Most people go to their vet for the best advice on kitty care, or any animal care.

But can you be sure that they are giving you good, sound, unbiased advice based on solid research?

The first few months of 2009 have seen media reports of Harvard medical students protesting that their professors have strong and lucrative ties to pharmaceutical companies. This compromises the integrity of teachers and cannot exclude them from biased teaching.

If the most famous and prestigious medical school in the world’s largest democracy has this problem, imagine what it must be like in lesser-known medical and veterinary schools.

Add the lucrative commercial pet food industry to the mix and you may want to consider whether your veterinarian, who may be the best person in the world, has had the best training. Or perhaps you have received a very biased and limited training: limited to ensuring the flourishing profits of already very profitable companies.

You can’t blame the universities that are always short of money. Governments cannot be blamed as they are always under pressure to offer cheaper courses. It’s probably best not to blame anyone.

But it’s worth knowing what’s going on.

Perhaps now you can appreciate why so many veterinarians strongly promote commercial pet foods. Its reception rooms are packed from floor to ceiling.

But stop and ask yourself if this really is the path to optimal kitten care. Or is it more for optimal profit in the commercial pet food industry? Or optimal veterinary care, with all the resulting unhealthy cats?

I want to introduce you to Dr. Francis Pottenger. He was a research scientist and conducted nutritional tests on cats between 1932 and 1942. He found that cats fed only a cooked diet, albeit “perfectly balanced,” showed a marked reduction in their immune responses. This reduced immune response was passed on to the next generation.

The additional feeding of cooked food further reduced the immune response. And so the cycle continued.

For the third generation, diseases such as heart damage, hepatitis, feline urological syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, leukemia, tumors, arthritis and a host of other immunodeficiency diseases were presented.

Dr. Pottenger went on to discover that the immune response could be enhanced simply by giving them a raw food diet. But it took another three generations for the immune system to return to a truly optimal level of efficiency, commonly found in feral cats.

If you’re still confused, and I can’t blame you if you are, here’s a tip to use when looking for the best kitty care.

Fashions come and go. What ‘science’ discovers this year will change next year as fashion changes, inaccuracies are discovered and more information comes to light.

On the other hand, nature has perfected itself over millennia. Cats have evolved on their raw diet and have thrived. Man and his petty ideas have not and never will alter a cat’s digestive system. How can it when you look at all the time nature has had to fine-tune it?

Putting good nutrition in the care of kittens into practice is not without problems. There are some pros and cons that you must adhere to. What:

• what meat can be overfed with disastrous results
• what ingredient, often omitted, MUST be present is a kitten’s healthy diet
• What additional supplements should you add to the diet?

Once you understand the concept and get into the routine, natural kitty care is easy. It will also determine that most cats do not hunt as adults. Domestic cats that hunt are typically trying to make up for the lack of nutrients in their diet, rather than doing what comes naturally to them.

Feed your cat as nature intended and the rewards will be endless.