Book review: Pottenger’s Cats
Nutritional pioneers like Weston Price (https://www.fitbynature.org/blog/book-review-nutrition-and-physical-degeneration) and Francis Pottenger observed rapid declines in health when previously healthy populations gave up traditional diets and began consuming modern, processed, nutrient-poor diets.
By chance, both of these pioneers research was completed in the 1920s, and predicted 4-5 generational (100 years) decline in fertility and mental health. While people argue we’re no longer near our traditional ways and certainly not cats (though mammals?), non-species specific dietary changes are indeed being seen in the forms of infertility and mental health are indeed 100years later in humans (right now)!
Dr Francis Pottenger was a medical doctor in California who conducted nutritional/feeding experiments with 900 cats over a 10 yr period during the 1930s. He was studying the effects of removing the adrenals glands in cats for his tuberculosis research and crazily enough found they could survive without this gland! He fed them a diet of cooked meat, raw milk and cod liver oil. As his study grew in popularity, people in the community began donating more wild cats and with increasing need, Pottenger approached the local butcher for raw meat scraps. And as research often goes, he saw how much more the cats thrived on the raw meat, their species-specific diet. He then went on to feed groups increasingly processed milk and put all his study conclude the generational declines in fertility, male docility and general social dysfunction already spoken about.
I’m very much aware that we are not cats and maybe a lot of this study does not cross species lines, but this book is still worth reading for the following reasons:
To Understand the awesome effect that nutrition bears on our whole system including behavior, asthma, allergies, and even reproductive ability.
To See that processing food does drastically alter nutritional value and that the differences will not show up on a government “Nutrition Facts” panel. ie. raw milk looks the same as pasteurized milk on the Nutrition Facts but is demonstrated by this study to be fundamentally different in its ability to support and sustain life and health. (read Nutrition Facts and the Bikini Atoll for more on this subject)
To Realize that the longer a demographic group continues poor nutrition the more pronounced the effects in the rising generation. This one startled me the most. Undeniably, the poor nutrition of one generation was effecting the genetic information which they were passing on to the next generation.
I found this and Weston Price (https://www.fitbynature.org/blog/book-review-nutrition-and-physical-degeneration) research fascinating and yes we’re not traditional peoples anymore and most certainly not cats but the outcomes of the studies and modern health cannot be chance!
So what can we do if we’re not cats and can’t get back to our traditional roots? We’re genetically (STILL!) wired to eat simple unprocessed foods and to expend a fair amount of energy in that process.
Eat what grows near you, even grow it yourself, and know your butcher (if not farmer).
Walk, run, lift, carry, dance!!
(Focus on the the foundations. The body has a profound ability to heal itself when you provide it with the right building blocks.)
