The Science Behind Visionary Pet Foods: KetoPet's Research

KetoPet began with a question about cancer and food. This is the story of the research at KetoPet Sanctuary, what it found and what it did not, and how it eventually led to Visionary Pet Foods.

A question about food

When I was a child, my dogs routinely lived into their late teens. They were fed simply and well. Later, I watched many other dogs become ill and die young, and the explanation was nearly always genetics. Food was rarely part of the conversation.

I helped launch the Golden Retriever Lifetime Study at Morris Animal Foundation, a study designed to follow thousands of golden retrievers through their whole lives and look at genetics, lifestyle, and diet. Several of its early sponsors were pet food companies. As the study took shape, I felt diet was no longer getting the focus it deserved, and I left. I came away convinced that someone needed to look much harder at what dogs eat.

Cancer and glucose

In the 1920s, the biochemist Otto Warburg, who later won a Nobel Prize, observed that many cancer cells rely heavily on glucose for energy, even when oxygen is available. This became known as the Warburg effect.

A ketogenic diet is very low in carbohydrate and high in fat. It lowers blood glucose and shifts the body toward using fat and ketones for fuel. Researchers have explored whether that could make conditions harder for cancer cells. Laboratory work by Dr. Angela Poff and colleagues at the University of South Florida found that a ketogenic diet combined with hyperbaric oxygen therapy extended survival in mice with metastatic cancer.

Very little of this had been tried in dogs. So we asked a simple question: could the same approach help dogs with cancer, used alongside the care their veterinarians recommended? That question became KetoPet Sanctuary.

KetoPet Sanctuary, 2014 to 2017

In September 2014, KetoPet Sanctuary, supported by the Epigenix Foundation, opened on a ranch in Georgetown, Texas. It took in dogs with advanced cancer, including dogs from shelters near Austin who were due to be euthanized, and cared for them around the clock with a team of veterinarians, veterinary oncologists, technicians, and researchers.

Every dog in the program received four things together:

• Standard veterinary cancer care: surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, or a combination, as their veterinarians advised.
• A homemade ketogenic diet: fresh meat, fats, and low-carbohydrate vegetables, adjusted for each dog and checked with twice-daily blood glucose and ketone readings.
• Hyperbaric oxygen therapy: regular sessions in a pressurized oxygen chamber.
• Metabolic conditioning: exercise once or twice a day, tailored to what each dog could manage.

Dogs were scanned with positron emission tomography and computed tomography (PET/CT) when they arrived and again at 60 and 120 days. PET scans show where the body is using glucose, so they gave the team a picture of how each dog's tumors were responding over time.

The ranch was a place of hope, and also of loss. Some dogs did wonderfully. Some did not respond, and some passed away during or after the program. We remember every one of them.

What the published research found

The work was published in 2019 as a three-part series in IVC Journal, "KetoPet Sanctuary: Ketosis, Cancer and Canines." Part 1 explains the approach and how ketosis was measured. Part 2 reports the results. Part 3 looks at how owners can apply the principles at home.

Part 2 describes an open pilot study of 40 dogs with advanced cancer, aged 4 to 14, from 18 breeds and covering 14 types of cancer. Each dog had 120 days of therapy followed by 180 days of follow-up, 300 days in all.

• Blood glucose: On the ketogenic diet, the dogs' blood glucose averaged about 63 mg/dL, compared with about 93 mg/dL in dogs on typical commercial diets.
• Completion: 22 of the 40 dogs completed the 120-day program. Of the 18 who did not, six died of cancer, two died of other causes, and ten were unable to finish.
• Prognosis: Of the 22 who completed the program, 11 went on to live beyond their original prognosis. Two did not reach their prognosis, three had not yet reached it when the paper was written, and six could not be given a prognosis because there was too little evidence for their tumor type.

What the research did not show

This matters, especially if your own dog has cancer, so I want to be plain about it.

• No comparison group: This was a small, open pilot study, with no group of dogs who received standard care alone. It points to possibilities rather than proving them.
• Not diet alone: every dog received standard cancer care, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and exercise as well as the diet. The results cannot be credited to any one of those on its own.
• Not our food: the dogs ate homemade ketogenic diets prepared at the ranch. The study did not test Visionary Pet Foods.

The authors were clear that a ketogenic diet and hyperbaric oxygen therapy are not a cure-all. They concluded that success with cancer depends on early detection, more than one kind of treatment, and the care of a veterinary oncologist, working in partnership with committed owners.

You can read some of the dogs' stories on KetoPet's Case Studies page.

What we learned beyond cancer

Caring for dogs every day at the ranch, the team noticed that dogs eating far less carbohydrate generally kept a healthy weight and steady energy. That was an observation, not a trial result. Together with research from elsewhere, it changed how we think about food for every dog, not only dogs who are ill.

Today, KetoPet suggests a low-carbohydrate diet for most dogs: high in protein, moderate in fat. A stricter ketogenic diet is best kept for dogs with cancer or seizures, with their veterinarian's guidance. The strength of the evidence varies by condition:

• Seizures and cognitive decline: there are studies in dogs, mostly of diets with added medium-chain triglyceride (MCT) oil.
• Weight and mobility: well supported, and most of the benefit to mobility comes from weight loss.
• Diabetes: cutting carbohydrates in a dog on insulin can drop blood sugar dangerously, so change the diet only with your veterinarian.
• Allergies: the link to carbohydrate itself is weak. Improvement usually comes from a different protein and simpler ingredients.

On a low-carbohydrate diet, a dog's blood glucose tends to run lower and steadier. Whether that leads to longer, healthier lives in healthy dogs has not been tested in a long-term study, and I won't claim that it has.

Reading carbohydrate on a dog food label

For years, US pet food labels did not show carbohydrate at all.