[00:00:00] JJ: I am JJ Virgin, PhD Dropout, sorry, mom turned four time New York Times bestselling author. I’m a certified nutrition specialist, fitness Hall of Famer, and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe, but I’m driven, most of all by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information that I uncover.

[00:00:31] JJ: With as many people as I can, and that’s where you come in. That’s why I created the well Beyond 40 podcasts to synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode, we’ll talk about what’s working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to powerful aging and prescriptive fitness.

[00:00:56] JJ: Join me on the journey to better health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out at 100. Don’t miss an episode. Subscribe [email protected] to start unlocking your healthiest, most energetic self. All right, pet parents, have I got the best episode ever for you?

[00:01:23] JJ: I have been selfishly so excited about this, um, meeting this woman, Dr. Marlene Siegel. Because I’ve been looking for the, the functional vet. The vet that gets to the root cause, the the amazing one. And I found her and she actually lives near me. How lucky am I? And you are lucky too because so much of what she teaches, um, you can apply without having to actually see her.

[00:01:49] JJ: Plus she trains other vets. Dr. Marlene Siegel is a pioneer in the field of really integrative, holistic, and functional medicine for the past 20 years. She is 40 years in, uh, veterinary medicine. She’s an author, she’s an international lecturer. She’s a researcher for integrative veterinary technologies and a practitioner.

[00:02:11] JJ: Her special expertises are in ozone therapy, photodynamic therapy and detox, and she has the, um, widest array of alternative therapies in the world in her vet hospital. Again, I’m like beside myself that she is 30 minutes away from me with a big focus on something called bio regulatory medicine, where you identify the root cause of disease and figure out safe and effective solutions.

[00:02:35] JJ: Some of the stuff you’re gonna hear about in this interview about the cancer rates in in our pets and dogs and cats and just some of the places that you may not have even thought about that they are picking up, uh, toxins is kind of mind blowing. So she’s got an online course for pet parents and she also has a vet course as well, and she has her own raw food and essential supplements company.

[00:03:02] JJ: Which I’m super excited about because I thought I was feeding my dogs really well and turns out I wasn’t. So, um, yes, this was a little of, uh, of, uh, J’s flower Garden of Doggies, Duffy, dandelion and, and Daisy. Um, how to help them. And hopefully this will be amazing for you as well, because there’s so many things you can put into immediate practice.

[00:03:27] JJ: I’m gonna have everything too in the show notes, she has a, an ebook for pet parents and, um, also her companies, her food and supplement company. I’m gonna put all of that at jj virgin.com/pet Health, and I will be right back with my new pal, Dr. Marlene Siegel.

[00:04:00] JJ: Here we go, Dr. Marlene Siegel. We’ve just started. We are, we’ve been talking offline now. We’re live. Um, well, not really live. We’re recorded, but I’m super excited to talk about this because I am a fur parent and I wanna make sure I’m doing the right thing selfishly as well. Sure. So, you know, we try to do the best things, and it’s interesting, one of the supplement companies that I worked with before actually had a bunch of supplements for pets too, because they were just kind of redoing the supplements that we would use and tweaking ’em for pets.

[00:04:33] JJ: So I’m not sure that was the right thing to do, but probably so. Well that

[00:04:37] Dr. Marlene Siegel: that’s, I I would like to actually talk about supplements when we get there. Yes, definitely. I’d to go from the bottom up, you know, and, and really create the conversation so people can follow. But definitely the supplement companies, it’s a wild west out there and it’s very, very hard to navigate.

[00:04:53] JJ: It’s, um, the whole thing is, feels wild. Westy to me. It feels like there’s very few of you, which I would consider you, I guess, a functional vet. So before we get into it, how did you become, what do you, what do you call yourself? Are you an integrative vet? Functional vet? What? Oh god.

[00:05:11] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Great. Crazy. I used to say integrative, but then that word became, uh, I don’t wanna say bastardized, but.

[00:05:21] Dr. Marlene Siegel: You know, integrative veterinarian medicine was then allopathic, veterinarian medicine substituting instead of a pill for the ill. It was an acupuncture needle or an herb, but they still weren’t getting to the root cause of the problem. So it was still symptom suppression. So I didn’t wanna be associated with that.

[00:05:38] Dr. Marlene Siegel: And holistic, the true meaning of holistic is whole body, but it’s not interpreted that way. You know, when people talk about holistic medicine, they think it’s this woo woo thing out there. Mm-hmm. So what I literally do is more bio regulatory medicine. And in bio regulatory medicine, which is an old, old science, comes out of Europe, it’s really understanding the body’s biology.

[00:06:02] Dr. Marlene Siegel: And when you understand the biology, then you’re, oh gosh, here we’re gonna say the biohack word, but you’re biohacking the biology. We’re just, we know what the body has and we know how it’s supposed to work, but we’re living lifestyles that are either suppressing it or interfering with it. And so therefore we have symptoms to show us there’s a problem.

[00:06:24] Dr. Marlene Siegel: So what I do is I go through very thoroughly figuring out what are the deficiencies, the toxicities, what’s causing mitochondrial dysfunction, and then we fix it.

[00:06:34] JJ: And it seems to me, now, correct me if I’m wrong, so I’d love to kind of know the current statistics on pets, but it seems like pets are getting sicker and fatter right.

[00:06:43] JJ: Along with their owners.

[00:06:44] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Yeah. Is this the case? Oh, worse actually, because cancer rates in dogs right now, the last I was a 10-year-old statistic, one outta 1.65. It is so much higher than that. What I would literally say, yeah. So one outta one outta 1.65 is almost a hundred percent. And we’re also seeing cancers in animals under a year of age.

[00:07:08] Dr. Marlene Siegel: I like let that sink in. Remember cancers when I started practicing 40 years ago, was an old animal disease. We didn’t see it in their younger years. And then it went to being a teenager and then it was a 6-year-old. And now I literally have a cancer patient in my office diagnosed with intestinal lymphoma at a year of age.

[00:07:28] JJ: What is happening?

[00:07:30] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Well, this is interesting because we did genetic testing on this tumor that was taken out of his intestines. And the company that we use, they test for genetic defects, but they look at those that were inherited and those that were acquired. And this was an acquired meaning that the toxic lifestyle, unbeknownst nobody does this on purpose to their pets, but toxins that this dog was exposed to.

[00:07:59] Dr. Marlene Siegel: And it just, the number of things that happened altogether at the wrong time, it was a perfect storm and it created the cancer at a year of age. Oh, you know, it didn’t happen at a year. It happened before that, so, right. Yeah. He was having some GI problems probably six months before the cancer was actually detected.

[00:08:17] Dr. Marlene Siegel: And in this dog, one part of the bowel tunneled on another part, it’s called an inception, and it was because of that crisis emergency. Of the bowel being tunneled like that, that they had to go in surgically and repair that and it couldn’t be undone. So they had to resect it, and that’s when they discovered that there was actually abnormal tissue inside the intussusception.

[00:08:39] Dr. Marlene Siegel: If it wasn’t for that, he may have gone longer without being detected. So it was really a blessing.

[00:08:45] JJ: Well, so you’re seeing this big rise in cancer. And you mentioned toxins. What, where are the toxins coming from?

