Pottengers' Cats: A Study in Nutrition

While the study on cats is depressing (as a cat lover) I found it eye opening. It is more heart breaking because this is exactly what we have done to ourselves. We are literally starving our bodies and are falling apart. As our bodies fall apart, the medical community continues to label new diseases...so much so that a new set of diagnosis codes has to be created just to handle them and the ones they know will come in the future. As a doctor, I have seen people improve just by improving what they put in their mouths. Changing our diets to more whole foods...REAL food...makes a BIG difference! If you want to see what we are doing to ourselves and our children, this is the perfect place to start reading. Then...do something about it!

The good doctor's cats lived longer and healthier on raw milk and a natural cat diet. The cats fed pasturized milk and processed cat food had faulty exo-skeletons and bone structure, lived shorter lives and failed to reproduce after the 4rd generation. Enough said. Be warned... Eat food the way our ancestors ate it, or as close to it's natural state as possible.

Pottenger's nutrition studies of cats clearly indicate the importance of quality nutrition. They also help understand why people in our society have such problems with poor health, given the poor quality food that they consume. The book is relatively easily understandable, as long as you don't put extensive effort into trying to understand the content of the tables of data.

This book was an easy read for anyone interesdted in nutrition and a good overview of the famous pottenger studies. It provides basic guidelines and good foundation information. the further reading recommendations are helpful and interesting. I recommend this book to anyone starting out in nutrition or for those of us that are continuing to tweek our practices.

Pottenger's Cats is a classic in the science of nutrition. Dr. Pottenger discovered quite by accident that cats degenerated unless they were fed raw food. In his 10-year study of 900 cats, he found the optimal diet for his cats was 2/3 raw meat and 1/3 raw milk plus a little cod liver oil. If either the meat or the milk was cooked, the cats degenerated. And if both were cooked, the degeneration was much worse, and the cats could no longer reproduce by the third generation. Some of the problems Pottenger found in the cats fed cooked food were: heart problems; nearsightedness and farsightedness; underactivity and inflammation of the thyroid; infections of the kidney, liver, testes, ovaries and bladder; arthritis and inflammation of the joints; inflammation of the nervous system with paralysis and meningitis. And in the third generation, some of the cats' bones became as soft as rubber. Lung problems, and bronchitis and pneumonia were also frequent. Moreover, the females became irritable and even dangerous, and the males became passive and lacked sex interest.Do many of these conditions sound familiar? Pottenger, of course, realized that his cat studies didn't apply entirely to humans. He believed nonetheless that his findings for cats did have relevance for humans, and in his sanitarium he fed his patients much raw food, with considerable success. Weston A. Price reported in his book, "Nourishing Traditions" that all of the people's he studied worldwide included much raw food in their traditional diets and were almost entirely free of the degenerative diseases that are rampant in our junk food society, such as tooth decay, heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, digestive disturbances,etc.If you want to stay healthy, you owe it to yourself to read both Pottenger and Price. Their eye opening photographs alone will make clear to you that you need optimum nutrition if you want to be optimally healthy.