Years ago, in the 1930s, a scientist and doctor by the name of Francis Pottenger initiated a series of now famous feeding experiments with cats that spanned more than ten years and several feline generations. His findings transformed many people's view of the role that diet plays in health and reproduction.
Certain groups of these cats were fed quality, fresh, un-denatured food and others were fed varying degrees of denatured and processed food, then the effects were observed over several generations. The results from the inferior diets were not so startling for the first generation animals, but markedly and progressively so in subsequent generations. From the second generation on, the cats that were fed processed and denatured diets showed increasing levels of structural deformities, birth defects, stress-driven behaviors, vulnerability to illness, allergies, reduced learning ability, and finally, major reproductive problems. When Pottenger attempted to reverse the effects in the genetically weakened and vulnerable later-generation animals with greatly improved diet, he found it took fully four generations for the cats to return to normal.
The reflections that Pottenger's work casts on the health issues and dietary habits of modern-day society are glaring and inescapable.
The time has come for us to decide just what level of health we choose to have for our children and ourselves. The choice is truly ours. A true state of health cannot be achieved by simply managing a disease process with either supplements or pharmaceuticals. Supplements can, at least, help, but by definition, they are supplements to a more fundamentally essential and healthy approach to diet. Also, we must somehow compensate for what we are being bombarded with from all sides.
Overwhelming modern-day circumstances have essentially eliminated our margin for error. The time for innocent indulgence has passed. We can no longer exercise the hubris of pretending we can get away with eating whatever we want, even "in moderation," and somehow avoid the unforgiving consequences simply because we are in denial of them. The consequences of ignorance, for many, will be beyond help. We are too many unhealthy generations of "Pottenger's cats" into the Industrial Revolution and the ravages of a deteriorating food supply, and we are too genetically compromised by all this to indulge in a dietary approach dictated merely by one's superficial tastes (e.g. comfort of junk food) or wishful ideals (e.g. vegetarianism and veganism. Many people no longer have the same resilience of even a generation ago.
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I personally submit that we are now living in a world and in a time where there is no longer any room for error with respect to what we must do to maintain our health and survival. Pottenger's work has shown us that progressive generations with poor dietary habits result in increasingly more vulnerable progeny and that each subsequent generation with unhealthy dietary habits results in impaired resistance to disease, increasingly poor health and vitality, impaired mental and cognitive health, and impaired capacity to reproduce. It is all part of what we are seeing in our epidemic levels of poor health and the overwhelming rates of autism, violence, attentional disorders, childhood (and adult) behavioral problems, mental illness, fertility issues, and birth defects.
We are a few generations of Pottenger's cats, as humans, past the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and the ever-tightening tendrils of the unscrupulous, greed-driven food industry it spawned. We, as a species, have never been more vulnerable. Today, the effects of the increasingly widespread consumption of processed and fast foods are glaringly, if not disturbingly, clear. Add this to an increasingly contaminated environment, nightmarishly dangerous and spreading GMOs, a proft-based (rather than results based) and broken health care system, and a broken economy on a global scale, along with progressively inferior and deteriorating food and water supplies, and the implications are virtually, if not wholly, cataclysmic.
The odds are clearly stacked against us.
