Latest / Common Sense Health / The Pottenger's Cats Experiment: What They Didn't Tell You
Transcript
- Stephen Thomas BSc. Hons: Hello You know, we've all been there. You're minding your own business and you're having a perfectly normal day when you wander into the wellness corner of the internet and suddenly discover that everything you've ever eaten or drunk or touched or microwave or looked at or just emotionally bonded with is apparently killing you. And it's usually someone with a suspiciously glowing skin and a ring light telling you that your morning oats are basically a bowl of slow release doom or Unless your drinking water has been filtered through volcanic crystals and blessed by a hill Himalayan yak farmer and served in a handbeaten golden chalice, your cells are vaporating at the wrong frequency. Well, every now and then the internet dusts off an old piece of scientific proof to validate whatever nutritional crusade is currently trending. Which brings me neatly to Dr. Francis Possinger and his tragic multi-generational army of 900 cats. Yeah. If you spend long enough in the raw food or anti pasteurization corners of the internet, and I don't necessarily recommend making a weekend of that, you will eventually run into Pottinger's cat. And the story goes like this, you know, back in the nineteen thirties, Dr. Pottinger fed one group of cats raw milk and raw meat, and another group cooked meat and pasteurized milk. Now the cats eating the cooked food are apparently became weaker and sicker and more deformed with each generation, and by the third generation they were a physical disaster. And by the fourth they supposedly couldn't even reproduce properly, and that line just effectively died out. Now it's at this point the Internet Wellness Priesthood leaps from behind a Himalayan salt lamp, clutching a raw ribeye and declares, Aha, proof. Cooking destroys the vital life force of food. If you eat a grilled burger, your great grandchildren will be born with poor posture and weak morals and possibly whiskers. So that's the brilliant story. It does have drama, it has that generational decline, it has cats, the internet loves cats. It has just enough science shaped language to sound impressive if you don't look too closely. But it is also a masterclass in taking completely Completely the wrong lesson from a study while committing one of the great sins of nutritional interpretation, assuming that you, a human being, are basically just a large hairless house cat with access to an air fryer. So I just want to slow down and ask a very unfashionable question. You know, what did Pottinger actually discover? Because he didn't prove that cooking food is some sort of ancestral curse, he accidentally discovered taurine deficiency. Cats are obligate carnivores. They are biologically speaking, tiny murder machines designed to eat raw prey in the dark and then sit on your chest about five o'clock in the morning. Because cats evolved eating raw animals, their bodies never develop much ability to manufacture an essential amino acid called taurine. I will talk about that later actually because it's not really an amino acid. They have to get taurine cats directly from meat. And here's the important bit taurine is not. is sensitive to heat and to water loss. So when meat is cooked, taurine can degrade and crucially it can be lost in the juices. So if you cook meat and then throw away the juices, you may remove a significant amount of taurine that a cat desperately needs. And that is exactly where Pottinger's experiment appears to have gone wrong. He fed cats cooked meat scraps without adding the cooking juices back in. So without realizing it, he placed these animals on a long term deficiency diet For one specific nutrient that cats cannot do without. And the symptoms his cats developed blindness, heart problems, reproductive failure, poor development, and they all line up remarkably well with what we now know happens when cats don't get enough taurine. You know, modern pet food companies know this perfectly well, and that's why processed cat food has taurine added back into it. Not because the kibble has a sacred life force or because a corporate wizard waved a wand over it, but because cats need taurine, and manufacturers know that they have to include it. So if Pottinger had simply poured the pan juices back over the cooked meat, those fourth generation cats may well have been absolutely fine, probably just lounging across the sofa, ignoring their names and knocking glasses off tables. Now, this is where the whole argument does take a spectacular leap. Because even if Pottinger's cats did badly on cooked meat, the obvious question is, well, what does that tell us about humans? And the honest answer is much less than some people would like. And this is the grand canyon of logical fallacies. Taking a cat study and using it as definitive proof for human nutrition, cats are not small people in fur coats. They are different digestive systems, they have different metabolic requirements. Different nutritional dependencies and very different evolutionary histories. You know, a cat is designed to process a raw animal of a prey very quickly. Its digestive tract is short and fast, built to move raw meat through before bacteria has time to set up a nightclub. Now humans are different. Humans can exist