ANCESTRAL EATING: Pottenger's Cats

In the 1940s, Francis Pottenger conducted some very interesting experiments involving cats and raw food

Some of Francis Pottenger’s famous cats

Welcome back to another instalment of ANCESTRAL EATING. Today we’re considering dairy again, with a look at pioneering California doctor Francis Pottenger and his experiments with cats and their diets.

In the last instalment on dairy, we looked at how the development of dairying on the Pontic-Caspian steppe at the beginning of the Bronze Age was the catalyst for perhaps the most important mass migration in human history: the spread of the Indo-Europeans from one end of Eurasia to the other.

Of course, the dairy the Indo-Europeans were eating was raw, but if you believed the scare stories about raw dairy, you’d be liable to believe they’d have spent the whole time curled over with upset stomachs and diarrhea. But far from it, instead of spending all day on their Bronze Age privies, they went on a crazy dairy-fuelled tear that changed the course of history. If that isn’t a testament to the power of a diet heavy in raw dairy, I don’t know what is.

Frances Pottenger can also tell us, in a rather more scientific manner, a thing or two about the superior nutrition of raw dairy. So let’s get stuck in and see what the man was all about.

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If you’ve gone down the raw-food or ancestral-eating rabbit hole, you’ve probably heard of Frances Pottenger and his experiments on cats. I love cats—in fact, like St Francis, I love pretty much all critters—so I don’t particularly like reading about experiments on them, but as far as animal experimentation goes these were maybe not so bad. Maybe. In any case, they were done a long time ago and there’s not much that can be done about that.

Pottenger’s experiments produced extremely interesting results about the nutritional value of raw vs cooked foods, including raw dairy. The results have been endlessly debated—and of course “discredited,” mainly by representatives of the dairy industry—so let’s take a look at what he did and what he claimed to have found.

First, Pottenger himself. Pottenger qualified as a doctor in 1930, at the University of Cincinatti College of Medicine, before working at the Monrovia Sanitorium for a decade. In 1940, he purchased some of the Sanitorium’s accommodation and founded his own hospital, which he called the Francis M. Pottenger Jr. Hospital. The hospital treated non-tubercular diseases of the lungs, with a particular focus on asthma. Pottenger was famous for insisting that his patients be served large quantities of liver, butter, cream and eggs. Sounds like my kind of place. From 1945, he was also Assistant Clinical Professor of Experimental Medicine at the University of Southern California.

Pottenger published widely, putting his name to some 50 articles in the fields of medicine, disease and nutrition.

He was instrumental in recognising the negative effects of pollution on health, and worked closely with the Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District’s Scientific Committee on Air Pollution. He also served as the medical service chief for his local Civil Defense Area after the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor. Pottenger coordinated the erection of the first portable hospital in Los Angeles, under simulated disaster conditions.

It’s safe to say, first of all, that Pottenger was no crank. He was a highly respected, decorated and well-liked physician who worked hard to improve the lives of his patients and the general public for decades. I hate having to say stuff like this, but the terms of the debate about raw foods are such that every opportunity to impugn a man’s motives, credentials and even sanity is taken once he starts talking about foregoing pasteurisation.

Here’s a recent case in point from Politico, which wants the world to believe being an advocate for raw milk also makes you a dangerous right-wing Q-Anon MAGA extremist.

Moving swiftly on, let’s talk about the experiments that made Pottenger famous: the cat studies. These began in the 1930s, but the results were not published until 1946, in a dental journal.

The full reference is, Pottenger, F.M. (1946). The Effect of Heat, processed foods and metabolized vitamin D milk on the dentofacial structures of experimental animals. Oral Surgery, 32 (8), pp.467-85. You can access the article here.

Pottenger’s experiments with cats initially began when he used ex-lab cats to test adrenal extracts he was preparing. The cats had their adrenaline glands removed and were fed the preparations to see what effect they had. Pottenger noticed that many of the cats died following the surgery. They were being fed on cooked-meat scraps from the sanitorium, raw milk and cod-liver oil. As the number of cats donated increased, Pottenger began looking elsewhere to get food for them, and ended up securing a good supply of raw meat. One group of the cats was now fed a totally raw diet. This is when Pottenger noticed something curious. The cats fed the raw food diet recovered from the surgeries, were in better health and produced healthy kittens, unlike the cats fed the mixed raw and cooked diet.

Just what was going on?