raw meat, one-third raw milk, and cod-liver oil while the second group was fed a diet of two-thirds cooked meat, one-third raw milk, and cod-liver oil. In 1946, Pottenger reported his results that the cats fed the raw diet were healthy while the cats fed the cooked meat diet developed various health problems. Pottenger reported that the cats which were fed cooked meat and pasteurized milk suffered from impaired growth, increased birth defects and lowered fertility. He stated that their deterioration included "germ plasm injury" causing them to pass acquired anatomical defects to their offspring. However, the idea of acquired characteristics has been discredited. In 1985, Pottenger's results were criticized for "lacking scientific validity". William T. Jarvis and Edward Kravitz commented that Pottenger's study was "overloaded with subjective observations and generalizations that render it unscientific. His overall inference that cooking meat made it unhealthful for cats is contradicted by the fact that all commercial cat foods are cooked." At the time of Pottenger's studies the amino acid taurine had been discovered but had not yet been identified as an essential amino acid for cats. Today many cats thrive on a cooked meat diet where taurine has been added after cooking. The deficient diets lacked sufficient taurine to allow the cats to properly form protein structures and resulted in the health effects observed. Pottenger himself concluded that there was likely an "as yet unidentified, heat‐labile protein factor". In 2014, Robert Davidson wrote that the "deficiencies Pottenger identified in cats correspond with those of a taurine deficiency and are the direct result of the lack of taurine in the feline diet". The ethics of Pottenger's studies have been questioned. Selected publications The effect of heat-processed foods and metabolized vitamin D milk on the dentofacial structures of experimental animals, 1946 Fundamentals of Chemistry in the Laboratory, 1976 Pottenger's Cats: A Study in Nutrition, 1983 See also Hal Huggins Melvin E. Page References External links Collected Professional Papers Lesson of the Pottenger's Cats experiment: cats are not humans (a review of raw foodist claims on Pottenger's cats experiment) Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation 1901 births 1967 deaths 20th-century American non-fiction writers 20th-century American physicians American medical researchers American pulmonologists Otterbein University alumni People from Monrovia, California Pseudoscientific diet advocates Raw foodists University of Cincinnati College of Medicine alumni