why do humans need to eat many different kind of foods to get their vitamins etc but large animals like cows only need grass to survive?
In: Biology
In short… because as humans got smarter, our diets became better and more diverse because we had the anatomy and ability to get better food. Therefore our digestive system became much more streamlined and simple. That means it doesn’t pull as many nutrients from each meal, cuz we have trained our guts that it doesn’t need to.
Extra details… The human brain has tripled in size over the last 3 million years. This is because humans began to eat a wider range of food, and began to cook our food. This meant the digestive system needed to work way less than it did before. Less energy to the gut, meant more energy to the brain.
Better food = bigger brain.
You can see this in the animal kingdom, as animals with very simple, nutrient deficient diets, tend to have very small brains. The body has to spend so much energy on the digestive system, that little goes to the brain, and evolution keeps the brain small.
TLDR; We need better food cuz we eat better food, and we made our body accept that.
Because their digestive system is centered around their natural diet. People would naturally eat all different kinds of things, but cows would only normally eat grass. I’m a horse owner, and sometimes I find that my horses will be eating dirt. This is because they can tell they have mineral deficiency so they take it into their own hands and eat dirt to get those minerals. It’s always a certain time of the year when my horses are coming in from pasture with muddy mouths, so then I’ll go buy a mineral block for them to lick or I’ll buy them some loose minerals to sprinkle in their feed. I like to leave blocks, because then they can decide when they need it and when they don’t because too much mineral could cause issues and it’s more natural for them that way. I’ve seen people with cows leave troughs of loose mineral in the pastures and the cows take a few mouthfuls when they feel like they need it. Digestive systems in large animals are so so different from those of humans
We don’t. We just like to. Humans can survive on very simple diets. Gauchos would live entirely on beef for example.
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