By Ruth Young
I have been trying a new supplement that can actually be given to pets. Since being harmed by a fluoroquinolone antibiotic in February of 2014, I have added many supplements to my own health regimen with great results. A lot of these supplements are anti-aging products that surprisingly seem to work. So why aren’t there anti-aging products available for our pets?
Monty, my feline friend, is six years old now. He is actually middle aged for a cat. My sister’s cat, Kobe, is seventeen! He lives upstairs with my sister in her apartment in our duplex. Kobe came with the house, as he was left with us when his previous owners moved out and were planning to dump him at a shelter. He has spent his entire long life upstairs in that apartment, but the past fifteen years with my sister have been the best for him. He is loved and well cared for. But now he reminds me of a little old man. He is so thin and sometimes he needs help getting down from her kitchen table where he likes to sit, perched next to her computer. Petting Kobe one day I was shocked at how bony and rail thin he was, so I decided we needed to try to do something for him. If my health could be restored from near total destruction through the use of anti-aging products, couldn’t his be improved despite his advanced age?
I had recently started taking a micronized purple rice powder and I thought I had seen that they had a product for pets. I had first seen this product advertised on Facebook and the testimonial I read seemed very promising. A woman had had a sudden, inexplicable mystery illness that was lasting for months and not responding to any conventional treatments. She started taking this micronized purple rice product and was well within six months. It sounded to me like she might have been harmed by a fluoroquinolone, just like me, but had not connected her symptoms to the antiobiotic. Even though I was feeling pretty good, her story got my attention. Within two weeks of starting the purple rice my blood pressure was normal, so that I could discontinue my medication for hypertension and my blood sugar came out of the pre-diabetic range to high normal. Hey, not perfect, but a step in the right direction! Also, my damaged left Achilles’ tendon, hurt by the fluoroquinolone, was getting remarkably better. My sleep got better and my damaged nervous system seemed to be healing. I felt more like myself.
What could this stuff do for Kobe? I called Kare Possick, the woman who had sold me the purple rice, and asked about their pet formula. After hearing about Kobe she sent me a bag of it for free. Unfortunately, it seemed like Kobe wasn’t tolerating it well. He always has had a touchy stomach, so it’s hard to say if it was actually the rice product causing him to vomit or if it was coincidence. I called Kare and she said I could just give him some of my purple rice, about an eighth of a teaspoon. Every day I mixed a little bit of purple rice powder into Kobe’s food. But being finicky, he wouldn’t always eat it. So I started giving him a little bit of salmon or tuna with the rice mixed in. Of course, Monty had to get some too. But I wasn’t giving Monty the rice yet. I still thought of Monty as such a young cat that I didn’t think he needed it.
It’s been several months now. Kobe expects my arrival with a treat for him and meows at me if I come upstairs empty handed. He allows me to pet him every day. He didn’t always allow me to come near him before, but he seems to have accepted me as one of his people now that I bring him a special treat every day. He is still our little old man. He is still thin. But he isn’t shockingly thin and it does seem like his fur is a little softer. It may take some time, but it seems like the micronized purple rice is helping him. The difficult thing is that he is still a finicky cat with a touchy stomach. He doesn’t always eat his tuna with the rice in it. He doesn’t always keep it down. Progress is slow, but we are seeing progress.
Monty gets the rice too now. His coat is really, really thick and silky. It is soft and glossy like it never had been before although he has always been a beautiful cat. He started getting the rice after an altercation with another cat in our yard. (We have since modified his enclosure so that other cats can’t get in, but that’s another story.) We think it was a female cat in heat. Normally, Monty will chase the intruding cat away and that is the end of it when another cat enters his yard. This cat didn’t go away. She kept coming back. She would run a couple of feet and then return, eyes fixed on Monty. This was so upsetting to Monty that he attacked her viciously. Fur flew, she was bloodied and climbed over the fence never to return. I hope she was ok. I think she might have belonged to someone because I only ever saw her prowling around after people would be home from work. She never came around earlier in the day. I am hoping she was able to return to her home and that they perhaps thought about keeping her safe in the future instead of letting her roam. And maybe getting her spayed. Just a thought.
I found one small scratch on Monty’s face. I cleaned him up and he seemed fine. The next day he could barely move. Trying to pick him up resulted in cries of pain. He could barely walk around. He was definitely displaying what we in physical therapy would call muscle guarding behavior. He was sore. Jeff thought maybe he had an infection from the scratch. I could find no evidence of that. Internet friends from across the pond thought the same thing: he has an abscess, look for a wound, for signs of infection. I could not find any injury to him except a small scratch on the side of his face that seemed to be healing ok. And he wasn’t acting like he had a localized pain. This was diffuse, body wide pain. I laughed when I realized what it was. “Monty, you are getting old, my boy!” He stared at me, not seeing the humor. “You have delayed onset muscle soreness. You overdid it, felt fine yesterday, and now you feel like you are going to die. Welcome to middle age, my friend!”
