Poor diets such as processed or cooked food negatively impact gene mutation in your cat or dog. These negative Genotype changes begin to tell the story through the Phenotype that start to present in your cat or dog.
Phenotype
Phenotype basically means physical characteristics. In your cat or dog this means everything from their forward facing eyes for hunting prey through to their height, weight, overall health, disease history, behavior and general mental and emotional outlook.
Phenotypes have an ability to adapt and change and different elements of the body have different levels of “phenotype plasticity” or adaptabilty”.
Where phenotype are almost completely determined by genotype, such as blood type, they have low phenotypic plasticity. Traits that are easily altered by the environment, such as height and weight, have high phenotypic plasticity.” (1)
Different factors can affect phenotype; – diet, climate, illness, chemical exposure, and stress. The ever changing high plasticity Phenotypes, can then go onto impact the Genotype.
Genotype
Geneotypes are made up of DNA. It is the genetic identity either overall or for a particular gene type or series of genes. It’s what is inherited from the parents.
DNA is present throughout all cells of the body and they are constantly mutating to form new cells. Various elements can effect a sequence of gene in a simple positive or negative way, through to it impacting a sequence of code.
Errors can occur in the DNA through damage or mistakes when they are being replicated. The mistakes can come from a misprint within the body or through a form of damage such as chemical exposure which is found if something is carcinogenic, a cancer causing agent, that cause the DNA to reproduce out of control. These changes in code are then play against their environment of natural selection to either have a positive, negative or neutral impact on the body and will impact everything from there on out.
Gene mutations that occur as part of evolution – germ line mutations, are passed through the reproduction system onto the next generation. For example, negatively impacted gene mutation can lead to dis-ease and illness that then becomes a genetic dis-order. If these present in the germ line mutations, the genetic dis-order is then passed along to the next generation and so on.
Neutral mutations – changes the DNA but doesn’t effect the cat or dog as the changes have been made to DNA that don’t contain genes or have little influence over changing the physical appearance.
Positive mutations – These types of mutation can help your cat or dog whereby the mutations that occur can for example, help them fight a virus and provides a form of protection.
Negative mutations – If a mutation occurs within a gene that forms part of the coding, 70% of the time, the changes within the gene cause a harmful mutation. If the mutation occurs outside of a coding gene only 7% of the time the mutation is harmful. (2)
Why are Phenotypes & Genotypes Important To Health?
Changes that occur in the DNA, Genotypes eventually influence the Phenotyes. Most Mutations are harmful.
It’s scientifically known that diet can have huge implications. Food can effect anything from a single building block of DNA to large segments of DNA that contain chromosomes.
Poor diets such as processed or cooked food negatively impact gene mutation in your cat or dog. These negative Genotype changes begin to tell the story through the phenotype/the physical characteristics that start to present in your cat or dog such as illness and disease.
What can’t be determined is where these negative mutations occur in the body or in which cell changes. It’s total pot luck, random, Russian Roulette or really natural selection. For example the phenotype change to present as diabetes versus cancer.
What you fundamentally can determine and control is whether you fed your cat or dog into genetic dis-order through harmful gene mutation or not.
Some common forms of illnesses that present in a pet’s phenotype, caused from harmful gene mutation are;
- cancers
- auto-immune diseases
- diabetes
- heart Disease
- allergies
Animals are adapted to eat raw food and studies done involving 500 cats and a combined study of 250,000 cats and dogs indicated that almost every parameter of health in a pet was improved on a raw food diet.
Science is demonstrating that raw food plays a huge role in helping to prevent, treat and even reverse the leading illnesses and diseases in pets.
There is NO chronic disease, no autoimmune disease and certainly no cancer or other chronic condition in your pet that would not benefit from being “fed out of disease”, via feeding your pet a BARF or real fresh food diet.
Raw food is the best investment you can make for your pet’s health. As the Francis Pottenger study demonstrated and many raw feeding pet parents will tell you, raw fed cats and dogs rarely if ever, need vet care.
Invest in food not medicine.
“Logic and common sense are critucal to good science. Animals, just like people are still using
digestive systems that evolved thousands of years ago, systems designed to provide them with nutirients derived from whole foods”.Dr Bruce Cobble
