How are animals that eat only one kind of food not horribly malnourished? Do they need a narrower set of nutrients than humans?

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How are animals that eat only one kind of food not horribly malnourished? Do they need a narrower set of nutrients than humans?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

In many cases, animals that eat almost exclusively one kind of food will have rare diet supplementation and they actually do get all the necessary vitamins. Wild cats eat grass, even though they are carnivores. There’s lots of videos of horses/deer eating mice and birds that get too close, even though they are herbivores. Or goats and other animals traveling far distances to get salt intake. Housepets will eat flies or bugs that they encounter around the house (just for a relatable example).

They may not do it very often and it is a negligible part of their calorie intake, and have adapted to conserve and more aggressively absorb the rarer nutrients in their diets. Common nutrients less so – like Vitamin C, which some animals produce themselves, but our diet expects it and we get scurvy without it.

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