Pottenger’s cats were given a diet of raw milk, cod liver, and either raw or cooked meat. The cooked meat cats showed generations of abnormalities that, left alone, killed off the cat breeding after three generations and took four generations of a proper diet to heal in the cat offspring.
3 While it is true that subsequent replication studies suggest a taurine deficiency more than cooking as the cause of the symptoms shown by Pottenger’s cats, which included heart disease, bad vision, lack of balance, and wild variations in birth weight, there is some link between our diet and the symptoms we feel.
4
Pottenger’s cats apply to the monkey study in this way: the standard captive monkey diet already has a lot of fat, heart disease and other ailments built in. Making a 30 percent cut in this non-whole foods diet will help because a lot of sugar is being cut out and every little bit helps. More research is obviously needed to see if monkeys and humans would benefit as much from calorie reduction when they go on a diet of more whole foods than not, or if these primate studies just tell us to cut the sugar, excess carbohydrates, preservatives, and other time bombs in our diet to achieve the same effect.
Another minor issue in applying the monkey study to our diet is the distressing fact that portion sizes in human meals keep
increasing. Some food items, like chocolate chip cookies, increased 700 percent between 1982 and 2002.
5 We need to find out which year to use in setting an appropriate base meal size, because while any reduction from a high-calorie diet is an improvement, it represents a false hope if the underlying average meal size continues to grow.
However, while there are holes left to fill concerning sugar and carbohydrates, the first bit of research on overeating and longevity is in. Eating a little less without depriving yourself of nutrients will go a long way to extending your life and making you healthier. But there are no magic pills for your health, says Dr. David Finkelstein of the National Institute of Aging, a funding source for the Wisconsin study.
“Watch what you eat, keep your mind active, exercise and don’t get hit by a car,” Finkelstein says.
1 Coleman, RJ, Et. Al. “Caloric Restriction Delays Disease Onset and Mortality in Rhesus Monkeys” Science 325;(5937): 201-204
2 Tannous, dit El Khoury D. et. al. “Variations in Postprandial Ghrelin Status Following Ingestion of High-Carbohydrate, High-Fat and High-Protein Meals in Males.” Annals of
