Pretty much as the question states: How is it that animals that consume mostly vegetation as opposed to meat so strong?
More specifically, how are animals like gorillas and horses so strong/decked out with so much muscle mass if they primarily eat grass/hay (in the case of horses) or leaves and bananas and bugs (in the case of gorillas? I understand that certain animals metabolize (break down and use) different foods differently, but it’s just mind blowing to me that these animals have such large muscles on such vegetable-heavy diets.
Moreover, they’re able to gain and maintain this muscle mass on these lean diets while also using those muscles almost ALL OF THE TIME. I mean, it would be difficult enough for a human to achieve such a muscle mass eating that same type of diet, but I would imagine that it would be EXTREMELY difficult for humans to achieve and maintain that level of muscle mass while simultaneously burning so many calories each day by using those muscles – I would imagine that a human with a similar diet with that amount of physical activity and that kind of diet would be fit and muscular, but have more of a “lean” or
“slim” muscular build instead of looking jacked like a horse or a gorilla.
So, what gives? How are they able to be so strong on such vegetable-heavy diets?
In: Biology
Its all in the digestive tract and how much they eat. Cattle for example have a multi-stomach system designed to very thoroughly break down grass and other tough plants that humans couldn’t even hope to digest, and they eat a ton of it every single day. All that protein found in meat was ultimately amino acids in plants at one point, just concentrated in the herbivores and then the carnivores.
They have different digestive systems. They can make internally manufacture some kind of nutrients we need to find in food.
Whenever you compare humans to animals, you have to remember that humans are designed to support our brain.
Our digestive systems are optimized with that fact. This comes across in two ways.
First, we need to devote a huge amount of calories to support our brains. Our brains take up something like 50% more calories than an ape like a gorilla. And I don’t even know how much more calories we need compared to a cow brain.
Second, our brains allow us to eat more complex and nutrient dense food. This is because we can cook. Cooked food is much easier to digest than raw food, and it kills more parasites and bacteria. This means that our digestive systems are much smaller because they don’t need to be as extensive as an animal like an ape (or a cow). This translates into getting more energy out of our food while using less energy to digest. But it also means that we can’t eat things that other animals can because our digestive system couldn’t process it.
So, the reason animals with a vegetarian diet can be stronger than us is because they were designed (by evolution) that way. They get more protein out of their diet because their bodies will synthesize protein out of their diet. Humans can’t synthesize all those proteins, so we need to get them from our food.
The simple answer is that those animals have different metabolic pathways for synthesizing muscles than humans. Grass and other vegetables contain carbohydrates and nitrogen compounds that can be used to eventually create proteins for muscles.
It’s all about the…
#Digestive system!
So for example, let’s take your question but let’s just narrow it down to one of humanity’s closest cousin species only:
The Gorillas.
Gorillas are INSANELY strong and muscular.
And yet they’re by far mostly vegetarian. So what gives? How do they do it?
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Well, in the case of Gorillas…
It turns out that their internal digestive tract kept evolving to specially harbor and lovingly care for a few specialized bacteria species. (Your digestive tract did not. Nor did mine!)
Those bacterial species then returned the favor in a big way and did the Gorillas a serious solid, a muscle-mass-solid to be specific! They did it by becoming ever more incredibly adept at transforming the Gorillas vegetarian diet into large amounts of extremely high quality complete protein.
And then it is this protein that in turn then gets absorbed into the gorillas blood stream, and is used for building up really crazy levels of muscle mass.
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In short, if you designed a viral payload to kill only the bacterial species in a Gorilla’s gut that transforms vegetative matter into high quality abundant protein…
Then Gorillas would quickly go extinct. End of story.
They can’t do it without that symbiosis of the bacteria in their gut.
(Same is true, but in other varied ways for other animals, such as cows, etc…)
To add to the already well written comments, humans can get muscle mass from a non-meat diet too.
Our digestive system breaks food down to amino acids and sugars, which after transportation trough the bloodstream are re-assembled into muscles (and the rest of your body), depending on what your body thinks it needs. So if you train certain muscles a lot, they get made (a very very simplification)
But your body doesn’t care where those building blocks came from, provided it gets enough.
Grass is between 15 – 25% protein and ~45% carbohydrates, depending on growing conditions. For reference, both cows and you are made up of ~22% protein, so some grass will actually have a higher protein content than meat does.
The reason that cows can eat protein but you can’t is because the main carbohydrate in grass is cellophane – the same stuff that plastic wrap is made out of. You can’t digest cellophane, and most of the protein in grass is coated in it. Because you can’t digest the cellophane, grass passes through your digestive tract in the same way that a piece of meat wrapped in cellophane would.
Cows can eat grass because cows can break cellophane down into sugar. Once the cow’s stomach has broken down the cellophane in the grass its eaten, everything else in that grass is easily digested.
I think the humans metabolism is also special in that you can just randomly start not eating for 3 weeks and most likely nothing bad will happen, if you don’t already have some medical condition. Many animals would just die in that case, while the human body tends to get rid of all unnecessary muscle mass as fast as possible.
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Grass is a low calorie food and hard to digest.
Calories is made of carbs, fats and proteins.
When looking from at the portion of the energy, grass actually has a lot of protein.
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