Simple question. We, as omnivours must eat fruits and vegetables to be healthy but… Lions? Sharks? Cocodriles? Where are their vitamins. Thanks
In: 1
Many carnivores are able to synthesize things herbivores can’t and vice versa. Omnivores are often missing some from both.
This mostly applies to certain things like amino acids.
For other things, they just eat the bits where their prey are storing/processing the materials. Livers are extremely rich in vitamins. Predators may have extra mechanisms to store these for longer than we would.
Carnivores eat other animals whole and raw, and this provides them with all the vitamins they need. Since, you know, the animal being eaten has already accumulated all the necessary vitamins for itself in its body from other sources.
In fact, some human cultures living predominantly off meat, like Inuit, occasionally eat fresh raw meat for the same reason, since cooking the meat destroys a lot of the vitamins.
They basically get it from whatever they eat. Unlike humans where we cannot digest many things such as bone and egg shells, animals especially snakes have much stronger digestive tracks that lets them swallow and devour things whole. This lets them get vitamins that humans cannot. As for plant matter, they dont require as much plant based vitamins as humans do, but they do get plant based vitamins from digesting their prey’s stomachs and intestines that would have left over plant life.
I’m carnivore and that’s where I get my vitamins specifically beef. I do a blood test every 4 – 6 months and my bio markers are excellent.
Animals synthesize most chemicals they need. The few they can’t synthesize are the ones that they get in their normal diet.
For example, most animals synthesize vitamin-C and therefore don’t need to eat food that contains it. Apes (including humans) are one of the few exceptions. Another exception is guinea pigs, and it’s pure luck that some of the early scientists experimented on guinea pigs to try to find the cause of scurvy – if they used rats instead, they wouldn’t have found the cause.
All the vitamins carnivores need, herbivores need also. When you eat an animal, you get those vitamins.
Humans are rare inn the mammal community in that we can’t synthesize vitamin c, so we have to eat veggies for it, other mammals are able to make it on their own.
A vitamin is simply a substance that you need to function but can’t synthesize enough of, so you need to get it from your food. It also means that not every animal needs the same vitamins. Which substances are vitamins to a particular species will have been determined through their diet and many, many years of evolution.
So the simple answer is that they get their vitamins the same way we do: from their food. They might just have different vitamins that suit their diet.
Latest Answers