The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [224]
“Proper vegans also tend to spend more time learning about where their food comes from. In other words, they make it a point to understand which foods come from which regions of the world, which foods are in season during certain times of the year, and which methods are best for raising the healthiest food.
“Not only is this environmentally friendly and quite healthy, it’s also pretty cool stuff to know.”
When Francis M. Pottenger Jr. was a newly graduated California doctor in 1932, he spent 10 years studying cats. Nine hundred cats over three generations, to be precise. Pottenger’s experiments are often cited by raw-food enthusiasts as evidence of the superiority of raw food.
Experiment #1: Raw Meat vs. Cooked Meat. Pottenger fed one group of cats a diet of two-thirds raw meat, one-third raw milk, and cod liver oil. He fed the second group two-thirds cooked meat, one-third raw milk, and cod liver oil. The cats fed raw meat were, by all measures, normal and healthy. The cats fed cooked meat produced kittens that had skeletal deformities, heart problems, vision problems, multiple infections, irritability, allergies, difficult births, and even paralysis. Rut-roh!
Experiment #2: Raw Milk vs. Cooked Milk. This time Pottenger had four groups of cats. The first group got two-thirds raw milk, one-third raw meat, and cod liver oil. The other three groups got either two-thirds pasteurized milk, two-thirds evaporated milk, or two-thirds sweetened condensed milk in place of the raw milk. He saw the same pattern of happy, healthy cats on raw milk, and all manner of abnormal development in the other groups, getting worse as the milk was more processed.
Based on these experiments, Pottenger concluded that “the elements in raw food which activate and support growth and development in the young appear easily altered and destroyed by heat processing.” He went on to extrapolate that humans suffer from the same nutritional deficiencies that are causing more developmental problems with each generation: “canning, packaging, pasteurizing, and homogenizing—all contribute to hereditary breakdown.”
Hmmm. This sounds like a compelling, fear-inducing argument. But here’s what Pottenger didn’t know when he said this: cats need taurine.
Taurine is a component of bile acid that cats can’t synthesize on their own, but humans can. It helps with digestion and is a supplement in commercial cat food. If cats are taurine-deficient, they show vision problems, heart problems, and developmental problems. Sound familiar? Guess what else? Taurine is deactivated by heat. So Pottenger’s cooked meat/milk diets would have been taurine-deficient.
Another factor to consider: cats are carnivores, humans are omnivores. It’s like comparing apples to oranges, as we have different nutritional requirements. A better animal model for humans would be mice, or rats, or primates. Without even calling into question how well controlled Pottenger’s study was, it doesn’t make good scientific sense to transfer what he learned about cats directly to humans.
But back to the crux of the debate: Should humans eat raw food or cooked food? It all depends. Here are some examples, each supported in the scientific literature:
By all means, go ahead and eat raw food if you like, or be vegan, or go gluten-free, or eat a few cats (I suggest fajitas). Just make sure you do your homework. Don’t confuse ideology with good science. Take an honest look at the available research (applicable to humans) so that you can make a well-informed decision.
It’s your body, after all.
Darwin’s Rule—Eat for Fertility
So if vegetarianism can be done, why am I not a vegetarian in the usual sense?
To paint a one-sided picture of the benefits would be irresponsible, so allow me to explain the reasons:
1. I have been unable to find a single indigenous population that has thrived on a 100% PPBD, even after asking my 100,000+ Twitter followers to help me find one. Low animal