The Dog Longevity Drug (and the Free Version That Already Works)
Good news! There's a new drug in development to make your dog live longer.
A biotech company called Loyal has raised over $150 million to fund it. They're running the biggest clinical trial in the history of veterinary medicine - 1,300 dogs across 70 vet clinics in the US. The goal is one extra year of healthy life for your dog.
It's not approved yet. But it's coming…
I want Nelly to live forever, and I'm sure you want the same for your dog. If it works and it's actually safe, amazing.
So I looked into it, and had a laugh 😅
What The Drug Actually Does
There are a couple of versions in the pipeline.
One is for big breeds like Great Danes, Rottweilers & Bernese. These dogs often live half as long as a little Chihuahua. Turns out there is a growth hormone called IGF-1 that is way higher in big dogs that causes this. The drug turns this hormone down. Totally fair enough - and pretty cool (if it works).
The weirder one is for senior dogs. It's a daily pill that targets the metabolic side of ageing. Here's what got me. The company's own description of how it works is a "caloric restriction mimetic". Basically it chemically triggers the metabolic state of eating less, without the dog actually eating less.
They made a drug to fake feeding the proper amount of real food. Skipping the other half entirely: what's actually in the bowl.
Genius.
The Solution Isn’t Fixing Diet?
Everyone agrees a big part of how a dog ages is metabolic. Everyone agrees you can slow it down with good diet.
So the solution is... a pill to pretend the diet is good.
The single biggest daily input into a dog's metabolism is what they eat every day for their whole life. Instead of fixing that, we slap a bandaid over the problems a poor diet creates.
It makes sense if you don't think about it 🤪
Why Nobody Funds The Obvious Answer
Here's the thing barely anyone funds research into: a biologically appropriate diet for dogs.
Here's the thing barely anyone funds research into: a biologically appropriate diet for dogs. I reckon that's because you can't patent food. You can patent a pill. Quality food made with pasture raised chicken, grass fed beef and organic veg are much harder to make industrial levels of profit with. That's why the money flows one way.
There's even a decent chance the senior pill turns out to be a repurposed human drug that's been on pharmacy shelves for 50 years. One vet did a proper deep dive and made a solid case it's an old cholesterol med. If he's right, the value was never the molecule. It's the patent on using it in dogs.
It's the same story that's played out in human health for decades. Eat rubbish for forty years, then take a pill to manage what the rubbish did. We've decided that's normal and now we're doing it to dogs.
The “Free” Version
Our message for the last 10 years (in September!) has been simple: feed your dog a balanced diet made with ingredients that are actually food, and they do amazingly well. It's not rocket science.
Nelly's been to the vet maybe three times in her whole life. A tick, a dog attack and a broken tooth. No visits for the stuff that fills most vet waiting rooms - allergies, itchy skin, pancreatitis, cancer, blocked anal glands. That's often diet driven and I'd argue most of it is avoidable.
What goes in your dog's bowl compounds over their whole life, good or bad. A pill won't cancel out a decade of ultra processed pellets, especially if they continue to eat the pellets.
The longevity drug might turn out to be great.
But the “free” version is already here, and it doesn't need a prescription.
Just feed real food. That's it 🙏
