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
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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