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the globe, Pottenger engaged in parallel research and became known for his research on more than 900 cats, which he conducted between 1932 and 1942.
    Pottenger compared the effects of two diets on cats. Cats that were fed diets of raw milk and raw meat had shiny, petable fur, sound bones, and good teeth, and were parasite free, healthy, fertile, and loveable. The catsthat were fed cooked meat and pasteurized milk gave birth to weak, puny kittens. These cats were riddled with fleas, ticks, intestinal parasites, skin diseases, and allergies. The females were she-devils, the males meek and cringing. They had terrible bone structure, and in fact, Pottenger observed the same types of facial and dental degeneration in his cats that Price found in his civilized native people. 145
    Pottenger maintained, like Price, that where there is smoke there is fire. In other words, terrible bone structure and messed-up teeth indicate poor nutrition, just as sound bone structure and pearly whites indicate healthy nutrition. (This is not to say that, in this book, we’re headed toward gnawing on raw meat, but only to point out that both Price’s and Pottenger’s research demonstrate that nutrient-dead foods—i.e., civilized diets—produce poor health, while untampered-with, real, living food produces robust health.) However, because of the prior rejection of nutrition as standard of care, neither Price’s nor Pottenger’s research made a lasting impression on the medical community. On the contrary, events unfolded within the American population that spurred the medical community in the opposite direction, so that dairy and meat would be vilified and factory fats that were made in laboratories would be glorified as health-giving.
    From 1900 to the end of World War II, the rise in myocardial infarction brought the medical community together in an attempt to figure out the cause. Atherosclerosis is the stiffening of the coronary arteries combined with plaque, which is a coating on the artery walls. In some people with advanced atherosclerosis, arterial plaque becomes so thick and protruding that it blocks off the blood and accompanying oxygen supply to the heart, thus causing radiating discomfort called angina. If blood and oxygen flow to part of the heart is completely blocked, the part of the heart that is affected will die. This condition is known as myocardial infarction or a heart attack.
    Today 2,500 Americans die of cardiovascular disease every day, an average of one death every thirty-four seconds. 146 Each year ten million Americans are disabled by cardiovascular diseases, including heart disease,stroke, and disorders of the circulatory system. Children now suffer from heart disease, a degenerative condition formerly related to aging.
    Prior to 1900, when Americans ate butter, cheese, whole milk, red meat, beef and lamb tallow, chicken fat, and lard, heart disease caused only 9 percent of all deaths. Today heart disease causes 30.3 percent of deaths. The first reported incidence of myocardial infarction didn’t occur until 1926. By then Americans’ diets were changing rapidly, with factory foods infiltrating our food chain. But our medical community didn’t use research like Price’s and Pottenger’s to determine ways to get Americans eating real foods again. Instead, they fixated on cholesterol as the culprit in the rise of heart disease and discouraged the consumption of historically eaten animal fats.
    In 1953, when biochemist Ancel Keys, Ph.D., argued that heart attacks could be prevented by avoiding cholesterol-laden foods, the scientific community was primed to embrace this message. 147 Scientists had already observed that the incidence of heart disease was low in occupied Europe after World War II at a time when Europeans were eating less cholesterol (meat, dairy, eggs). Ignored was the fact that sugar, flour, alcohol, cigarettes, and gas were scarce after the war and so people were eating less sugar and refined white