Daily Detox for Thriving Cats | Thrive: The Feline Wellness Summit With Dr. Ruth Roberts

 All right. Welcome back to the cat dad show. My name is Scott Colby. Thank you so much for being here today. I'm going to share with you a clip of my interview with Dr. Ruth Roberts for my feline wellness summit. You can grab a free ticket over at feline wellness summit. com. The summit goes from February 10th.

To February 13th, Dr. Ruth's interview is going live on February 10th, which is on day one, all about feline foundations, essential cat health, nutrition, and preventative care. Now a little bit about Dr. Ruth. She's the original pet health coach. She's the creator of the original croc pet diet. She has supported thousands of dogs and cats to heal and overcome health hurdles like chronic kidney disease.

GI illness, allergies, cancer, and much more. Gosh, we talked a lot about daily detoxification, um, and optimized diet, and as well as supplementation. So the clip I'm about to share with you, I asked her About detoxification. I know it can sound intimidating for a cat parent. So we talked about what does daily detoxification look like for a cat and why is it so important?

Again, if you want to hear the entire interview as well as my interview with 20 other feline wellness experts, just go to feline wellness summit.com now. Enjoy that clip.

And and right because we we hear all these oh these big detox protocols and that sounds very off putting But the truth is is that it can be super super simple to start with And the first place you need to start is is you.

So if you're able to chill and calm down and bring yourself from a sympathetic fight or flight state down to a parasympathetic rest and digest state, that helps your cat do the same thing. In that parasympathetic state, that's where the cat can actually start to bring its body into a place of healing.

And when the body is able to rest and digest, that's when all of the mechanisms, the innate mechanisms of detoxification can start to really work to support the body. So that's super easy. And it can be as simple as just shutting your phone off. Literally turning it off or putting it into airplane mode and sitting with your cat on your lap and just hanging out and petting and being calm.

So the second thing is to cavort. And so exercise we know on the human side has incredible benefits for helping our bodies be able to detoxify. And so that's going to do things like get the lymphatic system moving. And get the tissue, the extracellular matrix, get the fluid moving through there and helping that.

But when we do that and help it move to the lungs, the liver, the lymph nodes, then we can start to remove those waste products from the body more efficiently. And then thirdly is cook. Um, and so for cats, they truly are the species that probably should be eating raw. But what I mean by this is that the list, the least amount of commercially prepared food in your cat's body, the best now, our cats will.

Sometimes take offense at this idea. So we have to kind of work carefully through the food part. But by providing optimal nutrition, we help the microbiome become healthy. And when that happens, that's the ultimate detox mechanism. Right? So we've got the lungs, we think of, they're actually the number one detoxification organ, the guts number two, and then the liver.

So if we're waiting for the liver to do all the detox work, we're actually putting an over, um, over, overzealous amount of strain on that organ by relying on it to do all the work. And then the last is to make sure that you have clean water. And there's a myriad of ways. To do that, if you do nothing more than use a Brita filter, you're actually able to remove not only chlorine, but in many cases, things like plastics, PFASs, all the forever chemicals, all the yucky stuff we worry about.

So if, you know, just start simple. And you could go all the way up to a reverse, reverse osmosis filter. But clean water is the other thing that helps our body detox. If it doesn't have stuff in it, it can go through the body and help pull stuff out. So that's the simple, easy detox plan.

Yeah. I love that one because you made it simple and easy, but two, the things that we do for our cats are healthy for the pet owner, right?

The pet parent, you know, even just looking at the first tip that you. Uh, suggested like calm ourselves. You know, we're such a stressed society these days and technology plays a role in that. So when, if we unplug and just have our cat on our laps, that's going to calm us and help us with our own stress levels and health.

Um, and then the one that you said that I'm not doing yet for my two young cats I need to do is that, that filtered water. So. I'm going to start something simple, like you said, with a Breda filter. Um, so thank you for that. Now I know you've worked with so many pets facing serious health challenges.

Diet and Detoxification: Turning Health Around

Is there a common thread in how diet and detoxification can turn things around for them?

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Half, it seems like, so we worry about taking things out of the body in terms of detoxification, but probably what's more important is what we don't put into the body to start with. So if we can use You know, home cooked diet, a raw diet, um, the best quality food that you can convince your cat to eat, then we're not putting things into the body.

And when we move from a pro inflammatory diet that's really high in processed carbohydrates, um, which cats are just not built to eat, uh, then we can reduce the overall level of inflammation. reduce the level of reactive oxygen species and things that create damage to the tissues. So by doing this, we, we reduce the load on the body.

The second thing is, is that when we feed what's appropriate for the cat, then we enhance the ability of the microbiome to do its work. And when that happens, it's able to again, suck things out of the digestive tract that don't belong there, but also to create those immune factors that help us surveil for cancer cells, for instance, or keep all the rest of the body operations in check.

And then also the microbiome is responsible for producing neurotransmitters. And so if we're Our kitties are making the correct neurotransmitters, then their anxiety level goes down, their ability to cope with the daily stresses, our stress is vastly improved.