Live from the show floor at SUPERZOO 2025, we sit down with Daniel Schulof, Founder and CEO of KetoNatural Pet Foods and author of Dogs, Dog Food, and Dogma. In this candid conversation, Schulof pulls no punches on one of the most debated topics in pet nutrition—carbohydrates. From AAFCO’s upcoming Pet Nutrition Facts label changes to the spread of misinformation in pet nutrition, we explore how transparency in labeling could reshape consumer choices and companion animal health. This episode cuts through the noise with hard questions, bold insights, and a behind-the-scenes look at the challenges—and opportunities—facing the pet food industry today.

Helpful Links

📖 Read more about AAFCO’s upcoming changes pet food label requirements: https://www.petfoodprocessing.net/articles/17244-aafco-approves-new-label-regulations-for-pet-food

📈 State of Pet Health 2016 Report from Banfield shows rising rates of diabetes in dogs: https://www.banfield.com/State-of-pet-health#:~:text=Download%202016%20Report%20%2D%20What%20diseases%20are%20affecting%20dogs%20and%20cats

🎧 Hear more from the SUPERZOO 2025 show floor in this episode! https://bsmpartners.net/barking-mad-podcast/beyond-the-brands-your-backstage-pass-to-superzoo-2025

👀 Check out this past episode—The Billion-Dollar Deception of DCM: https://bsmpartners.net/barking-mad-podcast/the-billion-dollar-deception-of-dcm-inside-ketonaturals-class-action-lawsuit

🔬 KetoNatural’s research suggests a better standard-of-care approach for dogs with diabetes: https://academic.oup.com/tas/article/doi/10.1093/tas/txaf017/8008740?login=false, https://academic.oup.com/tas/article/doi/10.1093/tas/txaf018/8003283?login=false

Show Notes

00:19 – Inside the Episode

03:33 – From Guaranteed Analysis to Pet Nutrition Facts

05:13 – Why Carbohydrate Disclosure Matters in Pet Food

10:32 – Processing Reality Check

13:54 – Market Challenges for Low-Carb Pet Food

17:27 – The Role of Misinformation

20:37 – Keto Natural’s Research on Doggy Diabetes

22:05 – Rising Rates of Diabetes in Dogs

23:07 – Misinformation in Pet Nutrition

25:33 – Today’s Key Takeaways

26:42 – Behind the Booth at SUPERZOO 2025

27:47 – Stay Tuned for More Candid Conversations!

Jordan Tyler: Welcome back, and we’re glad you’re here, because we have a T-R-E-A-T for you today. If you caught our SUPERZOO episode, which we’ve linked in the show notes here, you’ll know BSM Partners recently attended one of the largest pet industry tradeshows in North America, but we didn’t just attend. We set up a soundproof podcasting booth right there on the show floor and conducted 27 interviews with brands, influencers, and other movers and shakers across the pet care world.

We collected 12 hours of recordings in that booth, and some of the conversations were just too juicy not to share. So, today we’re kicking off a mini-series of “Candid Conversations from the SUPERZOO Show Floor,” highlighting some meaty perspectives, hot takes, and spicy soundbites that ask the tough questions about the way we feed and care for our pets.

Today, we’ll share our conversation with Daniel Schulof, Founder and CEO of KetoNatural Pet Foods, a company breaking the kibble mold to create low-carb, protein-first diets for dogs. He’s also the author of Dogs, Dog Food and Dogma, in which he investigates the canine obesity epidemic, arguing that carbohydrate-heavy commercial diets are contributing to rising rates of certain diseases in dogs. And it’s not Dan’s first time on the podcast, either—his story is a key part of the DCM scandal, which we’ve uncovered in several past episodes, the latest of which we’ve included in today’s show notes.

This interview, though, will cover a few things. One will be carbs—one of the most debated and misunderstood areas of pet nutrition. We’ll also highlight upcoming changes to the way pet foods are labeled, detail what those changes mean for pets and their people, and explore the complicated relationship between science, emotion, and misinformation in the pet food space.

Get ready, because we’re pulling no punches.

