How Bad Are Processed Foods, Really?
This 1930s experiment showed exactly why we should all be worried...
Have you ever considered what will actually happen to us humans in the next hundred years or so, if we keep eating the processed foods we are eating so much of today?
It’s a curious question, and likely not the primary one on your mind whenever you find yourself wolfing down one too many of the sweet stuff (yet again).
Given how ubiquitous these foods are, you might assume their effects can’t be that horrible.
Today, we’ll find out exactly how bad processed foods really are, what continuing to eat them could lead to, and what you can do to protect yourself.
It turns out, we’ve had the answers for a long time…
Pottenger’s cats
In the 1930s- and 40s, the American physician Dr. Francis M. Pottenger Jr. conducted a revelatory experiment on cats.
Yes, cats.
Why? Because cats have a much shorter lifespan than humans.
Pottenger wanted to study the health effects of processed food consumption over time, which is both difficult and unethical to do in humans. So, cats were considered a useful substitute.
I don’t know whether this was more ethical or not (if I were a cat, I’d be pretty offended). But for better or worse, it allowed Pottenger to study exactly how processed foods affect the health of a species over generations.
To perform his now famous experiment, Dr. Pottenger selected a number of cats that represented the average, in his words, “run of the pen” cat.
The cats were grouped and each group was given a diet of increasingly processed food. He then tracked their development over four generations.
One arm of the experiment got processed (cooked) meat. The other arm got processed milk products – from pasteurized milk all the way to evaporated or sweetened and condensed milk.
The “control” cats ate a basic natural diet of raw meat, viscera, bones, cod liver oil, and raw milk. All other cats received 1/3 of their total dietary intake from the same basic natural diet, and the other 2/3 was the experimental part of the diet.
What happened over the following four cat generations is as instructive as it is alarming.
The cats eating an all-natural diet displayed shiny fur, good coordination, fully developed robust bodies, high fertility, and normal sexual interest across all four generations. No degradation in sight.
The processed food cats, on the other hand, showed signs of degradation already in the first generation; lethargy, dental deterioration, impaired balance, nervous behavior, arthritis, etc. These signs increased in proportion to the level of processing in the diet.
Disturbing as this is, the real horror story unfolds when looking at the degeneration across generations.
The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generation processed food cats displayed extreme degeneration such as multiple skeletal fractures at birth, underdeveloped skull and jaws, cross-gender physical attributes, infertility, and a lack of sexual interest.
The punchline? After the 3rd generation, the processed food cats were no longer able to reproduce. Had they continued to live in this environment, they would have gone extinct.
What this means for humans
The scientific explanation for at least some of these results turns out to be simple: the cooked meat caused a deficiency of the heat-labile protein taurine, something that Pottenger himself predicted, even though taurine specifically was yet to be discovered at that time.
In modern commercial cat food, this problem is “fixed” by adding taurine after it’s cooked.
Some will embrace this type of solution as a convenient excuse to keep eating processed foods. It’s fine they say; let’s just use more technology and processing to fix whatever problems are created by more technology and processing…
Some might also dismiss the experiment entirely because cats are not humans. This is true. But it would be incredibly naive to think that we are somehow immune to the effects of a processed diet.
A hundred years ago, Dr. Weston A. Price famously observed that the same generational degradation caused by diet and lifestyle shown in the cat experiment also occurs in humans.
Besides, cats have a similar digestive system to us. And a 2007 study found that 90 percent of the genes in domestic cats are shared by humans.
I would also argue that the processed diet in the experiment was actually more similar to the animal’s natural diet than the typical fare of modern humans is to the diet of our ancestors. I mean, how many people today consume at least 1/3 of their intake in the form of grass-fed nose-to-tail animal foods, wild-caught seafood, and locally produced, whole plant foods?
The fake meats, the seed oils, the pasteurization, the ultra-processing, and the general decrease in nutrients and quality – combined with all other novel aspects of the modern environment – amount to nothing less than the exact same experiment performed en masse on us humans right now.
(If I were a human, I’d be pretty offended).
In this human experiment, there are countless factors involved, which means that a simple problem-solution strategy like taurine deficiency → add taurine post-cooking is unlikely to fix our problems (isn’t this in essence what we’ve been trying and failing at for the last several decades?).
Something that struck me in Pottenger’s experiment was the nervous behavior displayed by the processed food cats. It seems to mirror the increasing rates of mental and cognitive issues like ADD, anxiety, and depression our society is battling. And yet, most people don’t even consider that these problems could have something to do with our diet…
In fact, virtually all of the health problems displayed in the cats are on the rise among us humans today.
The prevalence of arthritis and other inflammatory conditions is higher than ever.
