Co-authored by Dr. Ian Billinghurst, B.V.Sc.(Hons), B.Sc.Agr., Dip. Ed. and Rob Ryan
What’s been missing from dog diets for a few hundred years? Naturally occurring probiotics from whole foods.
Fermentation makes foods both more nutritious and delicious for dogs.
The unique process of fermentation for dogs is considered "wild fermentation". This is a form of lacto-fermentation, which uses the lactic acid-producing bacteria that occur naturally on the raw food that we ferment. We combine wild fermentation with another fermentation through grass-fed goat kefir.
Using these wild-type bacteria is very much in tune with the way our dogs have gone out into nature for thousands of years, eating these wild bacteria that are found in and on the plants, berries, and prey animals, including the gut contents of those animals, whose contents are highly fermented. In this way, Gussy's Gut brings millennia of instinct to your dog in a very clean, optimized, convenient, and health-promoting way.
Our wild fermentation process transforms superfoods into even more valuable, digestible, and useful nutrition for our dogs. This combination of wild-fermented superfoods and traditionally fermented goat kefir is creating optimal biodiversity for our dogs they absolutely love.
This is a wonderful way to support and ensure optimal health for your dog’s entire intestinal tract. Dr. Billinghurst and I believe supporting your dog's healthy gut and colon in this way is far superior to any probiotic pills and powders on the market today.
Fermented foods help dogs stay healthy and in proper relation to their world (or greater biome).
For thousands of years, dogs have been supporting their health using the power of wild fermentation. One of the ways they have done this is to bury their meat and bones and allow the wild soil microbes to ferment them. Eating this fermented meat and bones is instinctual for our dogs; in fact, it is part of their evolutionary diet, which is why dogs naturally crave them.
Fermentation can be very helpful in breaking down otherwise indigestible plant materials and releasing their full nutritional potency. This means it both aids in digestion and improves absorption.
Wild fermentation is the Gussy's Gut way. It creates an incredible and convenient way of giving your dog the benefits of nature in your home.
It is not an exaggeration to say that wild microbial cultures possess a great life force. This can help our dogs adapt to the shifting conditions of their environment and lower their susceptibility to disease and illness. This includes their mental health. You see, bacteria play a vital role in both our immune health and in the normal healthy processes that constitute the functioning of our nervous system. You may have heard of the gut-brain axis. This phenomenon controls many things. A gut in dysbiosis (low good bacteria and higher bad bacteria in your dog’s gut) can be responsible for low energy, anxiety, anger, and depression to name just a few. On the other hand, a gut in balance with higher beneficial bacteria can be responsible for happiness, calmness, centeredness, and contentment. Gussy’s Gut supports this balance.
The goal of Gussy's Gut is to support a vibrant, resilient, long life for your dog. And not just more years - more good years.
By eating our variety of 19 live fermented superfoods, you promote diversity among microbial cultures in your dog's body. Biodiversity, increasingly recognized as critical to the survival of our ecosystems, is just as important at the micro level in our dog's bodies. This is referred to as micro biodiversity.
Your dog's body is its own ecosystem that can function most effectively when populated by a spectrum of healthy microorganisms. By consuming raw fermenting superfoods from healthy soils, your dog becomes more interconnected with the life force of their food. Their food is alive.
Wild fermentation is the opposite of homogenization, uniformity, and monocultures. It is dynamic, completely natural, and spontaneous like life is. It also slightly varies from each batch of Gussy's Gut. There are two reasons for this.
- We never ever add lab-grown probiotics
There certainly are therapeutic reasons for these types of synthetic microbes, but not in Gussy’s Gut Daily. These are shelf stable and most can’t make it through
the acidic digestive systems of dogs. So those good probiotics are mostly a waste of your money.
- From batch to batch, our ingredients are sourced from different farms and grown in different soil which may give them different probiotic values. This is quite exciting and means your dog is never getting just one set of healthy probiotics from batch to batch.
The Disadvantages of Lab-Grown Probiotics
The advantage to other companies of using lab-grown single-species probiotics in their pills, powders, and chews is you can make a claim on your label that your product has a certain CFU and species of probiotic(s). No doubt this is great for marketing. But is it great for your dog long term? Sadly, the answer is no because our dog’s gut requires biodiversity. Life thrives on diversity and difference and Gussy's Gut is designed with this in mind; it is produced with wild bacteria to ensure it never uses these specific and lab-grown types of probiotics.
Gussy's Gut NEVER-EVER uses:
- Laboratory-grown or spore probiotics
- Hydroponically grown ingredients
- Non-organic ingredients
- Synthetic supplements
Gussy's Gut creates our own unique probiotics from nature through our unique fermentation process.
With each batch being different and unique, we proudly boast that Gussy's Gut is not the typical uniform commodity. It is alive and vibrant.
The process of wild fermentation begins with ingredients grown in healthy soil that is teaming with life from organic, biodynamic, and regenerative farms. We are fanatical about the source of every ingredient that goes into our products.
Gussy's Gut delivers:
- A clean and healthy fermentation process designed specifically for dogs with Dr. Ian Billinghurst
- Enzymatically-activated greens and superfoods = nutrients that are alive
- Superfoods that support an alkaline environment in the tissues and support detoxification
- A healthy spectrum of over 180 vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, fatty acids, amino acids and enzymes that go beyond supplements and beyond the limited nutrient range prescribed by AAFCO and other authorities.
- A powerful blend of antioxidants to help neutralize harmful free radicals and support healthy aging
Gussy's Gut is delivered to you as a dry powder that you sprinkle over your dog's food but it is still raw through our long, slow freeze-drying process. We never dehydrate, bake, or air dry our product as it would kill the raw, live, and dynamic value of the product.
To give your dog all the benefits of Gussy's Gut, we recommend you order enough for at least 2-3 months to see the positive effects for your dog. This is a supplement that works deeply within dogs. You must give your dog’s system time to reset and load up on the nutrients in Gussy’s Gut. The gut needs time to adjust and heal. For extremely healthy dogs, they respond much faster and you can see the changes happen faster. For dog’s that need Gussy’s Gut most, it takes many weeks. The beautiful improvements that our customers report seeing come in months 3-5.
One 7.5 oz package contains 135 teaspoons. We recommend one teaspoon per 20 pounds of your dog's weight every day. If you’d like to stretch your dollar further, you can give Gussy’s Gut every other day for positive benefit. Dr. Billinghurst says positive benefits come with regular and consistent feeding to your dog. Every other day can confer benefits.
If you wish to give extra support to your dog, give 1 teaspoon of Gussy's Gut Daily per 10 pounds of his/her weight. This can be valuable for older dogs or for all dogs after surgery, antibiotic treatment, or an illness.