Dr. Stephanie Clark: Welcome to Barking Mad, a podcast by BSM Partners. We’re your hosts, Dr. Stephanie Clark—

Jordan Tyler: —and I’m Jordan Tyler.

The goal here is to add more transparency, consistency, and clarity to pet food labels in order to help pet parents make more informed decisions about the products they buy for and feed to their pets. There are several changes involved, and we’ve linked an article in the show notes that explains more about each change in turn, but for the purpose of today’s conversation, we’ll focus on one specific update, which we’ll see on the backs of pet food bags, cans and pouches. This is the change from a Guaranteed Analysis Panel to what will soon be called a Pet Nutrition Facts Box. Let’s dig in.

Now, when it comes to quantitative nutritional content, so describing in numbers, in terms of what nutrients are in a food product, is called the Guaranteed Analysis Panel. I'm sure, like many of your listeners, know what that is, are either familiar with it because they've shopped in this world or made products, whatever. What they will be requiring is called the Pet Nutrition Facts Panel. They're different in some really important and very significant ways. They ought to be things that change the industry and change a lot about companion animal public health, in my estimation, at least.

Most notably, the big change that I'm super excited about is the change from not requiring brands to disclose the carbohydrate content of their recipes, their products, to one in which not only do they have to disclose the total carbohydrate content, but just like in human foods, you have to describe—there are lots of kinds of carbohydrates, and so you have to just say “total carbohydrate plus fiber,” you have to say “sugar,” you have to say, and there's like subcategories of carbohydrate that are required, which is very similar. And more generally, the whole Pet Nutrition Facts is very similar to how the FDA requires makers of packaged foods for human consumption to label their products.

The existing regime, the Guaranteed Analysis Panel, doesn't require carbohydrate disclosures, and as a result, consumers don't know how much carbohydrate is in their product, and as a result, they end up feeding a lot of it to their pets. And because I have spent the past 15 years, in one way or another, trying to help people understand and deal with the fact that most pet foods are crammed full of carbohydrate… I'm very excited about it, and I think it ought to have positive ramifications.

But you think about companion animal public health if for lack of a better veterinary public health, there's no real field for it at this point, so it doesn't have a name as far as I know, at least. Maybe you guys know something I don't know. But like, okay, what issues, top of your head, what are the most important issues that we can think of for US companion animal public health or companion animal veterinary public health?

Jordan Tyler: Obesity.

Dr. Stephanie Clark: Yeah. Obesity. Yeah, obesity for sure. Diabetes.

Daniel Schulof: Diabetes.

Dr. Stephanie Clark: You've got joint issues and skin joint issues.

Daniel Schulof: Yeah, so joint and skin to me, I'm always at least like, well, where do these show up in terms of like, in the utilitarian calculation? Like, are these things killing dogs? Like no, they're not killing them, but they're still maybe me making life painful. Yeah, they're not insignificant things. Cancer would be the only other one that I think of as being, it's like, but it's very different from—it's not a nutritional issue.

Nutritionally mediated stuff, I'm like on the same page as you guys. It's like obesity, diabetes, cancer, chronic joint conditions—those are kind of the four things where it's like, how are we still screwing this up so bad? And carbohydrate intake is very central to, for sure, inarguably, diabetes and obesity alone, and in all likelihood, if we were having this conversation 15 years from now, you'd be saying the same thing about cancer and arthritis, I believe. Because there's lots of early-stage stuff on that front that's also compelling. And so to me, you want to help animals? You want to make that system better? You deal with those things first, and you've got a thing right at the heart of that, which is excessive intake of carbohydrate. If you can fix that, you can really, really move the needle on companion animal public health in the US, and so, yeah, that's why it's the issue for me.

Dr. Stephanie Clark: So, do you think having to disclose that it's going to kind of force brands to either reduce the amount of carbs, or do you think it's just going to educate pet owners?

Daniel Schulof: I think that over time, you will see brands reacting to the disclosure requirement by reducing the amount of carbohydrate in many of their products, at least. One of the reasons the carbohydrate is the backbone of the modern pet food ecosystem is because, calorie for calorie, carbohydrates are really, they're the cheap nutrient. You know what I mean? Agriculture-based carbohydrate, one-tenth the cost of animal-based protein, you know, like very much cheaper.

