Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. The weekly podcast where Dr. G gives you the tools you need to boost your health and live your healthiest life.

Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. Get a dog. You know, it's my favorite prescription to give patients. In fact, just this week I wrote another prescription to get a dog.

Dogs are wonderful companions offer unconditional love and most importantly, they keep you active. But just like we humans, dogs and cats for that matter, I've had a cat too, are facing a major health crisis.

Obesity and disease are rampant in our four-legged friends. And sadly, they're developing these issues younger and younger. But it doesn't have to be like this.

Just like I say that certain lifestyle and food choices can prevent and reverse ailments in ourselves and our family members, you can do the same for your beloved pet according to my guests today.

They are Dr. Karen Shaw Becker, one of America's most respected veterinarians in breed specific nutrition expert and Rodney Habib, founder of Planet Pause, the world's largest pet health community on Facebook.

Their new book, Forever Dog, Surprising New Science to help your canine companion live longer, healthier, younger and longer reveals simple changes you can make in your dog's life to help them thrive and live to a healthy ripe old age.

And who doesn't want that for their pops? Myself included.

Okay, for all those pet parents out there or those thinking about getting a dog, you're not going to want to miss this one. Stay tuned.

Welcome to the program, Dr. Becker and Rodney. It's good to see you both again. We had a great time talking about dog food in a way a while back.

And as the owner of four dogs myself, I'm excited to have you on to discuss canine longevity. Let's jump right in. What motivated you to to write forever young? And can you talk about each of your contributions?

Well, first of all, thanks for having us. It's a treat to be on your podcast. And yes, I think it was about four years that you are on our podcast.

You, of course, made a great impression. We were discussing the DCM saga then, but it was actually then, Dr. Gundry, that we started about 2018 that we started our passion about investigating these oldest dogs in the world.

And we had heard about them for several years. We knew that there were some 29 30 year old dogs out there. And I'll just speak for myself. Rodney's obsession with the oldest dogs in the world allowed him to interview the owners of those amazing dogs.

Rodney, I am obsessed with longevity science. And because the top tier human longevity scientists are doing some pretty amazing research.

My obsession and my drive for writing this book was going to those scientists to reverse engineer the oldest dogs in the world. So you can talk a little bit about your obsession with ancient dogs.

Yeah. In my obsession, of course, comes from the wanting of my dogs wanting to live forever. I mean, who doesn't want that, right? I mean, the travesty of them only being with us for like one seventh of our life is the most heartbreaking statistic in the entire world. And Dr. Gundry, when we would start following the statistics, I mean, every decade, one of the biggest surveys to come out on dog health was showing a decline by 10% every decade.

I mean, it's that in itself, if it doesn't, it's not a wake up call for the world that, hey, we really need to start looking here at what's going on.

Was the ultimate driver for myself to sit down with these pet parents with these extraordinarily long live dogs. I'm talking dogs like not just 21, 22, 25, 26 from these owners we interviewed, but 30.

As we know, the oldest long live dog, Maggie, which was a kelpie from Australia. So what were these pet owners doing either knowingly or unknowingly that we could take to the as Dr. Becker alluded to some of the top longevity researchers in the world say, he decode this for us.

And let's break it all down into words and put it into a book. So all of us as pet parents can use some of these tools to help extend the lifespan and how span of our pets.

All right. So what did dogs lives and lifespan look like in ancient times compared to today? Do we have any idea?

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