[00:08:55] Dr. Marlene Siegel: So we are being inundated since World War ii. There have been over 85, probably now in the a hundred thousand range of synthetic toxins that have been dumped on our food, our water, our crops.

[00:09:09] Dr. Marlene Siegel: We have chem trails in Florida, lot being sprayed on us. Those are full of heavy metals. And that

[00:09:14] JJ: fog we had recently

[00:09:17] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Yeah. Wasn’t that because you live half an hour from me? Yeah. And uh, all of that was very interesting. Looking up at the sky and seeing those patterns. It was really different.

[00:09:26] JJ: It was frightening.

[00:09:26] JJ: We actually were, unfortunately it was during New Year’s and we were down in Naples and we were outside for a New Year’s, like, um, black tie bash on a boat dock, barefoot and black tie, and a boat dock. But it was barefoot black tie. And, and I’m like, looking this going. Oh my gosh. We are getting like bombarded with this.

[00:09:46] JJ: Fog. Yeah. Not fog. So yeah.

[00:09:50] Dr. Marlene Siegel: And it’s in our tap water, you know, the toxins and the heavy metals and the glyphosate. It’s raining on us in rain and it’s all the things in processed foods, the hormones, chemicals, pesticide, the same

[00:10:02] JJ: thing that’s hitting, hitting us as a, as humans.

[00:10:06] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Yeah.

[00:10:07] JJ: But I would think, you know, these are much smaller little bodies.

[00:10:10] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Yeah. For, for the surface area of their body, it is creating a bigger problem because cancer rates and men are supposed to be one outta two. Well, dogs are higher than that and cats, they say more like women, one outta three. But that is so highly under reported. We’re seeing so much more cancer in cats than the statistics show because probably they’re not all being reported.

[00:10:32] JJ: Oh my goodness. I had no idea. Well, I’ve got three doggies, a 19, a 3-year-old and a nine month old. Um. Who’s very mischievous, who’s chewing up all our rugs right now.

[00:10:46] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Which is dangerous.

[00:10:48] JJ: Yeah. It’s foreign body.

[00:10:49] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Linear foreign body. And the toxins in I know. What do you

[00:10:53] JJ: do? Like

[00:10:55] Dr. Marlene Siegel: uh, yeah, give them other redirected toys and supervision.

[00:10:59] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Kinda you would with a toddler that was crawling around you redirect them to appropriate toys. Good. We redirect payment. So. Alright, so here’s the operative question. Jj, what do you feed your pets?

[00:11:10] JJ: So I hope we’re doing the right thing. ’cause I thought we were, we’ve been feeding them. Uh oh gosh. What’s the name of it now?

[00:11:20] JJ: It gets shipped to US Farmer’s Dog.

[00:11:22] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Okay. All right, so let’s talk about farmer’s dog. Okay. Um, not all of their products are organic, so I’m gonna say that that’s the first thing. The ingredients in a diet need to be grass fed, grass finished, if it’s cattle or deer, and if it’s chicken free range without any feed being given to them.

[00:11:42] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Because all of the feeds that are given to these animals are corn-based. And 98% of the corn in the United States is genetically modified. So remember, whatever they’re eating, you’re eating, right? And so, yeah, we gotta be really careful about, um, the feeds that are being fed to these animals. So first thing is, what are the ingredients?

[00:12:03] Dr. Marlene Siegel: And a lot of these companies are adding in vegetables because it sounds great to us, doesn’t it? Like we eat vegetables and so should our pets eat vegetables. However, in the wild, and, and this is what I use to base my, um, my decisions on ’cause there’s not science behind everything. But what is, what happens in nature?

[00:12:26] Dr. Marlene Siegel: ’cause I think nature trumps anything man has ever done. So a carnivore, which is our dogs and our cats, cats were actually obligate carnivores. They have no dietary requirement for carbohydrates. So where did they get their carbohydrates? Well, when they hunted something, you know, they got up in the morning, they were hungry, they found something that they could chase rale with kill.

[00:12:47] Dr. Marlene Siegel: And as they were tearing through the abdomen to get to the organ meat, they would’ve had to pull the intestines out. And when they did that, they would’ve torn them and. Chewed through them. And so some of that intestinal effluent would’ve gotten in their mouth, well, what is that material made of?

[00:13:05] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Fermented grasses and things that the herbivore was eating. So they ate those products already digested for you. So dogs and cats do not have amylase in their saliva, literally. So nature doesn’t waste energy doing things that are inappropriate. So if nature wanted them to eat carbohydrates, they would’ve chewed their food thoroughly like we are supposed to.

[00:13:29] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Mixing it with the saliva, predigesting, our carbohydrates. But they don’t do that in the wild. They kill something and they tear. Gulp and swallow. And a lot of people go, oh my gosh, I, it is so frustrating to me ’cause I pay for this wonderful, delicious food and my dog eats it in 10 seconds. But that’s what they were biologically designed to do.

[00:13:50] Dr. Marlene Siegel: And think about it, if you’re a carnivore in the wild and you’ve just chased something, razzled it, killed it, and you’re about to eat it, you’ve attracted other carnivores. Yeah. There’s other scavengers out there that are going, oh, something’s happening. There may be a free meal. Or while you’re distracted eating your meal, somebody can come up behind you and eat you.

[00:14:08] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Right. So by preservation, they were designed to stuff themself when food’s available and then go back to their den and digest. And that’s the same for dogs and cats.

[00:14:19] JJ: So isn’t that, how often are dogs and cats supposed to eat then? Do they eat once a day, twice a day? Like what’s the recommendation?

[00:14:26] Dr. Marlene Siegel: So most people would feed them twice a day and they would hunt twice a day.

[00:14:29] Dr. Marlene Siegel: They would hunt at dawn and they would hunt at dusk where they always successful. No. So do they have to eat every 12 hours? Probably not. And I think that intermittent fasting done appropriately with supervision. Knowing the animal’s biological health status is a good thing because in the wild, when they stuffed themselves with food, they didn’t know when the next meal was coming.

[00:14:54] Dr. Marlene Siegel: If we’re feeding them twice a day, we can feed them to their biological need, not to satiety. Does that make more sense?

[00:15:03] JJ: My dogs know when their meal is coming. They know like, oh, they know the

[00:15:06] Dr. Marlene Siegel: V. Oh, absolutely. So you’re doing better than most, but your farmer’s jog is not all organic. It does have a lot of vegetables.

[00:15:15] Dr. Marlene Siegel: And if you’re gonna pay meat prices for raw food, then you wanna be buying meat. I. You don’t wanna be paying meat prices for vegetables. Well,

[00:15:24] JJ: do you need, because, you know, we ship in all of our meat from various sources like Butcher’s Box and Piedmont Teas, and, um, do you need to get animal-based food or could you get people food?

[00:15:40] Dr. Marlene Siegel: So, I’m not sure what you mean by people Food, meaning

[00:15:42] JJ: like, I’m already ordering like grass fed, grass finished ground beef.

[00:15:47] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Okay. I see. Well, it’s not just the meat. In order to be balanced, they would eat the meat, the fat, the bone, and the organ meat. Hmm. So most people are not that great about doing their own diet.