So, consumers, if a dog eats a donut or something, it pulls the calories out of it. It can digest that stuff; it can pull calories out of it. And in some ways, it—if you mix it with enough of the other stuff, it'll keep it alive. And so some consumers are surely going to be sold to the price points that they've grown accustomed to, that are grounded in 70% carbohydrate products. They're still going to want a product like that.

Even understanding they're still—75 years on from the Surgeon General's report on lung cancer and smoking, there are millions of people who smoke cigarettes. There are literally zero-cancer nicotine delivery strategies now, and still millions and millions and millions of people smoke. So, it's like, people are going to do it, and so there are going to be brands that are going to be there, that are going to serve that. But I generally think that when that information is more broadly available, it's going to impact some consumer decision making, and then how much it impacts is all down to education and other sorts of like who's motivated to help people understand the reality about what those things do to health. Do those folks win those kinds of information wars or not? You know, that's like what it boils down to, I think, in terms of how widely it changes things.

What these new disclosure requirements do is they make pet food labeling a lot more like human food labeling. Right? And if you go to the grocery store and you look at human packaged foods, you go to, like, the pasta aisle, or the cereal aisle, or the pancake mix aisle, it's still mostly full carbohydrate options, right? Like that's still the bulk of the products there. But even in those traditionally carbohydrate-focused types of foods, you now have whole sub-sectors that are, like, for the die-hard people, that are like, “I don't eat this way in anything… I still want to eat my pancakes, but I'm not going to eat the high-carb ones.” There are options for those kinds of people.

In addition to people just getting rid of, you know, probably read plenty about how industries like full-sugar soda have really suffered as the public has become more aware of the nutritional science that shows how bad sugar is, and so, people move away from categories of products too, but some categories, some combination of those two things, I like to think, will reduce the amount of carbohydrate in the overall pet food environment.

Jordan Tyler: Cutting in here real quick—carbohydrates get a bad rap in pet food, for sure, and Daniel offers some compelling points to justify his take. But I do think it’s important to understand that while our dogs and cats may not necessarily require carbohydrates as part of their diet, carbs like corn, soy, wheat, starches, etc., are required for the extrusion process, which is how kibble is made. So, from a processing standpoint, in order to create that brown and round goodness, you do need to have some level of carbohydrates to move the diet through an extruder.

When kibble is made, all the ingredients are mixed together and pushed through an extruder, which cooks the diet using heat and pressure. Carbohydrates contain starch, which turns soft and sticky when it gets hot. That sticky stuff acts kind of like glue—it holds everything together and makes the food puff up like popcorn when it comes out the other end of the machine. Without those carbs, the kibble would just crumble apart or come out all flat and weird-looking.

So, all that’s to say, the processing piece is a big reason why carbs are in kibble in the first place. But to Daniel’s point, his company makes kibble, so we know it is possible to make a kibble with lower carbohydrate content. But because brands have historically not had to disclose carbohydrates on the label, and because those ingredients are so cheap… you can see where I’m going here. Follow the money, people.

Dr. Stephanie Clark: So, I mean, you had mentioned it like, it's similar to human labels. Do you think more people will understand that? By all means, it's cool because we get to see more carbs. It's a little bit more transparency. But is it really helping the owner?

Daniel Schulof: I mean, I believe the only question is how many there are; I can tell you from surveying we've done, there are all sorts of instances [where] the average pet food consumer misunderstands how much carbohydrate is in their product by a large margin. And so, you're going to change people's understanding of the nutritional content of their animal's diet. The question is, I mean, are you talking about nine out of 10 people? No.

Dr. Stephanie Clark: Right.

