Dr. Pottenger’s work highlights how our farming methods and dietary choices today can affect our future
In the 1930s and ’40s, a medical doctor named Frances M. Pottenger, Jr., conducted a 10-year series of experiments, today known collectively as the Pottenger cat studies, with important implications for our modern diets. His findings are broadly known and respected in contemporary nutrition circles, but their relevance to human dietary needs is sometimes misinterpreted. Fortunately, he left behind a comprehensive body of work that documents his research in detail and explains his conclusions.
While working at the Pottenger Sanatorium — a world-renowned tuberculosis center in Monrovia, California, founded by his physician father, Francis M. Pottenger, Sr., and two uncles — the young Dr. Pottenger took on the task of standardizing adrenal extracts that would be used to treat the center’s patients. Because there were no chemical methods for standardizing biological extracts at that time, he calibrated their potency by adrenalectomizing cats (removing their adrenal glands) and then determining the amount of extract necessary to keep the cats alive.
He was surprised to find that many of the cats did not survive the operation, despite his efforts to maintain them in the best possible health beforehand by providing foods that were believed to meet all their dietary needs. Pottenger fed the cats raw milk, cod liver oil, and scraps of cooked meat from the sanitorium’s kitchen, including liver, tripe, sweetbreads, brains, heart and muscle. While investigating why so many of them were dying in surgery, he noticed that the cats showed various deficiencies, such as low reproductive rates, and skeletal deformities and organ malfunctions in the kittens.
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