[00:16:01] Dr. Marlene Siegel: So having the right proportions of grass, grass finish product like that. It’s so much easier if it just comes to you in a little hamburger patty. And that’s what my company does, is we make the product, which is all the chickens are free range. The, uh, the cattle are all grass fed, grass finished. Now your audience probably knows this, but I just feel like I need to say this, that grass fed, it could be on the label and mean that animal was outside for one day of its life.

[00:16:33] Dr. Marlene Siegel: So grass fed, grass finished means they spent their life outside and they weren’t subsidized with grains and corn and soy and other genetically modified foods. So that very important distinction.

[00:16:47] JJ: It was interesting. I went to, um, I’ve been going to, um. Expo West for years. I’m sure you’ve been to that.

[00:16:54] JJ: Yeah. Uh, back, back in the day when there was like a, it was like a couple, a couple halls and Expo West for people listening is the world’s largest natural foods expo, but I feel like it’s a farce completely. Um, it’s kind of like, it’s, it’s like as much ultra processed food as you can imagine with a lot of canola and soy.

[00:17:13] JJ: It’s kind of crazy, but, but at the time I had a catering, a healthy catering business, and I was searching for pastured chicken and trying to find chicken that hadn’t been fed GMO corn and soy. Was it not possible? Yeah, not possible. And that’s when I was like going, you know, I think I’m just going to eat meat and fish.

[00:17:32] JJ: Just

[00:17:33] Dr. Marlene Siegel: like, yeah. And, and this is, you know, think about us like when you’re, you’re like me. So I eat extremely clean. I’ve reduced the inflammation in my body. I don’t have my allergies. And you know, the little things that we had when we were younger, however, I recently went to a wedding a few days ago and I ate everything that was there.

[00:17:57] Dr. Marlene Siegel: It was catered. I couldn’t talk to the chef ahead of time and make sure there was no gluten and cedar oils. And so I literally thought, okay, you know, I’ll be sneezing tomorrow, but I’ll have antihistamines. I’ve got a week that I can recover. Mm-hmm. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that that level of inflammation, which was horrific, landed in my back.

[00:18:19] Dr. Marlene Siegel: So I’m standing doing this podcast because it hurts to sit.

[00:18:23] JJ: Wow.

[00:18:24] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Yeah. And it’s been five days already. So I thank God I can biohack all the things, make it better and I’m getting better. But I mean, it was just out of the blue because inflammation goes to the weakest link in the body. And that just happened to be, I was straining my back five hours in a car, looking down at a computer, sleeping in a hard bed.

[00:18:45] Dr. Marlene Siegel: You know, all the little things that were just out of my norm and I was just stretching and I felt it pop on my sacroiliac. So it is getting better, but I did it to myself. I ate that food and I will tell you it wasn’t worth it. So I’m telling you the story that way because your animals can’t tell you that.

[00:19:07] Dr. Marlene Siegel: They can’t say, oh, you know, the food that you’re feeding me is inflaming me, but they are telling you through their symptoms. And so even if you don’t do it for yourself, you really have to think about what is your animal eating. So going back to your farmer’s dog. Our dogs and cats are not designed to be the primary eater of vegetables.

[00:19:27] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Did they get ’em? Yes. They got ’em digested in the intestinal tract of the herbivore that ate it for them. So you’re actually adding inflammation. ’cause now you’re adding another layer of digestion causing the pancreas to work extra hard because now it has to send out more enzymes for a product that otherwise they would not have had to bother with.

[00:19:49] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Does that make sense?

[00:19:50] JJ: Yes. So back to the detox piece of this, you know, and I’m thinking like already my dogs have beaten the odds, but we’re really careful about like cleaning supplies and water and air purifiers and all the things, um, except for them eating the rug. But what can you do? Like if someone’s listening to this thinking, oh shoot, I’ve been.

[00:20:14] JJ: Feeding my dog tap water. Hopefully everyone’s filtered their water. Um, or some of this crappy food. What can they do at this point and alongside that? I’d love to also have the vaccine discussion. ’cause when you started to talk about these turbo cancers, I immediately went to, where’s the vaccine? You know, the vaccine situation in all of this as well.

[00:20:37] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Yeah. Uh, so let me back up just a tad and I’m gonna give you my six step process because again, this is not like symptom management and it, it’s not an isolated, this is a lifestyle. So once you’re doing it for your pet, you’re gonna improve your own life a lot. So this is good. Step number one, stop doing the things that are causing the disease.

[00:20:59] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Alright, so the food that got, I know it is like rocket science, but that’s an obvious thank you. It’s, but people don’t look at it like we’ve lost critical thinking along the way. So this is really important that we have our critical thinking skills back on and we go, okay, what does food look like? So, you know, feeding a species appropriate raw.

[00:21:18] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Grass fed, grass finished diet that is properly balanced. And I’ll explain how I made my diet in a moment because packaging laws are, are really not designed for our health. So number one, food, number two, water. You know, are you, I, I’m a water snob. I travel with my water, so it has to be highly filtered, getting out glyphosate and heavy metals.

[00:21:40] Dr. Marlene Siegel: It has to be structured. And in my case, I prefer to have molecular hydrogen available as well as my antioxidant. So that’s our water. And then cleaning supplies. You mentioned everything that you’re cleaning with should be. Um, free of any chemicals, hormone disruptors, no, uh, products that are coming from petroleum based goods.

[00:22:02] Dr. Marlene Siegel: So essential oils, vinegar, um, and if anybody ha we ha we actually make a lot of cleaning products. Um, so if anybody’s interested, I’m happy to share.

[00:22:12] JJ: You do? Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I remember hearing about a dog. I mean, I never use these things, but, you know, someone’s dog died from like licking up their Swiffer.

[00:22:22] JJ: Things. Yeah,

[00:22:23] Dr. Marlene Siegel: no, it’s, it’s a big problem. So we really have to be thinking and it’s not good for you either, right? So when people buy brand new clothes and they take and put in their closet, it’s offgassing. You got all these toxins in there. So air quality’s important. Uh, we live in Florida, lots of mold down here.

[00:22:41] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Um, that’s one of the big things I work with people is, you know, just check for mold. It may not be the mold under your sink, but it may be leak somewhere in the house. So real important. And then the electromagnetic frequencies. So all of 5G and wifi, and those are huge as well. You know, people sleep with their phones next to their head and kids do that.

[00:23:01] Dr. Marlene Siegel: And, um, a lot of people put the bed for the animals under the wifi router. Oh. Just so it’s like we have to really stop and be, pay attention to all this. And then the last one under the stop, the things that you’re doing is the ants that live in our brains as our. Pet parent and those are automatic negative thoughts.

[00:23:20] JJ: Oh, you’re a Dr. A Amen fan.

[00:23:22] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Well, yeah, I mean, I think I was saying it before he did, but, but he might be a little bit older than me. I don’t know. Anyway, these automatic negative thoughts produce neurochemicals that then send out messages to ourselves, but are pets entrained to those energies that we’re giving off?

[00:23:41] Dr. Marlene Siegel: That’s a physics principle called entrainment. So I didn’t even, that’s not woowoo. So it’s really important that we start writing down what are the thoughts that you’re having every day? Is it predominantly glass half empty? Is it very negative? Is there a lot of stress going on in the household? Are you always yelling at the kids, the, the spouse, you know, money problems?

