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including sprouted beans, fresh raw carrots and cabbage, and raw whole milk, along with whole wheat flatbread and a bit of meat and bones once a week. He also providedthe rats with good air, sunlight, and clean living quarters. At the close of the experiment, when the rats had reached an age equivalent to about 55 years in human terms, he sacrificed and autopsied them thoroughly for signs of disease. To his amazement he could find none. The only deaths that had occurred among those rats were from accidents.
    Later, Dr. McCarrison fed two other diets to groups of rats—one that was typical of poor people from England and the other typical of poor people in parts of India. Rats who lived on the poor Indian diet of rice had disease in every organ they possessed! Those who lived on the boiled, sweetened, and canned foods commonly eaten by the English poor grew so high-strung that they ate each other, the weaker rats succumbing first.
    T HE P OTTENGER C AT S TUDIES
    One of the most fascinating sources of information about the importance of raw foods has come from what is now known as the Pottenger Cat Studies. Dr. Pottenger did not set out to study cat nutrition, but he became intrigued by differences in the health of cats he was using in experimental studies. Turning his attention to this topic, he did a series of nutritional comparisons. For several generations, one group of cats was fed completely raw food (meat, bones, milk, and cod liver oil). Other groups of cats were fed the same foods either partially or completely cooked. What he found is of definite importance to anyone who wants to raise a truly healthy pet:
     
Cats on the entirely raw food diet were completely healthy, never needing veterinary attention.
The more the food was cooked, the less healthy were the cats that ate it.
The health problems evident in the experimental cats on the cooked diet were remarkably like those commonly seen in cats today—mouth and gum problems, bladder inflammation, skin disorders, and the like.
Over a period of three generations, the cats on the cooked food diet continued to deteriorate until they could no longer reproduce.
When the cats were put back on a raw food diet, it took three generations for the animals to totally recover from the effects of the cooked diet.
    Why is this? Foods are so complex that there is still much we don’t understand about them. Researchers have discovered, for example, that cats require a dietary source of taurine, an amino acid that many mammals, including humans, can make in their own bodies from the food protein they eat. Cats cannot do this and so must obtain it, already made by other animals, in their food. Taurine, found only in animal tissues, is largely destroyed by cooking. One study found that an average of 52 percent of the taurine in raw meats was lost through baking and an average of 79 percent through boiling. As a resultof processing, many commercial cat foods once had low levels of taurine. Now it is added to cat foods and supplements. (When meat is fed raw as we recommend, by the way, calculations show that our recipes for cats contain taurine in amounts comparable to that found in the wild diet.)
    In caring for our own cats, my wife and I came to the conclusion that we would rather not wait for more discoveries. Instead, we would rather be cautious, choosing to feed our cats a diet that most closely resembles that of their evolutionary history.
    THE ADDITIVES IN YOUR PET’S FOOD
    Since graduating from veterinary school in 1965, I’ve noticed a general and steady deterioration in pet health. We are now seeing very young animals with the same kinds of diseases that we used to see only in older animals. It is clear to me that there is an accumulation of poor health being passed on from generation to generation; this accumulation increases with each step. Without the perspective of several decades, veterinarians just coming out of veterinary school think that these degenerative