Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation

Price was a dentist from Cleveland, Ohio, whose 1939 book, Nutritional and Physical Degeneration,[3] describes the fieldwork he did in the 1920s and 1930s among various world cultures, with the original goal of recording and studying the dental health and development of pre-industrial populations.[3]

Pottenger was a doctor whose 1932-1942 Pottenger Cat Study addressed the nutritive value of heat-labile elements — nutrients destroyed by heat and available only in raw foods. He used donated laboratory cats to test the potency of the adrenal extract hormones he was making. The adrenal glands of these cats were removed for the experiments, usually resulted their death. But Pottenger noted that most of the cats died during or following the operation. He was feeding the cats a supposedly nutritive diet consisting of raw milk, cod liver oil and cooked meat scraps of liver, tripe, sweetbread, brains, heart and muscle. When the number of donated cats exceeded the supply of food available, Pottenger began ordering raw meat scraps from a local meat packing plant, including organs, meat, and bone; and fed a separate group of cats from this supply. Within months this separate group appeared in better health than the cooked meat group. Pottenger conducted subsequent studies involving approximately 900 cats over a period of ten years, with three generations of cats studied. His experiments showed that cats were healthiest after being fed raw meat and raw dairy.

Marion Patricia ("Pat") Connolly was the curator for PPNF. She studied health and nutrition for over 66 years and lectured on a variety of nutritional subjects. According to the PPNF, she was the foremost authority on the work of Price and Pottenger. In 1962 she took a course on nutrition by Alfreda Rooke, then Curator of PPNF, who had studied under Price. In 1972, she became a PPNF Nutrition Instructor, teaching Rooke's course. She wrote several books, including Dietotherapy (The Kelley Research Foundation), Mini Guide To Living Foods, The Guide to Living Foods (PPNF), Food Alive (Livingston-Wheeler Medical Clinic), A Modern Approach to the Primitive Diet (Nero), and The Candida-Albicans Yeast-Free Cookbook (McGraw Hill). She was also listed as a co-author of the first edition of Nourishing Traditions. She died in November 2010. [4]

In 1994 George E. Meinig published Root Canal Cover-up Exposed which resurrected Price's old studies.[5] Regarding the book, Hasselgren in New York Academy of Dentistry's Annals of dentistry stated "[t]he focal infection theory, supported by many including Dr. Price, has been attacked, debated, accepted, criticized, agreed upon, etc. but it has not been covered up." Hasselgren noted that Meinig would sometime confuse the meanings of "infection" and "inflammation" and based all his work on Price's 1923 Dental Infections, Oral and Systemic book.[6] Hasselgrenalso observed: "the work of Dr. Weston Price is therefore still to a great extent valid and important and the role of infection can not be underestimated."[6] Meinig died in May 2008 at the age of 93.