[00:24:03] Dr. Marlene Siegel: It’s like the list goes on and on. I call it the standard American Day. Mm, because it is filled with all of these stressors that keep you in high sympathetic tone. And then you never really have a chance to go into parasympathetic tone. What your animal feels is there’s a boogeyman, there’s a lion or tiger out there.

[00:24:21] Dr. Marlene Siegel: ’cause I can feel my pet parent is on high alert. So they’re, you know, like when you watch herds and they’re all communicating that way. So they’re saying to themselves, oh, there’s something horrible out there. I need to be on a higher alert. So they’re gonna be in a higher sympathetic tone. We don’t heal in high sympathetic tone.

[00:24:39] Dr. Marlene Siegel: We heal when we’re parasympathetic. So again, principles to live by we, I think a little bit of stress is good for everybody, but not constantly and not without having that break where you can actually rebalance your body and create good terrain, good homeostasis within the body.

[00:24:58] JJ: Okay, so I.

[00:24:59] Dr. Marlene Siegel: So that was just step number

[00:25:00] JJ: one.

[00:25:01] JJ: So in tip number one, it’s, this is pretty funny. Um, we started studying Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work years ago and, you know, started first, first we only had Daisy, our 19-year-old Chihuahua, but the minute she would hear eyes closed, she would like foom. And then when we got daffodil, our, we have a flower garden of doggies.

[00:25:24] JJ: She liked her too. So now all of them, they, if they hear Dr. Joe start, his eyes closed. They all just chill out and go. And I was telling Barry, who does Dr. Joe’s music this? And he actually goes, oh yeah, the dogs meditate to it. And he sent me the music for the dogs. Yeah.

[00:25:39] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Well they’re in training to you, right?

[00:25:41] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Because you’re their pack leader. So whatever you’re telling them is going on environmentally. That’s what they understand. Yeah. So even though it looks like they’re sleeping a lot of the day, there’s still a level of sympathetic tone that’s going on, which is contributing to a lot of the health challenges.

[00:26:02] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Mm-hmm. So you’re expressing through are all these neurochemicals, you’re expressing a different genetic code because you’re telling your cells, this is not a healthy, safe environment. We need to have. Other things expressing that could survive this negative terrain. And so we really shift our microbiome and we shift everything to this negative state, which is not good.

[00:26:25] Dr. Marlene Siegel: So that’s all step number one. Step number two, we have to supply the essential nutrients. And the essential nutrients are those nutrients that the body does not make insufficient quantity on its own. So there’s a certain number of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and fatty acids that need to be in our diet.

[00:26:44] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Well, we all know we’re eating nutrient deficient food these days. And I live in a food forest. I literally have food growing 360 around my house, and I use all regenerative agriculture permaculture to grow my food. But I still couldn’t tell you, does my broccoli have all the nutrients that it’s supposed to ha?

[00:27:04] Dr. Marlene Siegel: I don’t know, because I don’t know what my, the, those micronutrients in the soil are. So. I think it’s just a lot smarter and a lot safer that we supply that in a supplement. So now I’ll digress for a second, because when I went to create my own diet, I approached dozens of raw companies as was 15 years ago, and none of them wanted to produce a healthy diet.

[00:27:26] Dr. Marlene Siegel: It was really interesting. Oh, people won’t pay for grass fed, grass finished, or, you know, we have to add other stuff in there to make it more affordable, rather. Were these like,

[00:27:35] JJ: are these were pet food companies? Yeah.

[00:27:37] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Existing? Yeah. Mm-hmm. So I slammed my fist down, I’m gonna make my own, and then I went, who said that?

[00:27:45] Dr. Marlene Siegel: I looked over my shoulders there, somebody else here, you know, maybe that’s my clone. And um, and literally I just said to the universe, I’m, I’m a big manifester. If I’m gonna do this, I need the right people in front of me. And within two weeks I met the largest producer of grass fed, grass finished meats in the entire US and he was willing to produce the diet.

[00:28:04] Dr. Marlene Siegel: And then, uh, within that same period of time, I met a gentleman who had been doing a 20 plus year trial diet trials on animals with cancers. He would go and adopt them from the shelters and just feeding them raw foods like balance though, like mm-hmm. So he was playing around with formulas and he was watching to see how the animals responded.

[00:28:26] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Did the cancers go away, blah, blah, blah. And, and so with his research based on 20 years of actual clinical trials, that’s unheard of by the way, when you listen to some of these food companies, they go, yeah, we did a clinical trial. We had. 20 animals and we checked it for three weeks.

[00:28:43] JJ: Yeah.

[00:28:43] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Like what kind of a trial is that?

[00:28:45] Dr. Marlene Siegel: I wanna see does their disease go away? Does their cancers resolve? Is their longevity improved? Because right now, animals are living seven years shorter than they did 25 years ago. Oh my gosh. Seven years shorter. The average

[00:28:59] JJ: lifespans vary per breed, right? The bigger the dog, the lifespan it does, but

[00:29:03] Dr. Marlene Siegel: you know, they really should be living to 20 and beyond.

[00:29:06] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Honestly, my cat was 23 when he transitioned and he was eating processed foods the first 10 years of his life until I learned, and you know, once you know better, you do better. Yeah. So I changed him to a raw diet and he had no health challenges up until literally the week that he transitioned.

[00:29:25] JJ: Yeah, that was our 22-year-old cat.

[00:29:27] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Yeah, yeah. But your lifestyle, even though your food may not have been perfect, a lot of the other things you’re doing are including your attitude. So I think that has a lot to do with how well these animals will do. And belief systems are important. You know, I call it a belief system is your bs.

[00:29:46] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s not. But it’s what we all think to be our truth. Until you have an opportunity to change your truth and when you’re willing to look at facts and then consider some changes, it’s pretty marvelous. Okay, so number one was stop doing the things that were causing disease.

[00:30:05] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Number two, supply the essential nutrients. Oh, I was finishing the story, so when I made my food. Um, I couldn’t label it complete and balanced unless I added those nutrients in. And for most raw, for most any kind of company, pet food company, they use synthetic vitamins and minerals, be well vitamins and fatty acids because they are shelf stable, right?

[00:30:28] Dr. Marlene Siegel: So they’re not healthy and they’re certainly not helping the body, but they can say they put it in. So it’s kind of, I don’t know, it’s almost defeating the purpose, but the big box companies control what labels say. So I said, okay, how do I get around that? And it was pretty simple. I made my macronutrients and they separated them from my micronutrients.

[00:30:49] Dr. Marlene Siegel: So my micronutrients are fresh, organic, plant-based. All bioavailable I can dose based on body weight or biological need. So how interesting is that? ’cause you’re feeding, let’s say you’re feeding the same food to a 10 pound dog versus a great Dane. It’s not like these nutrients are distributed evenly in the diet.

[00:31:11] Dr. Marlene Siegel: They’re not. So how do you know how much your pet’s actually getting and is it rancid fatty acids? ’cause you have now opened the bag to air, there was all of these problems. Yeah, that um, I couldn’t allow my cancer patients to have another drop of toxin, so I had to do something different. So that’s what I did.