There are a lot of things where you just look at an image and all of a sudden you can't deny it anymore. “Oh, it's, yes, this is real. I saw the image. I can no longer believe that.” That's not how nutritional science stuff works. It has to sift through systems, and it takes forever. But yeah, it's going to have a major change. I mean, I can tell you right now, one of the things I do is own a company that makes low-carb dog food. We make kibble, it's 5% digestible carbohydrate because I believe all these things. And one of the things that makes it hard to sell products like that in the US right now is that I'm competing with brands that are suggesting to their consumers that their products are similar to ours, but because they don't have to disclose the carbohydrate content, they can mislead.

You know, it's like absurd. It's more than that. It's like under AAFCO’s existing regulatory system, did you know this? Under their existing system, you can't use the expression “low carbohydrate,” “low carb,” right? Or “low starch.” So, like, I make low-carb pet food. That's our shtick, that's our thing. I can't tell people that. No.

Jordan Tyler: Why?

Daniel Schulof: You have a prohibition on using the expression low carbohydrate.

Jordan Tyler: But where does that stem from?

Daniel Schulof: So, I mean, I could tell you…

Dr. Stephanie Clark: I was going to say, all I know is it’s in the AAFCO book, so sorry.

Jordan Tyler: Yeah, we're going down this rabbit hole.

Daniel Schulof: That's the rule. Where does the rule come from? The on-the-record answer is that—not for me, but I mean, like—if you were to ask somebody at AAFCO, what they will tell you is essentially that AAFCO’s whole regulatory system came from a time when it was regulating in a very similar way, companion animal food and livestock food. And it was kind of like we were trying to make sure, AAFCO was trying to make sure, that the snake oil salesman of the day wasn’t putting out foods that weren't even nutritionally sufficient for those animals. They weren’t going to sell “Dan's Snake Oil Dog Food” and have a wolf on the bag, but really, it was 99% carbohydrate.

And it's like, they came along to say like, “No, a dog needs to have this minimum.” It's like a lot of AAFCO is framed up in minimums, that kind of thing. And so, the Guaranteed Analysis reflects that, right? It's got all the minimum requirements, but a dog and a cat don't have a nutritional requirement for carbohydrate, and so it's not on—that's like how AAFCO has sort of, for decades, dragged its feet on requiring carbohydrate disclosures, because it's still sort of operating out of this world in which it was like, “We’ve got to tell people the minimum to make sure people aren't getting misled in that way.” There's no requirement for carbohydrate content. Therefore, there's no, like—they've sort of taken that to say like, “Well then, because there's not that, we can't really say what's low and what isn't.” So, you're going to have people that are going to abuse this system. You can't, you just can't use the term at all.

Jordan Tyler: That’s kind of wild. I never knew. And another thing—we’re seeing a ton of vet-formulated diets, but something I’ve heard you talk about in the past, Steph, is how some vets have historically relied on one peer-reviewed paper that says puppies need 20% carbohydrates in their diet, and they use that basis to formulate all their dog foods. But like, it’s only one study. That’s not enough to draw conclusions for the entire population of dogs. And while dogs don’t necessarily have a requirement for carbs, you could make the argument that dogs do need glucose on some level, but there are other ways to get glucose other than through carbs. So, like, there’s so much more nuance to it than appears at face value.

Daniel Schulof: Yeah, and it's like, the devil is in the details. Right? So much of this stuff, it's like, yeah. Misinformation, right, is such a broad phenomenon in the age in which we live that it gets studied a lot. Now it's like, how are we all as a society going to deal with this? There are people who that's their academic thing is that they're a professor at a major university and they study misinformation now. That's how common it is. And these dynamics get generalized and then get applicable or not applicable in your little domains, like pet food.

And one of the things that is like, a kind of generalized principle is that like there's, in the veterinary world, the amount of like veterinary nutrition research that gets published every year, the number of studies that get conducted, the amount of dollars spent, whatever metric you want to use is, is not even fair to call it a drop in the bucket compared to the human equivalent. It is absolutely minuscule, you know? Very, very small. We're teaching veterinarians in the same way that we teach anybody in any kind of scientific discipline, which is like, you go look at the evidence, you draw opinions based on the evidence. When you have such a smaller record with so much less information in it, you end up doing something on a systematic basis. You over-index limited findings, and you over-index characterizations of those limited findings, and what you flagged, Steph, is a really good example of that.

