Why do humans get food poisoning so easily compared to animals?
In: Biology
Most other animals we see in the world have grown to be highly specialized for certain food groups. Humans evolved specifically to eat as much as possible from a large variety of sources. But that opens us up to more diseases and bacterias than other animals that eat only a handful of specific foods.
Plus, we have some pretty poor food handling practices. Many animals can actually handle eating poop, we cannot. But humans get animal poop and human poop and urine mixed into food all the time somehow, somewhere along the line of process.
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There are many reasons why we get sick more often than other species. Humans are weird with everything we do.
What makes you think this is even true? I’d imagine wild animals get food poising far more often.
Humans and animals have different digestive systems and immune systems.
Many animals, especially wild ones, have stronger stomach acids and shorter digestive tracts. This means food passes through quickly, and harmful bacteria don’t have much time to multiply. Their strong stomach acid can also kill more bacteria before it causes harm.
Animals often have stronger immune systems because they are constantly exposed to different types of bacteria and other microbes in the wild. Over time, their bodies have adapted to handle these better.
Over thousands of years, humans have moved from eating fresh food directly from nature to farming and cooking. This means our bodies haven’t needed to develop as strong defenses against bacteria because cooking usually kills them.
So, it’s a mix of how our bodies work, what we eat, and how we handle food that makes humans more prone to food poisoning compared to animals.
I dunno but my beagle barfs far more often than any human in our house, so I don’t necessarily agree with the premise.
Easily? The cat and the horse beg to differ…
Primarily it comes from the fact that we process and store food. Scavengers are built to be able to handle the microbes that grow on spoiled meat, and everything else eats their food fresh as it gets.
Storage of non-living foods opens up the chance for harmful microbes to colonize it. Our assembly line-style farms and slaughterhouses for animals also allow harmful microbes like salmonella to be easily spread to all the cuts of meat as opposed to the occasional animal.
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