[00:31:28] Dr. Marlene Siegel: I separated my macronutrients from my micronutrients and then we don’t label it complete and balanced. Wow. You know, but it’s education. I have to teach people. And then the next part is healing the leaky gut. ’cause animals get leaky gut, just like people do. And uh, it’s important to heal the leaky gut because all of those proteins and foreign material that are coming into the body get transported by the bloodstream to the liver in the liver.

[00:31:55] Dr. Marlene Siegel: It mounts this inflammatory storm to take care of the invaders, which is what it’s supposed to do. It’s actually a good thing. That’s why we’re biologically still here thousands of years later. But when it’s happening, every bite of every meal, every day, multiple times a day, now it becomes very chronic.

[00:32:13] Dr. Marlene Siegel: And then you start getting autoimmune diseases and that inflammation lands in the weakest links of that pet’s body. Number four is detoxification, and, uh, there’s six organs of elimination, which is fascinating. The pets have it. We have it, we have the kidney. The colon, the lungs, the liver, the skin, and I’m gonna say lymphatics slash fascia.

[00:32:38] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Because our Cinderella tissue, the fascia, we now know how important it is and the lymphatics run through the fascia. So I kind of bundle them together. But those are the six organs of elimination. And when I do blood work on a lot of our patients, I’ll see liver enzymes that are in the 20 or below number, that is exceedingly, exceedingly low.

[00:33:02] Dr. Marlene Siegel: When I started practicing liver enzymes were 45 to 90, and it’s not the number that’s so important. It’s understanding the meaning when it’s too low. So most practitioners, they get alerted when the number’s high. It means that a lot of those liver cells are busting open, something’s damaging, then they’re dying and they’re releasing this enzyme that we measure.

[00:33:23] Dr. Marlene Siegel: But when it’s low numbers, it, it means that organ is so bogged down. It can’t function. It’s like the little engine that’s trying to go up the hill and it can’t quite get there, right? So recognizing when the body’s overwhelmed, the lymphatics can’t do their job, the liver can’t do its job, which are hundreds of different functions, now we have a problem ’cause your two major organs of detoxification aren’t working.

[00:33:47] Dr. Marlene Siegel: So those are super important to make sure we understand how to do that. Number five in my process is supporting the mitochondria. Not only do they make the energy that we need to function, but they also create the communication between themselves and the microbiome, the organisms that live in and on us and where do they communicate through the fascia.

[00:34:10] Dr. Marlene Siegel: So it’s fascinating to me how important these structures are, and yet no one is being taught how to. Fix it or how to support it until you come into my world. And then of course, that’s all I talk about. And then number six is clearing trapped emotions. Because we all know that with every dis-ease, there’s always trapped emotions associated with that.

[00:34:31] Dr. Marlene Siegel: We could do three podcasts on that topic, but that’s the overall plan, number one. Okay. Wait, wait, wait.

[00:34:37] JJ: How would we know if our little being has trapped emotions? Um. So let’s go. Woo woo. Now we’re, we’re gonna let, we’re going into the quantum world. Alright. We’re good at, I think our listeners are, are a little, I call it science.

[00:34:51] JJ: Woo. I think we’re, we’re all on the science world. Yeah. But its, it’s, it’s been quantified enough. Oh yeah. That we know this is science.

[00:34:58] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Oh yeah. They have energy fields like we do, they’re mm-hmm. Souls. And, and so all of that exists. So I don’t, in my personal belief, I believe everything happens for a reason in our little hologram.

[00:35:11] Dr. Marlene Siegel: So I think we live in a hologram and I think we incarnate into this hologram in order to have experiences in order to be able to grow and, um, learn and expand and to leave this hologram better than we came into it with. Right. So that’s the fun, it’s sort of like playing a puzzle, right? If you played a little children’s puzzle that had three pieces and we’re adults, it would be kind of boring.

[00:35:36] Dr. Marlene Siegel: We wouldn’t like to do it. But we love those puzzles that have 5,000 pieces. I know people that. They get done with them, it takes ’em a year. They frame it because it’s such an accomplishment. So that’s what life appears to me to be. It is all of these experiences that we get to have, and I believe that all these experiences come to us to give us guidance.

[00:35:59] Dr. Marlene Siegel: So when I’m experiencing something in resistance, and it seems like every door shuts I, everything goes wrong, nothing’s moving, nothing’s flowing. That tells me in my guidance system that I’m off track. When things are in flow, then you are just going down the river, right? It’s just easy peasy. You’re not trying to swim upstream, and so it’s never usually a hundred percent one way or the other, but it’s some, being aware of the emotions that you have and what they’re telling you about your experience in Earth School.

[00:36:37] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Where do the pets come in? Because I think they are our sole pets and they volunteer to help us with learning and messages and experiences and awakening at times in our life when we really need it. And I have yet, in my 40 years of practice with almost 30 now doing this more bio regulatory, integrative kind of medicine and really getting into the emotional side of it, never failed every single pet if the pet parent is willing to wake up.

[00:37:16] Dr. Marlene Siegel: And that’s the operative. So how I help them to understand where they’re at is how many times have you had this emotional experience? So let’s say it’s grief. Or fear, like the animal’s gonna die and I feel outta control. Okay. Like, we’ll use that one. And then I’ll ask them, how many times have you felt that feeling in the past with a family member, a friend yourself, whatever.

[00:37:42] Dr. Marlene Siegel: And they go, oh, it’s like, who’s repetitive it? It’s the GPS coming back around and saying, here’s your sign, here’s your sign. And then at some point you either get it or you don’t. And, and it’s not wrong if you don’t, if you don’t wanna wake up in this life experience, that’s okay too. That’s a choice. But when we do wake up, you can’t unsee.

[00:38:04] Dr. Marlene Siegel: You can’t unknow, and you can’t unhear, and you can’t unthink either, which I think is a beautiful thing. And then what do you do with it? So every pet is either reflecting or mirroring something that the pet parent needs at that time in their life. But there’s never a coincidence that you have a particular pet with a particular problem at this particular time in your life that you have to stop and deal with.

[00:38:33] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Like, there’s no accident that you and I are having this conversation, jj, you know, we’ve, we’ve kind of brushed circles for years and years and we never actually talked, so

[00:38:43] JJ: I know, and what’s so cool, like for people listening is we’re neighbors. We’re only like 30 minutes away. My, um, my, my ex-husband and my other son actually live up in Wesley Chapel.

[00:38:54] JJ: They have two doggies up there.

[00:38:56] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Oh my gosh. I didn’t know that.

[00:38:58] JJ: Yes. So I was like, when I found this, ’cause I was like, oh my gosh. For,

[00:39:03] Dr. Marlene Siegel: yeah.

[00:39:04] JJ: And, and we have

[00:39:05] Dr. Marlene Siegel: besties in common, like Dr. Eric Zelinski and Sabrina. They’re my besties. Oh, wow. Yeah. How amazing. Yeah. So, you know, I’ve heard about you for years. I followed your work for years, but, you know, ask that question.

[00:39:17] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Or, you know, why are we having this conversation now? So I know there’s, whether it’s you and me and listeners, that there’s something that they’re going to hear that is going to change the trajectory of their life in one shape or form, whatever that is. I just trust that it’s going to land where it needs to land.

