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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I think most people don’t realize just how high our standards are now. We, by and large, expect a safety level that is far beyond what is simply needed to stay mostly healthy.
Humans can do a lot of things considered unsafe (like eating raw meat, or consuming certain chemicals, etc) and life a long, healthy life. However, with the law of large numbers, we can consider it very unsafe.
For example, take something based on eating a meal. It could have a very low chance of actually getting you sick. Lets say only one in a million meals eaten produces a ugly, fatal reaction.
If you eat 3 meals a day, 365/year, and do it for 100 years, that is only 110,000 meals over your life. You can do that activity every day and still pretty likely never hit the reaction.
The US population is 330 Million. If everyone did that then you’d be looking at 1,000 preventable deaths a day.
There have been humans who have only eaten one type of food and been seemingly healthy. Hell, there was the one guy who lost a ton of weight by not eating for over a year. Doesn’t mean it is good advice for the population at large, or that you’d be advised to take whatever risks are involved.
Most people would consider a 1 in 10 chance of getting severe nutritional deficiencies unacceptable, even though that means 9 in 10 people don’t have problems.
tl;dr: We live in an era of high standards.
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