie: I think to just do your best and really love your dog and not get stressed because your dog wouldn't or your cat or your horse doesn't want you to be stressed. That's not why they're in your life and to dig in. I feel like I used to tell all my patients this, that, not my patients because they were four-leggers, but all my clients this, that they know their animals better than anybody. That if they can just step outside their busy day and just sit and observe and watch their animals, they'll make the right decisions.

It doesn't have to be complicated, and it doesn't have to be scary. They just need to breathe and thank goodness for people like you where they can come in and they can get support, but what I'm saying to them is that they're going to get pushback. They're going to go to the vets, and they're going to hear something else. Just come from a place of, like, be a dog kind of. Be your animal and just don't pass judgment and just do what you know in your gut is what you're supposed to be doing.

Science, I'm a science freak. I'm a science nerd. I'm always looking at every single research I'm doing. Like I said, I'm doing cancer research with Dalhousie, but science isn't everything and neither is natural always the best. [crosstalk] No. It's like, "What's working for your dog? What's working for your family? What's working for you? What's making everybody happier and healthier."

Neal: That sounds very holistic. [laughs]

Julie: It is. [laughs]

Neal: It was a real pleasure, Julie Anne. Thank you very much.

Julie: You're very welcome.

Neal: It was very kind of you to give us your time.

Julie: Okay. Well, thank you for everything that you're doing too. It's awesome.

Neal: If you ever make it back to Victoria, come on by.

Julie: I will.

Neal: I'd love to sit down and maybe share a meal with you.

Julie: Okay, that'd be amazing.

Neal: Thank you so much.

Julie: Okay. You take care.

Neal: Cheers.

Julie: Bye.