[00:39:39] JJ: Okay. I’m gonna go one step farther, woo. And then we’re gonna go over to vaccines. Polar opposite. Um, I’m assuming you’ve listened to the telepathy tapes, have you,

[00:39:51] Dr. Marlene Siegel: um, telepathy tapes. So, okay.

[00:39:52] JJ: So just for the listeners, we’ll put a link to this. Um, one of, uh, my, one of my girlfriends, Dr. Ann, should be turned me onto them, but in these telepathy tapes, they actually have a piece in there where they talk about the telepathy of your pets.

[00:40:08] JJ: And I’m listening to this and I’m thinking to myself. That I watch my dogs and especially our middle dog. When we got our middle dog, we were not home. We were out on a trip across the world. And so my son, who is 26, picked up the dog from the airport and this dog fell in love with my son and so much. So we come home and the dog’s like, what are you doing here?

[00:40:36] JJ: Why are you in his house? You know? And this dog will sit and cry by the door when, you know. But what’s so funny is, so my son drives an electric car and you can’t hear the electric car pulling up. But my son, the minute it’s, it’s every single time she’ll start to cry by the door and he’s not, you know, he, he’s five minutes away.

[00:41:03] JJ: Driving in, but she knows, yeah, that’s a whole thing. And that’s, they actually described this and I went, oh my gosh, I watch it every single time.

[00:41:10] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Yeah, that’s a soul connection. So I am actually trained in mediumship as well. It was something that I had that intuitive, I didn’t know when I was little, because who knows?

[00:41:21] Dr. Marlene Siegel: You know, like you, you just do things and you think everybody does that. But as I got older, things were happening in my life, and then I really wanted to have more of an expertise and have more control over the experiences. So I do a lot of mediumship work. Um, I do a lot of, um, I guess you would call it, um, energetic work.

[00:41:42] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Huh? You know, where I, I even work remotely because energy is energy and there is no time and space. So getting through that quantum understanding. You allow yourself a more expanded understanding of what it means to exist and to heal and to grow and to thrive. And so I’m, I’m able to do that, but the emotional connection is one that’s very, very big.

[00:42:07] JJ: Yeah. This was, um, in the telepathy tapes, and it was funny because I’m in another group called Transformational Leadership Council was something Jack Canfield created, and in there we have a, a pet medium and she, she describes this. And then I’m listening to these telepathy tapes and they’re describing someone whose pet would just sulk in the corner.

[00:42:25] JJ: They, you know, it was this, uh, a, uh, rescue dog. And, and she came in and did some medium work, long distance with the dog and was able to understand what was going on, explain to the owners, so the owners could then, you know. Make sure the dog knew when they were leaving and coming. The dog was just afraid she was gonna be given up again.

[00:42:43] JJ: Mm-hmm. And so she was, and I was like, oh my gosh. So now I make sure that when I’m leaving the house, I tell them when I’m coming home Yeah. What’s going on?

[00:42:53] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Yeah. Um, you know, they’re understanding the energetics of, of your emotions. So that’s really, really important. And, and I think for all of us, we’re entering a really interesting and exciting time in the world where we have an opportunity, we have an opportunity to have discussions and to make changes like never before.

[00:43:16] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Think about the, you know, like 50, a hundred years ago, they didn’t have the ability to communicate worldwide. Hmm. And people weren’t talking. Even 20 years ago, people weren’t really talking about acupuncture and energy medicine and reiki and mediumship like you. You got brewed at the stake still. So these weren’t conversations.

[00:43:38] Dr. Marlene Siegel: And nowadays people are doing breath work and they’re talking about going into your higher consciousness, which is amazing because now it’s becoming more of the norm and the more we transform the energy in this planet and the more we make choices that help support better health. The quicker we’re gonna make these changes, but there’s so much responsibility that we have to learn and then use our dollars wisely.

[00:44:08] Dr. Marlene Siegel: You can’t go out to a restaurant and just eat whatever they put on your plate and then pretend you’re living a healthy life. Uh, no, you’re not. You know, I, I did go to the wedding and I didn’t ask because. Of the circumstances, and I will never do that again.

[00:44:23] JJ: You know, it’s interesting. I always say, you know, we’re doing this so we’re resilient.

[00:44:26] JJ: So in those times like that, you can get away with it, but the challenge is when you feel great all the time and then you go have these things where all of a sudden gluten and glyphosates and seed oils and all this garbage sneaks in, you’re like, oh, you know? Yeah. And I think most people that are eating a lot of ultra processed food, and this would follow to our pets too, they just, they’re low grade inflamed, they’re mm-hmm.

[00:44:51] JJ: They just feel

[00:44:53] Dr. Marlene Siegel: they don’t have good energy. They probably don’t sleep well. Right, right. I’m rounding 70 and. I am the Energizer bunny. Like I accomplish what people think five people could do, and I can do it by myself. I mean, I’m, I’m still practicing full time and I’m lecturing all around the world and podcasts and interviews and, and going to conferences and teaching and, you know, the list.

[00:45:22] Dr. Marlene Siegel: I have my own raw food company, our own supplement company, um, educational company. I have all that going and I don’t slow down until I over inflamed myself, which was ridiculous. So, you know, for people who. The brick hasn’t fallen on their head directly yet, but they, they’re not equating the fact that they don’t feel good or that they’re on some medicines or they have some body parts going south.

[00:45:46] Dr. Marlene Siegel: They don’t equate that with their lifestyle, but when they finally get it, hopefully not too late, then they start making changes. But it’s gonna be we the people that make those changes. Yeah. Until we start saying no, when I go into a restaurant, I literally tell them I’m allergic to canola, to soy, to gluten.

[00:46:08] Dr. Marlene Siegel: And then I, I actually travel with my own homemade olive oils infused. So

[00:46:13] JJ: bene I had ’em on, I don’t know if you know Ben. Um, he made these little cards that we could give to. The waiter or waitress to take back to the chef that says, I’m allergic. And he used Dr. Kate Shanahan’s Hateful Eight, and it just says it right in there.

[00:46:29] JJ: Oh, that’s a great

[00:46:29] Dr. Marlene Siegel: idea.

[00:46:30] JJ: It’s fantastic. So we travel with them. So yeah, I will

[00:46:34] Dr. Marlene Siegel: have to do that. That that is great. It will save me the phone call ahead of time. Right. And then sometimes they make mistakes, but I find the chefs are thrilled to do the right thing. They, yeah. It’s like

[00:46:46] JJ: it’s juice butter or olive oil like and real olive oil.

[00:46:49] JJ: That’s always the challenge. Yes. And then Ca Andinos makes little olive oil packets. Mm-hmm. And little olive oil bottles, so Yeah. Yeah. So we are those people. I do not, I always say I don’t travel light, like we travel with a coffee maker, our own coffee, like the whole, the whole nine yards. Now Tim wants to travel with the sauna and I’m like, okay.

[00:47:09] JJ: I don’t know. I think that we might be at our limit. I think. I think we’re where we need to be. Alright. Back over to the pets. Okay. So, um, because I feel like vaccines are finally out in the open and we can discuss them and, you know, when, when we were, when my kids were young, I really looked at all of ’em and said, okay, what do we need to do?

