Humans have to maintain well balanced diets or they can develop vitamin deficiencies of certain vitamins and minerals, why does this not seem to be true for animals ?
In: Biology
Many animals synthesize vitamins that they need, just like humans synthesize Vitamin D using sunlight.
Animals can totally have vitamin deficiencies, but that tends to be when certain foods are scarce. Overall though, wild animals are naturally adapted to eating the things they do.
So many things available to humans are unnatural and mass produced; containing a lot of sugar and sodium, which are addicting. This causes people to gravitate more toward eating that kind of stuff, so they miss out of some of the nutrients they really need from things that don’t taste as good or are “gross”, but otherwise would have been in a balanced, nutritional diet.
Everything evolves and adapts to its environment. Many animals evolved around what sort of food was available to them, which is how you can get something like a Koala that just eats leaves and plants, whereas Cats, which are carnivores, need to eat meat to get their nutrients. Humans are omnivores, which means we tend to need meat *and* plant products to get all the nutrients we need.
Animals for the most part still kind of operate on a survival level. Their natural diets provide the basics so that they don’t starve or lack any critical vitamins, but they aren’t really the peak of health. Animals in captivity tend to live far longer, healthier lives that their wild counterparts for this reason.
Humans, especially in the modern world, strive for optimal diets. Most vitamin deficiencies aren’t that extreme, and would just cause uncomfortable symptoms in the wild. In our cushy, controlled lives free from everything else that would bother us, we live longer, healthier lives, but need a wider variety of vitamins and nutrients to perform at 100% comfort at all time.
Humans (and guinea pigs) have a genetic mutation where we can’t produce vitamin C… so we must get it from our diet. Most other animals can produce it on their own.
There are two ways to get vitamins: by eating them and by synthesizing them. Synthesizing vitamins takes resources that could be used elsewhere, so evolution tends to make it so that only those that aren’t in your natural diet are synthesized.
Humans are omnivores, and relatively extreme omnivores at that- we’ll eat a lot of things (such as onions, garlic, grapes…) that are outright poison to other animals. So our body has slacked off on the synthesizing factor. The one we tend to notice the most is Vitamin C, the deficiency of which became a Problem once we stopped eating so much organ meat and became a Big Problem once the Age of Sail hit and we couldn’t bring fresh fruits on long journeys.
Contrast cats, who as obligate carnivores. They synthesize their own vitamin C. They do NOT synthesize their own taurine, which is found exclusively in animal meat. Try to feed a cat on grain and vegetables and you will kill it. The lack of taurine will make them go blind and die of heart failure.
This was actually a big problem around the time mass produced pet food was becoming a thing, because taurine is extremely water soluble and the process of making cat food was washing a lot of the taurine out. A lot of people were having their cats get sick and sometimes die and they had no idea why.
(Modern cat food has fixed that problem, don’t worry)
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