ends up with a very narrow face, a jaw bone far too small to hold all the teeth, and in women, a small oven that may have trouble baking babies.  More importantly, those nutrient reserves earmarked especially for making babies are also deficient.  So a deficient mother not only shows certain structural evidence of physiological degeneration, but she makes deficient babies.  A deficient female baby at birth is unlikely to completely overcome her bad start before she herself has children.

So with females, the quality of a whole lifetime’s nutrition, and the life-nutrition of her mother (and of her mother’s mother as well) has a great deal to do with the outcome of a pregnancy.  The sins of the mother can really be visited unto the third and fourth generation.

This reality was powerfully demonstrated in the 1920s by a medical doctor, Francis Pottenger.  He was not gifted with a good bedside manner.  Rather than struggling with an unsuccessful clinical practice, Dr. Pottenger decided to make his living running a medical testing laboratory in Pasadena, California.  Dr. Pottenger earned his daily bread performing a rather simple task, assaying the potency of adrenal hormone extracts.  At that time, adrenaline, a useful drug to temporarily rescue people close to death, was extracted from the adrenal glands of animals.  However, the potency of these crude extracts varied greatly.  Being a very powerful drug, it was essential to measure exactly how strong your extract was so its dosage could be controlled.

Quantitative organic chemistry was rather crude in those days.  Instead of assaying in a test tube, Dr. Pottenger kept several big cages full of cats that he had adrenalectomized.  Without their own adrenals, the cats could not live more than a short time By finding out how much extract was required to keep the cats from failing, he could measure the strength of the particular batch.

Dr. Pottenger’s cats were economically valuable so he made every effort to keep them healthy, something that proved to be disappointingly difficult.  He kept his cats clean, in airy, bright quarters, fed them to the very best of his ability on pasteurized whole milk, slaughterhouse meat and organs (cats in the wild eat organ meats first and there are valuable vitamins and other substances in organ meats that don’t exist in muscle tissue).  The meat was carefully cooked to eliminate any parasites, and the diet was supplemented with cod liver oil.  However, try as he might, Pottenger’s cats were sickly, lived short and had to be frequently replaced.  Usually they bred poorly and died young of bacterial infections, there being no antibiotics in the 1920s.  I imagine Dr. Pottenger was constantly visiting the animal shelter and perhaps even paid quarters out the back door to a steady stream of young boys who brought him cats in burlap sacks from who knows where, no questions asked.