Francis Pottenger

Pottenger divided his cats into groups fed different diets. Those given completely raw food, including raw milk and raw meat, had absolutely no diseases across all generations studied. Those fed cooked foods developed diseases. Those fed processed cooked foods developed all the severe and chronic diseases that humans experience, and the worse the degree of processing, the worse the diseases became.

Aajonus described the progression across generations of cats fed cooked and processed diets: by the fourth generation, they were completely sterile and could no longer produce offspring. By the fifth generation, there were such epidemics of disease that they were dying young. The cats on raw food, by contrast, showed none of this. No diseases, no reproductive failure, no early death.

He connected this directly to observable human trends, pointing to rising rates of impotence and infertility as exactly the fourth-generation trajectory Pottinger documented. "So many people are becoming impotent," he said. "It's outrageous. And the Howell rats and the Pottinger cats went through the same thing. By the fourth generation, they couldn't reproduce."

The most practically significant conclusion Aajonus drew from Pottenger's work was the timeline required for recovery. When Pottenger took diseased cats and placed them on a fully raw diet, it took five generations of cats to return to optimal health. Aajonus translated that five-generation feline recovery into a 40-year human timeline.

He stated this with consistent specificity: "According to Pottenger's work, it takes 40 years to get a body from ill health to optimal." The way Pottenger derived this, according to Aajonus, was through the five-generation recovery arc of cats placed on good raw diets after being bred on cooked or processed food. Five generations of cellular renewal in the human body, Aajonus calculated, takes approximately 40 years from the day a person begins eating a properly constituted raw food diet.

Aajonus applied this to himself directly. He made a complete commitment to raw foods in February of 1972 and described still getting better every year, noting that someone who had seen him a year and a half prior commented that he looked better, which he took as confirmation that the 40-year process was still operating. He framed this not as a discouragement but as a reason to understand that healing is continuous and generational in its depth.

Aajonus frequently discussed Pottenger alongside Edward Howell, who conducted parallel experiments with rats. Because rats live only three years rather than the much longer lifespan of cats, Howell chose them specifically to get faster experimental results. Howell found that the rats fed raw food had no diseases whatsoever. The rats fed cooked foods got diseases.

There was one notable difference between the two bodies of research that Aajonus pointed out repeatedly. In Pottenger's cat experiments, the cats fed cooked food lived a third less of their normal lifespan than those fed raw food. They died younger. In Howell's rat experiments, the rats fed cooked food and the rats fed raw food all lived the same total age of three years. The difference was not in lifespan but in disease: the cooked-food rats got diseases, the raw-food rats did not, but both groups lived to three years.

Aajonus described this as "unusual" because it diverged from what Pottenger found with cats. He presented both findings without resolving the discrepancy, simply noting that in the rat experiments the lifespan was equal while disease burden was not, whereas in the cat experiments both lifespan and disease burden diverged based on diet.

Both researchers, in Aajonus's reading, confirmed the same core finding: raw food produced no disease across all generations studied, and cooked and processed food produced disease that became more severe as processing increased.

One of Aajonus's key uses of Pottenger's work was to explain why chronic disease had become so prevalent and so severe across the twentieth century. He argued that the current human population was not experiencing the first-generation consequences of poor diet but rather the accumulated multi-generational consequences of diets that had been progressively more cooked and more industrially processed since at least the mid-nineteenth century.

He drew a direct parallel to the black plague, arguing that city-dwellers who cooked in lead pots, breathed heavy metal vapors from smiths on every block, and ate progressively more degraded food accumulated enough toxicity across several generations that catastrophic disease became inevitable. The farmers who grew their own food and did not live in metal-vapor-saturated cities did not get the black plague. He used this as a Pottenger-scale demonstration in human history: "You ask them, they say, well, how is that possible? You look at the work of Pottinger, who took 900 cats over a 10-year period and fed them different diets. The ones he fed on processed food like evaporated powdered milk, mixing them with water. They got all the diseases that humans get."

He saw the post-World War II canned food boom as an acceleration of that generational process. The wide adoption of canned, processed, and preserved foods, combined with the earlier shift to cooked diets, had placed much of the American population on a trajectory Pottenger had already mapped in his cat colonies. The children of parents who ate canned foods were, in Aajonus's view, already into the second or third generational descent described by Pottenger.

Aajonus emphasized that Pottenger's experiments covered a spectrum of dietary degradation, not simply a binary of raw versus cooked. At one end were the fully raw cats with no disease. Moving along the spectrum, there were cats fed various types of cooked food who had diseases of humans. At the far end were cats fed the most processed foods, specifically condensed powdered milk and canned milk products, who had "all the severe and chronic diseases that man had." The more processed the food, the more acute and chronic the disease became.

This gradient was central to Aajonus's framing of modern illness. He did not argue merely that cooking was harmful; he argued that the degree of processing compounded the harm, and that the industrialized food supply, which had moved from home cooking toward factory-processed products over the twentieth century, had placed populations at the worst end of Pottenger's spectrum.

Aajonus placed Pottenger alongside Weston Price as researchers who had documented the health consequences of diet among both human populations and laboratory animals. Price, a dentist, studied traditional populations across the world and documented the absence of dental caries, skeletal deformity, and chronic disease among people eating traditional diets including raw animal foods. Pottenger worked with laboratory animals to establish the same principles under controlled conditions.

Aajonus also noted that Pottenger applied his findings clinically to patients with tuberculosis and other chronic diseases, with documented results. Despite initial acceptance by the medical profession, his work was subsequently ignored. Aajonus attributed this pattern to commercial interests in industrialized food manufacturing, noting that at least one industry researcher told him that a team working from approximately 1926 to 1937 or 1938 had been tasked with proving that cooking and processing made food healthier and safer, and that all their tests proved the opposite, after which the test results were destroyed because "they had billions of dollars invested in manufacturing food."

Aajonus applied the 40-year timeline not as a counsel of despair but as an explanation for why people on the Primal Diet continued to improve for decades rather than reaching a plateau. He described his own experience of continuous improvement year over year, and framed individual healing crises, discomforts, and slow progress as expected features of a 40-year arc rather than signs of failure.

He also used the five-generation recovery arc from Pottenger's cats to explain why it was so important to start the diet as early as possible, both for oneself and for one's children, because each generation that ate well would be one generation closer to the full recovery of optimal health that Pottenger's experiments had mapped.

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