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How do obligate carnivores not have nutrient deficiencies?

Biology Asked by Chickenpeep on July 17, 2021

I know that if a human eats just meat without plants, they develop issues like scurvy. If my understanding of it is correct that there are nutrients not found in meat, then how do obligate carnivores not suffer from certain nutrient deficiencies?

2 Answers

To add to Bryans answer there are a few other issues.

mainly pickiness and brains.

Human can handle an all animal diet surprisingly well, look at the modern Mongolian nomad diet, which is exclusively animal based. One problem we see in modern humans in industrialized nations is they often avoid eating organ meats, eating only muscle tissue "meat" can easily lead to a nutrient deficiencies. Ask yourself when is the last time you sat down to a liver or kidney dinner. many vitamins are almost exclusively found in organ meats and not muscle tissue. So many times when people from first world countries end up on an all meat diet they end up with deficiencies because they are not eating the vitamin rich portions of the animal.

The other problem is humans have very big brains, and brains can't burn fat. They can only burn carbohydrates or protein. you may already see the problem, animal tissue is rather poor in carbohydrates. But, you say, they have lots of protein, which is true, but humans along with many animals do not metabolize proteins well, doing so on a large scale leads to ketone and other toxic byproducts. Human brains demand so many calories that they burn thorough what little carbohydrates animal tissue have, very quickly forcing ketosis. So humans must burn far more protein than most other animals on a all animal diet even when lipids are available because carbohydrates are lacking.

Carnivores also have adaptations to better deal with ketones, they still produce a lot of ketones but have better methods for managing them, mostly better ways to excrete them. Most apes only eat small amounts of meat and rarely lack carbohydrates in their diet, have not needed this adaptation. This is true for most of human history and the exceptions are very noticeable. The Mongolians I mentioned earlier also eat a lot of milk and cheese which contain a decent amount of carbohydrates.

Correct answer by John on July 17, 2021

Humans are pretty unusual in their inability to synthesize vitamin C (in humans, scurvy is caused not just by a lack of dietary vitamin C but the important factor that we can't simply make our own).

Wikipedia lists just a few mammals as examples of those unable to synthesize vitamin C: simians, tarsiers, capybara, and guinea pig. None are obligate carnivores.

Humans, like the others on this list, have a gene for the L-gulonolactone oxidase necessary in the synthesis pathway for vitamin C, but it's non functional. It seems that either losing function of this gene provided some evolutionary benefit (without a cost if diet was a sufficient source at the time), or it simply didn't provide any benefit and so there was insufficient selective pressure for it to remain functional.

Answered by Bryan Krause on July 17, 2021

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