Name Francis Pottenger, Role Physician | Died 1967 | |
Books Pottenger's Cats: A Study in Nutrition | ||
Francis M. Pottenger Jr. (1901–1967) was the son of Francis M. Pottenger Sr., the physician who co-founded the Pottenger Sanatorium for treatment of tuberculosis in Monrovia, California.
Contents
He completed his residency at Los Angeles County Hospital in 1930 and became a full-time assistant at the Sanatorium. From 1932 to 1942, he also conducted what became known as the Pottenger Cat Study.
In 1940, he bought some of the cottages from the Monrovia sanatorium and founded the Francis M Pottenger Jr. Hospital. Until closing in 1960, the 42-bed hospital specialized in treating non-tubercular diseases of the lung, especially asthma.
Work
One particular question that Pottenger addressed in his study had to do with the nutritive value of heat-labile elements – nutrients destroyed by heat and available only in raw foods.
He applied the principles of nutrition and endocrinology early in his practice. Dr. Pottenger was a pioneer in using crude extracts of adrenal cortex as supplements to treat allergic states and exhaustion. In his treatment of respiratory diseases such as TB, asthma, allergies and emphysema, he always highlighted proper diet based on the principles discovered by Weston Price. At his hospital, he served liberal amounts of liver, butter, cream and eggs to convalescing patients.
Pottenger's cats
Pottenger used donated laboratory cats to test the potency of the adrenal extract hormones he was making. The adrenal glands of these cats were removed for the experiments. He was feeding the cats a supposedly nutritive diet consisting of raw milk, cod liver oil and cooked meat scraps of liver, tripe, sweetbread, brains, heart and muscle. When the number of donated cats exceeded the supply of food available, Pottenger began ordering raw meat scraps from a local meat packing plant, including organs, meat, and bone; and fed a separate group of cats from this supply. Within months this separate group appeared in better health than the cooked meat group. Their kittens were more energetic and, most interestingly, their post-operative death rate was lower. At a certain point, he decided to begin a controlled scientific study. Pottenger conducted studies involving approximately 900 cats over a period of ten years, with three generations of cats being studied.
Meat study
In one study, one group of cats was fed a diet of two-thirds raw meat, one-third raw milk, and 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.
At the time of Pottenger's Study the 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 another study, dubbed the "Milk 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. 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.