Dog bowls and health is a podcast for the dog lovers out there!  How clean is your dog bowl? What sort of bugs grow on it?  What sort of diseases can happen to your dog or even people from a dirty dog bowl? How often should you clean it and how? What about dog food? How should you store that? Well, let’s find out.

If you listen to my podcast, you’ll know that I mostly cover human health but sometimes I sprinkle in dog health topics too. I had on veterinarian Dr. Jean Dodds to talk about the grain-free diet and vaccination schedules in dogs. It was a pleasure to have her on the podcast, because she was the veterinarian who took care of my childhood dog, Curly, who had hemophilia. Of course my father is a veterinarian and took care of Curly, especially when he got a bleed, but Dr. Dodds is who he would call as an expert consultant. Anyhow, Curly was my first dog ever, so it was so special to chat with Dr. Dodds. If you are interested, you can listen to the episode here. 

On a recent episode of Causes or Cures, I chatted with another veterinarian, Dr. Emily Luisana, about her recent study on dog bowl and dog food hygiene and the link to human and dog health published here. In the podcast, she will discuss how she became interested in this topic and provide an overview of the potential bacteria/viruses that may grow on dog bowls and the potential impact for dog and human health. She’ll discuss results from her survey that assessed how many people knew about the FDA’s pet dish cleaning recommendations (I didn’t know about them) as well as the most common current practices for handling/storing dog food and cleaning dog bowls. She’ll describe results from a survey to assess bacterial growth on dog dishes among different groups, one of which followed the FDA guidelines, and discuss differences. Then she’ll offer general guidance and a bit of nutritional wisdom for dogs.

Dr. Luisana is a practicing veterinarian and board-certified clinical nutritionist for veterinary medicine. You can read more about her here.

To listen to the episode on dog bowls and health and doog food hygiene and health, please click here. 

If you are interested in reading my “public health musings” , you can do so here. I write about my work, politics and public health, misinformation, funding nad public health, scientific communication and more.

Thanks for listening to the podcast! And thank you to everyone who shares it, tells people to listen to it, ranks it…I really appreciate it! If you have ideas for topics and guests, please email me: erin@bloomingwellness.com.

Talk soon, Eeks