I remember noticing that after I started taking the purple rice I just didn’t have delayed onset muscle soreness as frequently, and if I did get sore it didn’t seem to last as long. I immediately went upstairs and got some of the pet purple rice and put it in some food for him. He got more than one dose of purple rice that day. By the next day he was moving completely normally. It felt good to be able to do something for him, especially as his soreness was a reminder that he is getting older.
So what is this purple rice stuff and isn’t giving rice to cats kind of weird, since they are obligate carnivores? These are some of the questions I asked Kare. She said the rice part is removed, so that the starches are not there, only the nutrition. And the rice is highly nutritious. It has polysaccharides, amino acids, and poly peptides. The purple rice has every amino acid. Animal products commonly have this variety of proteins, but the purple rice is the only plant known to contain all amino acids. It has a lot of other nutrients too. One of my friends looked up everything that is in purple rice, and the list was a couple pages long. This purple rice is a 2,000 year old, very rare strain of purple rice and it is grown in a pristine valley in Thailand. No GMO’s or pesticides are allowed and it is only taken out by hand—no vehicles are allowed in there. The soil is very rich and unspoiled.
They take 60 pounds of purple rice to make one pound of the purple rice powder. It’s put through a one of a kind high tech device, which mills it down to the size of a micron. Because it is so small the rice can get into even damaged cells to help nourish the mitochondria so that cells function the way they were meant to.
For dogs people report UTI’s being cleared up, arthritis symptoms decreasing, and cataracts clearing up from regular use of this purple rice product. There is a twelve year track record of it being used for animals, including race horses and all pets. Kare told me about a sixteen year old cat with chronic UTI’s and kidney problems who has been fed the purple rice for a few months and is now fine and running around like a kitten. Kare does give it to her own cats. She just sprinkles it on their food, about an eighth of a teaspoon. Her cats are semi-feral and are named Sweetie Pie and Scaredy Cat. They live in her yard and eat lizards. That made me laugh when she told me that because we don’t have lizards here in Wisconsin, but I can just picture Monty catching himself a lizard. I doubt he would eat it. Kare has noticed the rice helping with skin issues for her cats and, like Monty, their fur is soft and thicker. Writing this just reminded me that I have not noticed the dry, white flakes at the base of Monty’s tail for a long time. He used to have what looked like dandruff there, but it seems to have cleared up.
What is good for us is good for our animals. Reading people’s comments in Kare’s Facebook group shows me that a lot of people really are being helped by this product. Kare says that her own husband’s life was saved by it. He had a large mass on his kidney, but the doctors refused to operate because his diabetes was so out of control. She was just taking care of him, watching him die, until friends told them about the purple rice and they decided to try it. Her husband’s blood sugar numbers got better and better until the doctors could operate and when they did there was barely anything left of the mass. It seems so crazy that a plant milled really small could do so much. But I have seen the before and after pictures of Kare’s husband. Something saved his life.
Kare says that if you are having trouble getting your cats to eat food with the purple rice in it, you can mix it with water and squirt it down the cat, as if giving him medicine. It is powerful food, not medicine, but it can get into the cells and do what food is supposed to do in the first place. If you want to order some from Kare her number is 727-798-8764. You can read more people and pet testimonials on www.KaresPurpleRiceProducts.com She is the United States in Florida. The company doesn’t ship outside the US. There are ways around that with third party shippers, but of course that adds to the cost. Kare has been very helpful to me as a health coach and it is so wonderful that she is also a cat lover. I also applaud any company trying to do things to improve the health and extend the lives of our animal companions. Thanks in part to Kare’s purple rice, Monty and I are doing very well.
hello Ruth,
I am convinced natural foods can often cure or help us and also our animals,always being careful because some things are good for humans but venomous to cats and/or dogs and other animals…not so rice ofcourse.
I am really writing you because I have had many and still have cats and when they are older they tend to get renal faillure and getting thinner is one of the signes.I hope your sister has taken her cat to the vet because a diet and some farmaceuticals can give the cat a longer life and help its kidneys so the animal will feel better.
You probably know all this but I had to tell you just in case because I didn’t know with my first cat…I wish I could warn all catowners to let a vet check their older cats regularly…the cost is worth your animal having a better old day.And cats do not show illness or unhappiness untill too late…
I don’t mean to upset you,many greetings,
sincerely,
Guinevere
Thanks for commenting Guinevere.
I’m going to try this, for me and Samirah. Thanks, Ruth!
Ruth, Thank you for sharing this information on purple rice and it’s benefits.