We have two house cats; one is fat and one is skinny. They
were both born to feral moms about 5 years ago, one behind a pizza parlor and
the other in a backyard. A non-profit trapped the moms as part of their TNR
(Trap/Neuter/Return) program. The moms were spayed, treated and released. The
offspring were also trapped or rounded up. We fostered the last one from each
litter and eventually adopted both.
The backyard cat is a big, lanky, lean male. His pizza-parlor
“sister” is smaller boned and very fat. They both eat the same food:
supermarket “Fancy Feast” in 3oz (70kcal) cans, twice a day, plus Purina “Complete
Cat Chow”, ad libitum.
Both house cats seem to like both foods equally. They clean
their dishes and put a big dent in the chow bowl daily. They also snack at an
outdoor station where we feed our own small feral colony. That’s how we
originally got involved with the local TNR non-profit. A litter of 4 adolescent
ferals walked into our backyard about
15 years ago. They were adolescents – way too old to socialize – so we fed and
eventually trapped and TNR’d them all.
The food we give the ferals is the same Cat Chow (32% pro;
13% fat; 42% carbs), plus 2-13.5oz cans of Purina’s “Friskies.” The analysis of
these 366kcal cans is again 11% protein, but 2.5% fat, and 27% carbs (dry
matter basis). The ferals (and our house cats) also like these offerings
equally, scarfing both down twice a day. Both the house cats and the ferals
“know” each other and frequently eat side by side at the outdoor feeding station.
(As an aside, one of the ferals occasionally comes into the
house, through a door left open in warm weather, and crosses to the kitchen to
eat at the house cats’ station. But never, in the 15 years that we have
faithfully fed them all, have any
of the ferals ever allowed either of us to touch any of them, or even get close.)
All the ferals are lean. So why, given the way they are fed,
is one of our house cats, and all the ferals, lean and the other house cat fat?
They both have access to all 3 types of food. Both have good appetites, and
both have equal opportunities for exercise. Both run around the house and yard,
frequently chasing each other or birds or butterflies. The big, lean male, is
less active – more of a couch potato, but the fat female is completely
undeterred by her girth.
If this were simply a comparison between two carnivores – our
house cats – eating a high carbohydrate diet, one could hypothesize that the
“pizza baby’s” genetic makeup was epigenetically “expressed” when she was
exposed to the high-carb Fancy Feast and Friskies diet. Or, that the “pizza baby’s” mother,
or her mother, developed those
“expressed” genes (remember: she survived by living behind the pizza parlor)
and passed them on to her offspring.
Her offspring (our “fat” cat and her
siblings) were thus born predisposed and are therefore likely to get fat on a
high-carb diet. And our lean house cat – the “backyard baby” – was
perhaps the product of a feral mom who hunted mice and voles (as our feral
colony did before we starting feeding them twice daily) and had a different set
of genes or similar genes that had not
been epigenetically expressed by what she
and they ate. She therefore produced a large, well-shaped, lean male
kitten. For further reading, see Dr. Cate Shanahan’s book, “Deep Nutrition.”
Restating the question: Why didn’t the young ferals who
wandered into our backyard 15 years ago get fat on our nutritionally poor diet?
Is it because they were offspring of a carnivorous mom who ate animal protein
and fat and had not had her genes “expressed”? Is that
why her offspring aren’t fat cats like our “pizza baby”?
We’ll never know. Our house cant and
our ferals will never reproduce. But how about you and your
offspring? We’re said to be omnivores,
but I would say that humans, while not obligate carnivores, are perhaps
facultative carnivores, a species that “does best on a carnivorous diet, but can
survive-but-not-thrive on a non-carnivorous one.”
This has
been amply demonstrated, I think, by the effects that the high carbohydrate diet that we’ve been eating since the dawn of the
Neolithic Age, made much worse recently by the highly processed industrial
foods and processed oils that we now eat.
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