Eläintarhojen gorilloidenkin ruokavaliossa ollaan huomattu että kantsii syödä kasviksia.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 091130.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Gone is the bucketful of vitamin-rich, high-sugar and high-starch foods that zoos used for decades to ensure gorillas received enough nutrients.
Instead, Cleveland's Mokolo and Bebac receive a wheelbarrow of romaine lettuce, dandelion greens and endive they gently tear and bite, alfalfa hay they nimbly pick through, young tree branches they strip of succulent bark and leaves, green beans, a handful of flax seeds, and three Centrum Silver multivitamins tucked inside half a smashed banana.
Instead of spending about a quarter of their day eating the old diet, the pair now spends 50 to 60 percent of each day feeding and foraging, about the same amount of time wild gorillas forage.
Although they take in twice as many calories on the new diet, after a year, the big boys of the primate house have dropped nearly 65 pounds each and weigh in the range of their wild relatives.
...
In addition to dropping weight and becoming active feeders, the gorillas also dropped a habit seen only in zoo gorillas, a habit that literally turned patrons away. Whether to taste sugar again and again, or to take up time not spent foraging or because large amounts of sugar and starch didn't sit well; on the old diet, the gorillas would repeatedly spit up and then eat what they'd just spit up.
"That behavior has been completely eliminated with the new diet," Less said
Ja tässä kerrotaan lihotettujen apinoiden käytöstä koe-eläiminä ihmisen ruokavalioon liittyvien asioiden tutkimisessa ja vähän mitä sillä on saatu selville.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/health/20monkey.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
The corpulent primates serve as useful models, experts say, because they resemble humans much more than laboratory rats do, not only physiologically but in some of their feeding habits. They tend to eat when bored, even when they are not really hungry. And unlike human subjects who are notorious for fudging their daily calorie or carbohydrate counts, a caged monkey’s food intake is much easier for researchers to count and control.
...
The monkey’s daily diet consists of dried chow pellets, with about one-third of the calories coming from fat, similar to a typical American diet, Dr. Grove said, though the diet also contains adequate protein and nutrients.
They can eat as many pellets as they want. They also snack daily on a 300-calorie chunk of peanut butter, and are sometimes treated to popcorn or peanuts. Gummy bears were abandoned because they stuck to the monkeys’ teeth.
They also drink a fruit-flavored punch with the fructose equivalent of about a can of soda a day. In all, they might consume about twice as many calories as a normal-weight monkey.
Dr. Grove and researchers at some other centers say the high-fructose corn syrup appears to accelerate the development of obesity and diabetes.
“It wasn’t until we added those carbs that we got all those other changes, including those changes in body fat,” said Anthony G. Comuzzie, who helped create an obese baboon colony at the Southwest National Primate Research Center in San Antonio.
Still, about 40 percent do not put on a lot of weight.
Barbara C. Hansen of the University of South Florida said calories, but not high fat, were important. “To suggest that humans and monkeys get fat because of a high-fat diet is not a good suggestion,” she said.
...
The studies also found something else that could be important for people — that eating a healthy diet during pregnancy reduced troubles in the offspring. That suggests, he said, that the diet of a pregnant woman matters more than whether she is obese.