Digestive Problems

Pancreatitis In Dogs

Table of Contents

Pancreatitis Is On The Increase

Hello and I’m back in the UK now and I want to tell you about pancreatitis because I know that this is on the increase. It’s probably the most rapidly increasing disease situation that we have in our pet dogs and cats, particularly dogs actually.

Pancreatitis is on the increase in dogs – why is this?

So the job of the pancreas then, first of all is to produce digestive enzymes to enable the body to digest food that’s taken in.

Also within the pancreas are the islets of Langerhans an area which produces insulin and the hormones required for the distribution or storage or usage of glucose. But I’m going to talk primarily about the pancreas as pancreatitis involves mostly the pancreas. So producing enzymes for the digestion of food is a very costly business.

Cooked And Processed Food Overworks The Pancreas

If the animal is eating raw food the food still contains its enzymes in a perfectly active form so the pancreas doesn’t really have very much to do. It produces a few enzymes but not very many because basically the food contains enough enzymes to digest itself more or less.

Producing enzymes for the digestion of food is a very costly business

So the pancreas produces a little. When fed on processed food, there are no enzymes in processed food because by very definition of being processed gives them a long shelf life and the requirement for a long shelf life is to destroy all the enzymes. 

Well as enzymes are the currency of health, the currency of energy in the body, it seems really rather pointless feeding processed food because it has no enzymes in it. It’s just empty calories as they say.

So the solution is of course to feed raw food. But also if you want to feed processed food, then you can mix enzymes with it as in PET Plus. That’s one of the reasons I created it.

The Pancreas Is Worn Out

The pancreas then when you feeding processed food has to produce all the digestive enzymes and it just gets exhausted doing that a couple of times every day for however long the animal lives.

It’s always on the go in fact an experiments where they took a bunch of rats and fed half of them on a particular type of food raw and the other half on exactly the same food but cooked, they found that the pancreas of the rats fed on the cooked food was three times bigger than the pancreas of the rats fed on that food, but raw after just a few months. 

The pancreas is simply worn out

So it just shows how much extra work were asking the pancreas to do by feeding processed food so much the best thing is to feed raw food. If your dog or on the rare case cat, has pancreatitis then start giving it some enzymes straightaway.

PET Plus is a really good source of enzymes because it also has antioxidants and all sorts of other good things with it like probiotics prebiotics. and the works. 

So that’s the quickest way to start reversing the problem. And also change the diet onto a raw food diet start off with less fatty types of things because fat seems to be the most difficult thing for the compromised digestive system to be able to digest. And then gradually as the system improves you can gradually go on to feeding completely raw food with fat in it so you don’t have to go for low fat options and that’s the best way to deal with pancreatitis.