[00:47:30] JJ: I was getting pushed at my kids should get the HPV vaccine. I’m like, not a chance. Or the chicken pox. I’m like, why? So, you know, and we’ve done the same with our pets. It’s like this as assumption, we’re gonna get all these things. Talk about pet vaccines, which ones. If any, should we do, which one should you avoid?

[00:47:47] JJ: What’s the story?

[00:47:49] Dr. Marlene Siegel: So it’s a, a long story. Um, number one, the only legally required one is rabies, but there are mercury free rabies vaccines out there. So you just need to find a veterinarian who offers that. But obviously we do. And then we do a homeopathic remedy to that rabies vaccine after we vaccinate to help mitigate some of the side effects.

[00:48:13] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Um, because I really don’t wanna lose my license yet. So I follow the law. Now, I vaccinate my rabies, my younger animals at six months of age, not at four months. I let their maturity get there. And then the law in Florida requires one year, a one year vaccine when they’re six months or older. And then one year after that, they have to get one more booster and then they can go to every three years.

[00:48:42] Dr. Marlene Siegel: So that’s. The law, what people do in the privacy of their own home is one thing. The one caution is that if you have an animal who escapes who could bite somebody, it’s a serious consequence because if that animal bites somebody, they have to be quarantined for 10 days. And if you don’t quarantine, the health department has the ability, they have the legal right to take that animal, euthanize it, and then test the brain for rabies because it is a fatal disease in humans.

[00:49:16] Dr. Marlene Siegel: So I would say don’t make rabies the hill you die on. Make sure you’re feeding a species appropriate diet, that you’re using good water, that you are helping your pets detox on a regular basis, that you have good gut health. Do all of those things and then make educated decision on your rabies. How does a pet

[00:49:42] JJ: get rabies?

[00:49:43] Dr. Marlene Siegel: It’s, um, saliva transfer from an animal that is infected. So wildlife, if they get into a fight with a possum or coyote, and we have all those here in Florida, so you, you know, you, you have to know where your risk factors are and, and just use some common sense, but that would be the one vaccine. Getting it thi aerosol free would be the way I would go.

[00:50:04] Dr. Marlene Siegel: And then, uh, from there, just using your best judgment. The other vaccines, we’ll start with dogs. Um, in the dog category, there’s distemper, hepatitis, parainfluenza, parvo, leptospirosis. And. I try to help people understand what their risk factors are. What is your lifestyle like? Are you going to dog parks?

[00:50:26] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Are you traveling to other states? What is your exposure? Or is it a little guy that is potty trained on a pee padd in the 16th floor in an apartment complex and they’re not gonna see anybody and you don’t have other people bring their dogs over, right? So you have, and are you gonna be going into the woods?

[00:50:40] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Are you going to go traveling? Are you gonna go into states where Lyme’s disease is a problem? And then evaluating what your risk factors are? Then you make some educated choices. For a lot of our puppies, we’ll do an initial vaccine starting at 14 weeks or older because they have maternal antibodies that are blocking the vaccine anyway, so we vaccinate starting at 14 weeks of age.

[00:51:07] Dr. Marlene Siegel: We do a second vaccine two to three weeks later, and then we do a titer. And it’s a titer for distemper and parvo. This is dog only. As long as we test on a yearly basis and their titers are adequate, they don’t need to get another distemper, parral titer, I mean shot. And there are university studies by Dr.

[00:51:28] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Ford who shows that these vaccines, once they’ve had their second set of immunity, is good for seven to nine years. But what is the overall health of that animal? Are they eating processed foods? Are they drinking top water? Are they exposed to all kinds of hormone disruptors in the house? Are you pouring chemicals on them?

[00:51:49] Dr. Marlene Siegel: You know, those are all part of the questions that we have to ask More

[00:51:53] JJ: chemicals on their dog or

[00:51:55] Dr. Marlene Siegel: cat. Well, you know, there’s a lot of shampoos and conditioners, which are made with petroleum products and they’re nasty and you know, they have plasticized in them and there’s all kinds of stuff they’re exposed to.

[00:52:09] Dr. Marlene Siegel: So we just have to be. We really have to sit down with ourselves and ask those questions. What is the overall lifestyle? Because when somebody makes a stand on flea products that say, oh, I would never put that toxin in my animal. You know, I’m a great pet parent, but you’re feeding processed foods, so every day you’re loading them up with chemicals and sugar.

[00:52:30] Dr. Marlene Siegel: I, I don’t get it. You know, like you, no. Make sure that the hill you die on is the right hill. And we live in Florida, so parasites are a huge problem here. Just had somebody email me today. What’s your, what’s your holistic option for flea and tick control? And I literally had to say, I need to know where you live because different regions have different problems.

[00:52:53] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Um, is your animal on heartworm preventative? Is it a dog, is it a cat? Do they have allergies already? Because if it’s an animal that already has a flea allergy, one bite, we’ll send them hairless, they’ll chew and scratch and stay up all night long. So we have to really understand it’s not a pill for the ill.

[00:53:11] Dr. Marlene Siegel: What is your lifestyle and what can you do to improve the immune system? Think about a garden. Um, and I live in that food forest. I can’t wait to see it. And you know, they, when the terrain is healthy, I don’t have a lot of pests and I use natural things to help my plant stay healthier, but. There are gardens where people just get weeds everywhere.

[00:53:35] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Well, why? Because the, the weeds are coming in as that first line of establishment. It’s not that they’re bad, it’s telling you that the terrain is horrible. So when we have pathogens that are expressing themselves in our pet’s bodies, they’re telling us that the microbiome is off, the terrain is off. We need to fix all of that so that the pathogens aren’t needed anymore and the good microbiome can flourish.

[00:54:05] JJ: Wow. Are you training other vets?

[00:54:09] Dr. Marlene Siegel: I hope I am. So I have, I have programs for veterinarians and I have programs for pet parents. And I’m really pushing the pet parent one because it’s going to be you, the pet parent that is going to go back to your veterinarian and say, I heard this podcast, or I, I got this ebook and I wanna do these things for my animal.

[00:54:30] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Can you support me? And if they are smart, they’ll say, well, let me learn more about it because it’s good medicine and it’s good practice. There’s no veterinarian that I have ever, ever met that is ever happily said to their pet parent, I’m sorry, there’s nothing more we can do euthanasia. Right. Nobody feels good about that.

[00:54:54] Dr. Marlene Siegel: In fact, the suicide rate in veterinarians is higher than any other industry really. ’cause we, we do suffer from that compassion fatigue. Ah, you know, when somebody yells at you or they blame you for the death of their pet or the ill illness or whatever. I mean, go look at my one star reviews. These are the people that if I didn’t have a compassionate heart and know that they’re hurting, which is why they’re trying to hurt others, right?

[00:55:19] Dr. Marlene Siegel: But they just haven’t got it yet. Um, that could affect me if I wasn’t the person that I am. So think about veterinarians who are more fragile in their emotions and somebody writes a bad review and attacks them personally, which is horrible to do. Yeah. And so we see a lot of compassion fatigue. Yeah.