as omnivores, and many people appear to do extremely well on a carnivore or even a ketogenic diet. But whichever way humans eat. We are not metabolically identical to cats, and unlike cats, we can make taurine ourselves. So just as an aside, technically taurine is not a standard amino acid in the same way say leucine or glycine or lysine is. It's it's more accurately described as an amino sulfonic acid, essentially an amino acid like compound, but it contains sulfur. Humans can synthesize taurine mainly from sulfur containing amino acids. Such as cysteine, with methionine also playing an important role because it can feed into cysteine production through the transulfation pathway. Anyway, we don't need to pounce on a raw pigeon in the garden to maintain a hell a functioning heart. Our biochemistry has those options. Cats, sadly, have fewer options. Although they do have that emotional resilience to stare at a closed door for forty minutes and then refuse to go through it once you've opened it for And then there's the rather inconvenient issue of cooking itself. Now, cooking is not some modern mistake that began when people stopped listening to their ancestors and started buying saucepans. Cooking is one of the things that helped make us human. Evolutionary biologists generally generally agree that cooking gave our ancestors a huge advantage because it breaks down tough fibers, makes food easier to chew and digest, it neutralizes some of those nasty plant toxins. And it increases our access to the nutrients. And that matters because growing and maintaining this huge, large human brain is metabolically expensive. In other words, without cooking, we may not have had the brain power to write or read an angry online piece about why cooking is natural, which is beautifully ironic if nothing else. Now, does this mean all cooking methods are equal? No. Does it mean food quality doesn't matter? Of course not. Does it mean humans and cats have identical nutritional needs? Absolutely not. Unless your weekly routine includes hiding under the bed and chasing a laser pointer and judging everyone from your windowsill. I mean the real lesson from Pottinger's cats is not that cooked food is toxic. The real lesson is that species matters. Nutrients matter, context matters, and if you remove an essential nutrient from an animal's diet for several generations, things tend to go rather badly. That's not quite as exciting as cooking destroys your food. But it does have the advantage of being closer to reality. And this is a recurring problem in nutrition science. We see a headline saying something like Ingredient X causes memory loss in mice, and immediately half the internet empties its spice rack into the bin. Then when you actually look at the study, the mice were injected with the equivalent of a human consuming forty pounds of the ingredient per day, While suspended upside down with fluorescent lighting in a lab environment that would would give anyone some trust issues. So animal studies they can be useful. They can point researchers in a direction, they can raise interesting questions, they can help us understand mechanisms, but they are the beginning of a scientific conversation, not the final word. And they are definitely not a license to take a ninety-year-old cat study, misunderstand the mechanism. Ignore the species difference and then tell everyone that grilled chicken is a threat to your bloodline. So the next time someone waves pottinger's cats at you as proof that cooked meat will make your grandchildren resemble Victorian gargoyles, just take a breath. And remember the taurine, remember the pan juices, remember that modern cat food has taurine added back in for a reason. And most importantly, remember that you are not a cat. Unless of course you are currently knocking a pin off the desk while watching this, in which case I apologize for the misunderstanding and I fully respect your dietary choices. Now, in a future video, I'm going to dig into another famous study that has been lifted out of context, polished into internet folklore, and used to support claims the original research never really proved. Because if there's one thing the nutritional world loves more than a good study, it's a badly interpreted one wearing a lab coat. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, don't forget to like, share and subscribe. Subscribing is free. And if you think you're subscribed, I wouldn't mind if you could just quickly check that you're still subscribed. That would be really helpful. And if you don't want to miss a video, hit the notification bell and YouTube will annoy you probably two to three times a week about the fact that I've just released another video. If you're listening on Substack, I do thank you for your support as well. I'm not AI. I definitely am a real person. Look. I can wave my hands out on the video, and if you watch me there, you'll see that I leave all the mistakes in. I do this in one take. Therefore, hmm, it has mistakes. I don't think AI is that clever yet to mess up some of the sentences. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it. And if I did make you smile, that's also another good thing. Hopefully you've learnt one thing about the poting's cat study and you can take that forward with you. Anyway, thanks very much for listening. I'll be back.