Books like Pottenger's Cats: A Study In Nutrition

Even though these studies began in the '30s and the book was published in the '40s, this book is an important read for my family. My dad actually gave each of us this book for Christmas a few years back. We are susceptible to arthritis, which my dad *lovingly* refers to as "Arthur." "Arthur's hurting me again today," he would say with a crooked smile. My grandfather (on my dad's side) also died of heart disease, a disease of affluence. My dad's mom also had debilitating arthritis. What this book says about nutrition is that it is important to eat well not only for yourself, but for future generations that you could be affecting.Pottenger didn't start out experimenting on cats. He actually was a great physician working in Monrovia, CA, treating tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. He needed cats for his treatments, and he got donated laboratory cats to extract adrenal cortex for his patients' treatments. But he began to notice certain characteristics happening in these cats. He decided to explore these observations further with a study.The cats in this study were placed into 5 different groups and given different diets according to group. Each group was then observed, and not just for those cats' lives, but for their offspring's lives and so on. All the groups were given carnivorous diets typical for cats, high in meat. However, the degree to which food had been cooked and processed varied. (This book is probably the precursor to a lot of those "RAW DIETS" we read about these days.)Cats eating the diet with the raw meat were healthier (and more likely to survive the adrenal cortex removal process). Their offspring was healthy and had a low mortality rate. Good stuff. Pottenger concluded that there was probably an enzyme or protein that he hadn't yet identified that was "heat-sensitive" and destroyed in the cooking process, that was vital to proper cat nutrition. It was an amino acid - Taurine - that had recently been discovered, but not yet linked to the raw meat that these cats were eating.What happened to the cats in the other four groups was not so pretty. Previously healthy cats began to develop certain diseases and disorders and became lazy. Their offspring was sickly, and tended to develop the same disorders, but earlier on in their lives. Third generation cats did even worse. The males became very docile, and the females were unusually aggressive. Bones became more brittle and more easily broken. Some of the groups were unable to produce a fourth generation, with sterilation being a prominent problem. Some of the cats showed homosexual tendencies and were disinterested in mating for procreation.The reason this rings true in my life is that my grandmother, my dad's mother, didn't eat the best of diets (often her lunch consisted of a ding-dong and a coke) also got badly crippling rhematoid arthritis around the age of 40. My dad also did not eat healthily, and was crippled much earlier in life, at the age of 19. He was becoming bed-ridden. He developed bad allergies to milk and wheat. He now must eat healthily everyday and lift weights to stay functional. He still has a lot of pain throughout his body, but it beats being bed-ridden. My dad wants to save us, his kids, from his pain and struggle, and we ate healthy diets growing up, rich in leafy greens and stuff from our garden in the back yard, low in refined carbohydrates like white flour, white sugar, white rice, cereal from a box, etc. We've been pretty healthy, but unfortunately, we don't eat quite as healthily as he does since we've gone off to college and gotten married and the like. My sister has begun to develop arthritis in her elbows and knees and my brother has rhematoid pains now, but they made it to about 30 before the pain really started (a slight improvement from my dad's age of 19). They are also still very functional. My brother is an avid mountain-biker and my sister works out at a gym. Lately I have begun to notice more pain in my hands, nothing yet that requires pain relievers, but it makes me aware that if I don't eat better, the pain will be worse and more crippling.Anyway, we have an uphill battle to fight because of the dietary choices of my grandmother and father early on. We have to be more aware of what we eat, both for our own health and our children's health.