[00:55:39] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Which is a shame because it takes so much to go to veterinary school and, and this as a profession are the kindest, most compassionate, most giving and loving people I’ve ever had the joy and, and honor of being associated with. So it’s very important that pet parents learn the material and encourage their veterinarian to explore the path.

[00:56:03] Dr. Marlene Siegel: That’s all they have to do. I have a 30 hour course for ve 34 for veterinarians. You don’t have to do anything different, but if it speaks to you, then you can start incorporating a couple of little modalities and start making a difference. I was in Thailand, uh, at a conference recently and a couple veterinarians came over and they wanted me to go back to their clinic, and they had all of this amazing high end material.

[00:56:28] Dr. Marlene Siegel: I mean really high tech. It looked like me on steroids, and they were selling processed dog food in the waiting room. Oops. And I looked at them and I looked at the food and we had a language barrier already and I went, you gotta get rid of that because I see

[00:56:45] JJ: this in biohacking and it makes me nuts.

[00:56:48] JJ: We’re all like, and literally at, at New Year’s Eve, I was sitting next to someone who was proudly telling me about how they were going to this longevity conference and that longevity conference. They were doing this biohacking thing and that biohacking thing and, and I go, what do you do for exercise?

[00:57:06] JJ: Crickets. I did a little yoga a few days ago. I’m like, oh boy. Okay. Yeah. But it’s, it is, you know, there’s, there’s so much of it as I’m listening to this, it’s so similar to the, to what we tell people around their own health and that you need to educate yourself so that when you go to the doctor, you can ask the right questions.

[00:57:24] JJ: And if they’re not on board, then you find another doctor. Absolutely the same here. Yeah. There’s somebody for everyone. You have a, I think an ebook that you’re giving our audience. Yes. Yes. Good. So it’s the success. Good.

[00:57:38] Dr. Marlene Siegel: We went over it already, but now they’re gonna have it, you know, as, uh, as part of their, their gift.

[00:57:43] Dr. Marlene Siegel: And, um, and that’s an outline really, of understanding those six steps. And then I just encourage pet parents to take the next deep dive, go explore a little bit more, because in my course, I teach them how to identify the deficiencies in the toxicities. Not every lab does that, and. I don’t understand why they don’t, but you know, veterinarians aren’t trained in nontraditional.

[00:58:08] Dr. Marlene Siegel: I know the labs

[00:58:08] JJ: for humans and how lame so many of them are. Yeah, that’s why I’ve been using more function health with Dr. Mark Hyman. ’cause it’s like, you know, I mean, they’re not even testing Vitamin Ds and fasting insulins.

[00:58:19] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Oh, thank you for mentioning Vitamin D. Here’s a statistic for you. 85% of dogs eating a processed food diet are vitamin D deficient.

[00:58:33] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Now here’s what makes it even more interesting. Dogs being carnivores. Carnivores do not get vitamin D from the sun. Herbivores get vitamin D from the sun. So your cows and deer and those guys grazing, they get vitamin D from the sun, which is why if they are not outside as a normal cow would be. Mm-hmm.

[00:58:55] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Then they’re gonna be vitamin D deficient. The dog eating that protein source will then be vitamin D deficient because they carnivores only get vitamin D from their protein.

[00:59:06] JJ: Wow. They’ll have ing. They have lowered immune function, lowered hormone. Yeah. The entire

[00:59:12] Dr. Marlene Siegel: innate immune system is shut off.

[00:59:15] JJ: Wow. But

[00:59:15] Dr. Marlene Siegel: another branch, so you have your regular immune system, then you have your innate immune system, the one that operates without you telling it, and it literally has to have vitamin D and magnesium as the co-factors to run that pathway.

[00:59:27] Dr. Marlene Siegel: So if you’re either deficient in vitamin D and or magnesium, which most of them that are deficient in vitamin D will be deficient in magnesium as well. Just

[00:59:35] JJ: like humans. Yeah. The big, the biggies. All right, so we’ll put all of this at jj virgin.com/pet Health. We’re gonna put the link to the ebook that’s free that you can download, and then I’ll link over to, um, all of the food and supplements and everything else as well, which I’m gonna obviously be switching over to.

[00:59:55] Dr. Marlene Siegel: I’m so excited. We’re gonna get video of your guys, of our little gals. The transition? No. Well, we have

[01:00:00] JJ: a little, yeah. All the little gals in their, our, our little, we call it our Dog, flower, garden of Daisy, dandelion, and daffodil. Um, and the supplements that you give, like. You know, we’ve tried various things with the dogs and they’re very picky.

[01:00:14] JJ: Mm-hmm.

[01:00:16] Dr. Marlene Siegel: So that is something that we teach people. Do not put supplements in the diet. Okay. That food is sacred. You don’t wanna put anything in there that they’re gonna go, oh, I don’t know, like, you know, I hate taking pills. I have to because I wanna make sure my nutrition is good, but I don’t always like having to take a bite of my food and then swallow a pill.

[01:00:39] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Right. It’s just annoying. And if they taste bad for them, they’re not gonna wanna do it. Right. So we make sure that the supplements are all done separately and we teach people different hacks on how to make that happen.

[01:00:51] JJ: Okay. Yes. Well, was doing that wrong? Glad I brought that up. Thank you for being so vulnerable, parent.

[01:01:00] JJ: Yeah. All right. Well, I appreciate your time so much. I’m looking forward to getting together with you, seeing your, seeing your whole area there. Wow. And, uh, we have a little, we have a great health group here in Tampa too, that I’ve been putting together.

[01:01:14] Dr. Marlene Siegel: I let me know how I can serve. Yes. Because, um, I, I, this is my passion and my love.

[01:01:19] Dr. Marlene Siegel: I don’t treat people, but I model for people what does that lifestyle look like? And once they’re doing it for their pet, than they’re more likely to transition and do it for themselves.

[01:01:31] JJ: Yeah. And what I hear is, you know, most people I’d say listening this or doing all these things for themselves, but may not be aware.

[01:01:39] JJ: That you’re actually, you know, just like I thought I was making good choice with not serving bagged food for the dogs. Right. So, you know, you just, you’re just not aware. Yeah. So now that we are, we can do better, which I super appreciate all of this. This is fantastic. I’m so excited that you exist and you’re

[01:01:58] Dr. Marlene Siegel: near me.

[01:01:59] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Thank you,

[01:02:00] JJ: selfishly. All right. Thank you so much.

[01:02:02] Dr. Marlene Siegel: Thank you. Bye everybody.

[01:02:09] JJ: Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life to ensure you look and feel great and are built to last. Check me out on Instagram, Facebook, and my website, jj virgin.com. And make sure to follow my [email protected] so you don’t miss a single episode.

[01:02:31] JJ: And hey, if you’re loving what you hear, don’t forget to leave a review. Your reviews make a big difference in helping me reach more incredible women just like you to spread the word about aging powerfully after 40. Thanks for tuning in and I’ll catch you on the next episode.

[01:02:57] JJ: Hey, JJ here, and just a reminder that the Well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness, and nutritional information. That’s designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

[01:03:14] JJ: If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional. Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid, or delay obtaining medical or health related advice from your healthcare professional. Because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes, the use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.

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