by Catherine Haug, May 21, 2009; updated December 15, 2012
As I wrote in 2009: The Diet of Traditional Peoples: the Work of Weston Price & Frances Pottenger:
Dr. Frances Pottenger Jr. is famous for his 1930s studies with cats. He fed some a raw food diet, and the others a cooked and processed food diet, then studied their health through the generations, for 10 years. This was a well-controlled study, that compared a control group with the experimental groups. More detailed results are given below.
In summary, he found that by the third generation, the cats on the cooked or processed food diet were so changed they were no longer fertile, and had similar problems with their skeletal and other systems, as observed in humans by Dr. Weston Price. On the other hand, the cats on the raw diet were healthy and fertile in all generations. (more detail on this, below). Of course, human dietary needs are different from that of cats, but certain parallels are still valid.
His research is not without critics. But after 3 or more generations of humans regularly consuming highly processed foods, the truth of their theories is becoming evident. See my article: The Third Generation & Health for more about this, and for a similar, more contemporary study on hamsters.
The Cat Studies
Pottenger studied approximately 900 cats over a period of ten years, with three generations of cats being studied. The Meat Study and Milk Study are the most well known.
The following is from Wikipedia (1).
Meat study
This study compares feed of raw meat vs cooked meat for his cats. “One group of cats was fed a diet of two-thirds raw meat, one-third raw milk, plus cod-liver oil while the second group was fed a diet of two-thirds cooked meat, one-third raw milk, and cod-liver oil. The cats fed the all-raw diet were healthy while the cats fed the cooked meat diet developed various health problems:
- By the end of the first generation the cats started to develop degenerative diseases and became quite lazy.
- By the end of the second generation, the cats had developed degenerative diseases by mid-life and started losing their coordination.
- By the end of the third generation the cats had developed degenerative diseases very early in life and some were born blind and weak and had a much shorter life span. Many of the third generation cats couldn’t even produce offspring. There was an abundance of parasites and vermin while skin diseases and allergies increased from an incidence of five percent in normal cats to over 90 percent in the third generation of deficient cats. Kittens of the third generation did not survive six months. Bones became soft and pliable and the cats suffered from adverse personality changes. Males became docile while females became more aggressive.
- The cats suffered from most of the degenerative diseases encountered in human medicine and died out totally by the fourth generation.”
NOTE: “At the time of Pottenger’s Study the heat-sensitive amino acid taurine had been discovered but had not yet been identified as an essential amino acid for cats. Today many cats thrive on a cooked meat diet where taurine has been added after cooking. The deficient diets lacked sufficient taurine to allow the cats to properly form protein structures and resulted in the health effects observed. Pottenger himself concluded that there was likely an “as yet unknown” protein factor that may have been heat sensitive.”
Milk Study
“In this study, the cats were fed 2/3 milk and 1/3 meat. All groups were fed raw meat with different groups getting raw, pasteurized, evaporated, sweetened condensed or raw metabolized vitamin D milk. The cats on raw milk were the healthiest while the rest exhibited varying degrees of health problems similar to the previous cooked meat study. (See Pottenger’s Cats Milk Study (2) for more detail of the results).
This particular Pottenger cat study has been cited by advocates of raw milk as evidence that it is likely healthier for humans than pasteurized milk.”
Sources:
- Wikipedia on Francis M Pottenger, Jr.: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Pottenger,_Jr.
- Pottenger’s Cats Milk Study: nutritionreallyworks . net/Pottengers-cats.html [NOTE: link disabled because it contains malware and my hurt your computer]