I wish I had read Pottenger's Cat's: A Study In Nutrition (Francis M. Pottenger, Jr., M.D.), but as it is I finally got around to reading it while we were in Italy. I was familiar with his work from his association with Weston A. Price. This book is a short but thorough summarization of his nutritional studies with cats as well as those with humans and the dietary recommendations for people. It is just 123 pages, so even a busy mama can read it - if you can get your hands on it. It is available from the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation (who keep it as well as Price's Nutrition and Physical Degeneration in print) or from amazon.com where you can view part of the book online.
Frances Pottenger was a medical doctor who ran a sanitorium. He used cats to standardize adrenal extracts after removing their adrenal glands. He found that his cats who were on a diet of cooked meat scraps, raw milk, and cod liver oil were poor operative risks, but that a second group of cats who ate a diet of raw meat scraps, raw milk, and cod liver oil were much more robust.
This lead to his nutritional studies where he observed the effects of diets including cooked and raw meat, cooked and raw milk, and cod liver oil over several generations of cats. He looked at their ability to produce uniform healthy offspring over multiple generations, their bone structure, their teeth and gum health, and their bone health and the amounts of phosphorous in their bones. He also used the composted manure from their pens to grow beans.
He obseved the raw meat/raw milk cats were robust generation after generation while cats consuming cooked foods showed poorer health with each successive generation. The cooked food cats also had higher rates of reproductive problems, parasites, respiratory problems, allergies, and had poorer dispostions. He concluded that there were certainl heat labile substances in the raw foods that increased their nutritive potential. His bean experiment results were more ambiguous, and it would certainly be very interesting for a more careful and complete study of this kind were undertaken today.
The book also details some of his nutrition analyses of humans as well as his research on the facial development of people who were breastfed or bottlefed.
His studies are as fascinating as Weston Price's, and their work seems to have drifted into the same place of relative oblivion. While their findings are not complete nor their methods considered rigorous by today's scientific standards, I think that these are very important issues that deserve further study. As we lead increasingly modernized lifestyles complete with ultra-pasteurized milk and other heat processed foods, we are likely causing ourselves many of the ills that are extremely common - infertility, allergies, and poor tooth and jaw structure (you know, the need for braces and fillings - it's not genetic!).
I have been affected with all of these maladies. I'm a third generation cat, if you will, and I have a lot of nutritional healing to do for myself and for the future generations of my family. We drink raw goat milk and try to eat raw meats - sashimi, rare steaks and medium rare burgers. We still have a lot to stive for if I am to be a "regenerating cat," a mama who was on a deficient (cooked) diet but who has been put on a raw diet.
The specific nutritional advice at the end of the book seems inconsistent with itself and with Pottenger's findings. There are some raw recipes but also lots of cooked ones that include items that the book (not sure if this part was from Pottenger or from the editors) recommends against (such as ham).
I hope that you will take the time to read this one. It really is one of those books that changed my life. It relieved some of the guilt I felt over Owen's dental health while energizing me to further improve our diet because my children and grandchildren really are counting on me.
3 comments:
I like the Japanese emphasis on raw foods and "blanching" vegetables- cutting them into small sizes and cooking them for as short a time as possible.
However, I am a huge fan of legumes and pulses and will continue to enjoy my lentils cooked in bone broth, hummus, refried beans, and black-eyed peas.
I also note that most medical studies at the moment strongly advocate reducing saturated fat intake (is it the heat treatment of it- I don't know) and a mostly vegetable and legume based diet.
I don't think this is AT ALL applicable to children and pregnant women and BF women. It's funny how they always leave these vulnerable people out of "healthy" eating articles in popular literature and parenting mags... arrrgghhh.
Thanks for the cool posts! Carolyn
Hey Carolyn,
Yes, the Japanese diet is one of the best - proven by its long-lived healthy population. It is remarkably rich in raw foods, sea foods, and fermented foods. They are a great example of a culture that seems to have retained a lot of traditional wisdom (at least nutritional) while *advancing* into the ultra modern age. Interestingly, an online friend of mine reports that before the introduction of white rice, the Japanese were much taller, and many Japanese warriors were in the range of 7 feet tall. I am interested in looking into this further, and if I find a good reference for this, I will certainly pass it on.
Studies abound, and everybody's got a slant. Not all saturated fats are created equal (as you well know). When studies equate hydrogenated oils which have become almost unavoidable if you do not prepare all your food at home with traditional saturated fats such as lard, tallow, or butter, the can easily suggest that we shouldn't eat any sat. fats. People often recoil in revulsion when they find out we use lard for cooking, but the truth is many of them have probably never eaten real lard - rendered from a pig. It's so darned hard to find here, I doubt most people under the age of 80 in the US (born before the Depression, war, and onslaught of industrial foods including hydrogenated fats like Crisco and margerine) have eaten any appreciable quantities of lard. A similar concern goes for eating meat. It's no surprise people would get sick eating meat from factory farmed animals eating inappropriate grain-based diets. To my knowledge there has been essentially no rigorous scientific study of people eating traditional diets. Weston Price spent many years and lots of his own money looking for a healthy population eating a plant based diet, but again and again, the healthy people he visited were eating diets rich in fat soluble vitamins whether from shellfish and fish, milk, cow blood, or some other source, to get what they needed, they were eating diets based on animal foods. No one makes much money telling people to eat more homegrown and fresh-caught animal foods, and I think that is a big reason that his work has not been pursued by later researchers. It's difficult to fund research that doesn't promise to make someone some money.
Most of the dicta from the nutritional powers that be do seem to be a one-diet adjusted for all. Pregnant women need more calories, but not different nutrient profiles - so they say, and children need the same (grain-based) diet scaled down to their size.
Also, we eat plenty of cooked foods. I'm not an advocate of an all raw diet for humans. I think some things are actually more digestible cooked than raw. Pottenger noted that neighborhood cats who were fed a cooked diet but were free to roam and supplement their diets with wild catches of the day maintained the same healthy features he observed in his raw food cats. So, yes, we still eat lots of broth (Pottenger even recommended additional gelatin to aid in digestion) as well as beans (rich in Mg and B vits), as well as other cooked foods. The big lesson I took away from PC was to aim for more raw foods - especially animal foods.
The Japanese are fascinating... apart from eating toxic dolphins. I think that their wisdom has remained intact because it is a traditionally patriarchal society where women are encouraged to stay at home and learn/practice domestic skills. I would like to know what sort of cultural mores keep women both in the home and happy in the home. Is it the closeness to kin and family on small densely populated islands, pride in traditions rather than having them usurped by the food pyramid, a tight job market, a "monocultural population" opposed to outside influences (I remember reading Shogun), a genuine appreciation for preparing and eating food slowly?? Tracy might know, having visited Japan.
Yes, please pass on any info on white rice (do you use brown in sushi?). Also, any new fermented food recipes would be great, especially if you have perfected suaerkraut or kimchi. Carolyn.
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