Underdeveloped jaws and the resulting breathing problems are a hidden pandemic.
Cross-gender attributes are also becoming more common. For example, the average levels of testosterone in men have been declining by about 1% per year for the last 50 years.
We are also seeing a general decrease in interest in reproduction, and reproductive problems becoming more and more common in the last 30 years.
Perhaps the strongest indication is that people are experiencing these problems early in life. Cancer in people under 55. Obese and diabetic children.
We used to explain away many of these problems by old age. But how do we explain them in our kids?
Are we seriously going to blame it on genetics alone… or could it be that we have entered into the 2nd and 3rd generation of degradation caused by our diet?
All of this is not to say that correlation means causation, of course. But this is one of those rare cases where, if we open our eyes, it’s pretty damn obvious what’s going on…
What to do about it
The good news: these problems can be reversed once you go back to a species-appropriate diet.
After replacing the cats’ cooked diet with a raw one, Pottenger reported that “minor health problems did persist even into the third generation” and that it took four generations for the cats to regain all features of health.
Considering how resilient the human body is, it’s not unreasonable to assume that over generations, we too could reverse most of the damages caused by our modern diet.
And there are still many among us who aren’t too far gone (even though, if our ancestors had traveled in time, they would likely wonder what the hell we’ve been up to…).
It’s easy to just say, “stop eating processed foods”. And hopefully, Pottenger’s findings are scary enough for some people to go cold turkey.
But realistically, not everyone will cut out processed foods completely.
If that sounds like you, there are some concrete, simple things you can do that will have the biggest impact on your health.
Look to diet first
We have embraced a one-pill solution philosophy, where we happily take whatever the pharma industry spins up as the one true solution to our problems.
This is perhaps especially true in mental and cognitive conditions like “ADD” as well as depression and anxiety.
If you or anyone you know is experiencing any of these issues, I’d recommend turning every stone in the diet- and lifestyle department before going on any of the drugs so many people are now chomping down like candy.
Similar to the cats, it’s likely that these problems are at least partly caused by a processed diet.
Avoid the main offenders
Our culture has a tendency to make any issue contentious and complicated.
Healthy eating is no exception.
There is a lot of virtue signaling, environmental alarmism leading to the vegan vs. carnivore wars, and of course, the latest diet du jour that some celebrity is touting… “I drink my pee every morning and that’s why I look this beautiful – never mind my many plastic surgeries”.
If you cut through this noise, the truth is much simpler.
The biggest offenders in the modern diet are likely:
Seed oils
Ultra-processed grains
Refined, white sugar
If you can find and stick to a pattern of eating that doesn’t include these; whether that’s paleo, carnivore, vegetarian, some kind of fasting, or whatever else, you will be doing better than most.
A simple rule of thumb: if a “food” has a list of ingredients, it likely contains one or more of the main offenders.
What foods don’t have a list of ingredients?
Meat. Eggs. Vegetables. Fruits.
There are other problems with the modern food system, of course. But you can worry about those later.
“Cheat” with real foods
The world is upside down. We eat so poorly that anyone who tries to protect their health is considered to be on a diet.
Because of this, even for (perhaps especially for) health-conscious people, it’s common to have occasional “cheat meals” or even “cheat days”.
Unfortunately, this often means filling up on staggering amounts of the main offenders.
Trust me, I’ve been there, and done that… and done it again.
Sidenote: I think Tim Ferriss is actually a big culprit here, popularizing the concept of “cheat days” to sell more copies of The 4-hour Body. Don’t get me wrong, I love Tim, but I think he severely screwed up on that one.
If this sounds familiar, one of the biggest leaps you can make in your diet is to cheat with real foods. You can make many treats with whole, healthy ingredients. In fact, once you wake up from the matrix of big-dollar food marketing, you’ll increasingly find how much sexier and more delicious it is with simple, high-quality foods than those “triple frappuccino caramel ice cream cake pizza burgers” or whatever else they came up with.
talks about the "decadent diet" which is similar to what I subscribe to. Especially once you understand that things like bread and dairy don’t have to be unhealthy (if they are made in the right way) – the notion of "cheating" at all becomes more and more distant.Summary
While we all know that processed foods are bad, most of us are oblivious to the level of threat the popular foods of today truly present to our health.
Pottenger offered us a cautionary tale and a possible future for humanity. Even if cats are different from us, we should assume that the very same things are happening to us. By all accounts, it seems like this is exactly what’s going on.
The damages can be reversed, but that requires us to change our culture around food significantly. This does not seem to be anywhere in sight for the vast majority, but there is still hope for you as an individual.
To make sure you are not a statistic, here are some simple things you can do:
Look to diet & lifestyle first
Avoid the main offenders
“Cheat” with real foods