It's like a single study; we didn't even know off the top of our heads what the findings are. It's like, somebody characterized, it's like this is what we've seen happen for the past, I don't know, whatever it's been now, eight years with DCM is like, “How does it work?” “Well, bad things happen.” And it's like, “Yeah… okay.” But it's because we don't have a hope. After all, there are fewer than 100 board-certified veterinary nutritionists in the United States today. We don't have enough of a body of information to use the same kind of decision-making and kind of intellectual approach that works in domains where there are thousands of participants and lots and lots of research money going into it.

Dr. Stephanie Clark: It's like what you mentioned with grain-free and DCM. It's like they lock onto this one paper or this one conclusion that is their belief, and it's like, can you replicate that? Yeah, okay. Bad things happen. What are those bad things? But like, if you repeat that study today, what would you find? Well, you don't know, because you only have one paper.

Daniel Schulof: No, it's exactly, it should, like—that example really shows how important in that system the characterization of the scientific findings is. And in the veterinary world, how vets are educated about nutritional topics is one of the Swiss watches, evil genius Swiss watch, but it's a Swiss watch. A limited number of industry largest industry participants have done a tremendous job of making sure that how vets are taught about nutrition is consistent with what's good for their business. I don't know other industries, like I know pet food, but I'm a reasonably well-read person, and there's nothing remotely close to it.

Dr. Stephanie Clark: They're going to pick that hill to die on, and they're going to die on it. And so, even if other research comes out and it maybe says, “Hey, you know, carbs. Yeah, we don't really need them. We don't need 20%.”

Daniel Schulof: You mean like the two studies that we put out this year in which we completely destroyed the standard of care for diabetes in this country? Like the number one prescribed formula for dogs with diabetes, we tested head-to-head, how did dogs’ metabolism look on our diets? We’re a tiny startup. Sixty percent lower blood sugar than the standard of care prescription-only diet. They employ more veterinary nutritionists than any organization in the history of planet Earth. I'm a $3 million company with a—I'm a guy like. That's not, like, what?

Dr. Stephanie Clark: And they're going to die on that hill because, yeah.

Daniel Schulof: Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Stephanie Clark: And the crazy thing about, like, the diabetes, not to like circle back, but when I worked in a clinic, it's a death sentence, because owners don't want to give insulin. They don't want to prick their dog's ear or paw every morning, and so the number of dogs that die from the diabetes diagnosis instead of just…

Daniel Schulof: Getting it managed?

Dr. Stephanie Clark: Yeah.

Daniel Schulof: Yeah. Nutritionally managing this nutritional disease. Yeah, it's insane. Diabetes and dogs were like measles in people not long ago. Like, one of the ways in which the nutritional science record is deficient in the doggy world is in prevalence data. It's not as good. People, you can go find right away, the CDC’s keeping track of diabetes rates in the US. You can look at the trends. It doesn't exist on the same kind of level [for pets], but all indications, to the extent there is data—Banfield keeps some of the data and there's some amount of prevalent studies—it's rising. It's clearly rising.

In 2011, Banfield reported a 32% increase in canine diabetes since 2006, so about over a five-year period of time. Between 2006 and 2016—so over the next 10 years—Banfield saw canine diabetes rates increase by nearly 80%. So, if you break that down and assume this trend has continued since 2016, doggy diabetes rates have been steadily rising for the last twenty years. And when a health problem keeps getting worse despite advances in science and medicine and diagnostic tools, it raises a tough question: what information are we missing or misunderstanding along the way?

This brings us to the second part of today’s conversation—the rising tide of misinformation. It’s everywhere, for everything, and pet nutrition is no exception. Whether it’s outdated guidelines, overreliance on a single study, or the lack of robust veterinary nutrition research, pet parents and even professionals don’t always have the full picture. And when that happens, myths get repeated so often that they start to sound like facts.

To find out just how widespread this problem really is, Dan and his team decided to test the theory by surveying everyday dog owners and veterinary professionals to measure what they truly know about the more black-and-white aspects of pet nutrition science. Let’s hear about it.

Daniel Schulof: One of the things I've been working on for the past six, seven months is I engaged in survey work that is designed to test, in many ways, the broad, generally the quality of people's level of understanding of the veterinary nutrition scientific record. And what we did is we empaneled hundreds of everyday dog owners. Nice broad subset of folks that are just, “We have a dog,” and otherwise we look like normal Americans. The other one is veterinary professionals, veterinarians, and… What do you call the people that are—

Jordan Tyler: Techs?

Dr. Stephanie Clark: Yeah, the techs.

Daniel Schulof: Yeah. Put together a survey with dozens of questions on it. That's like they're all very—there's a correct and incorrect answer to this stuff, because it's very tight. I used to be a lawyer, so you draft it very tightly. It's just like, you can't deny, there's been one study that shows this, or zero studies that show that, there's just, it doesn't exist. And so, there's a clear yes or no answer.

And we asked everybody, both—we gave them the same surveys. Both groups did poorly, as you might expect. A lot of bad information in both groups. Worse, though, considerably worse in the vet community than in the lay public community. What I'm hopeful about is that by publishing that stuff and promoting those findings, you can help the public and maybe start to say like, “Look, this is the reality I have to contend with when I go to the vet, this is a person that doesn't understand as much about these topics as I do.” And I think that's sort of like, there are only so many things you can do to try to change the situation, but I'm kind of bullish on that one.

Jordan Tyler: So, let’s pull this all together. We’ve learned that carbohydrates, while not required nutritionally for dogs and cats, do play a key role in kibble production, but considering rising rates of pet obesity and the diseases that stem from it, we may want to go back to the science and reconsider.

We’ve also heard how AAFCO’s new labeling requirements could shine a brighter light on carbohydrate content—making it harder for brands to hide behind vague panels and easier for pet parents to make more informed choices.

Dan made it clear that transparency can drive industry change, even if it doesn’t happen overnight. And Stephanie underscored how limited veterinary nutrition research can leave room for overreliance on not enough data, shaping recommendations that may not tell the whole story.

The bottom line? Pet parents deserve clear information and better options—and the only way forward is to keep asking the hard questions. Because at the end of the day, your pet’s long-term health deserves more than “business as usual.”

Well, Dan, I always learn something when we chat, so thanks for taking the time today.

Daniel Schulof: Thanks for talking with me.

Dr. Stephanie Clark: Yeah, absolutely.

Daniel Schulof: Thanks for having me in the booth. Just so everybody that's listening understands what's happening: right now, I'm in a booth on the floor of SUPERZOO, which is this huge conference. So, it's like this—Las Vegas today, in mid-July, it's 140 degrees or something like that, if you go outside the Mandalay Bay Hotel. Once you walk into the Mandalay Bay Hotel, there is an incredible air conditioning system that brings the temperature to probably 65 degrees. Then you go in another layer into the recording booth that BSM Partners has set up for the Barking Mad podcast, and the temperature immediately goes up back up to 140 degrees.

And so, the three of us have been sitting in this 140-degree hot house talking about dog nutritional stuff for you, the listener. And you better appreciate the hard work that Jordan and Stephanie are putting in, because they're grinding.

Jordan Tyler: It's part of our, it's like a psychological game. It's like, how hot can we make this thing? And, you know, how spicy can we get the conversation?

Daniel Schulof: Yeah, yeah. I hope we delivered.

Dr. Stephanie Clark: Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Barking Mad. If you want to learn more about BSM Partners, please visit us at www.bsmpartners.net. Don't forget to subscribe on your favorite leading podcast platform or share it with a friend to stay current on the latest pet industry trends and conversations.

Jordan Tyler: A huge thank you to Dan Schulof for joining us, and to Dr. Stephanie Clark for her always-insightful perspective. We'd also like to thank our dedicated team, Ada-Miette Thomas, Neeley Bowden, Kait Wright, Cady Wolf, and Dr. Katy Miller. A special shout out to Lee Ann Hagerty and Michael Johnson in support of this episode, and to David Perez for our original music in the intro and outro. See you next time!