• absentbird@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    They have a long hind gut with specialized bacteria to break down cellulose, so they get way more protien from plants than humans. Horses use a similar trick.

    • iocase@lemmy.zip
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      20 hours ago

      They also don’t eat bananas primarily in the wild instead eating really abundant but nutritionally dilute foods like bamboo, thus the crazy efficient guts.

      They also don’t have myostatin which is a way for our bodies to reduce muscles when we can’t get enough to eat. We get skinny and weak while a gorilla just straight up dies. OTOH when a gorilla builds muscle they never lose it.

      Although that comes down to how we don’t eat the equivalent of grass. Even if a gorilla had myostatin if it couldn’t find enough bamboo shoots to eat they’re dead anyways.

  • angrystego@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    People have a muscle mass regulating hormone that prevents us from developing huge muscles easily.

    Also gorillas don’t eat bananas in the wild, true banana species all come from Asia. The closest they could get is Ensete ventricosum.

    • Initech_vs_Initrode@lemmy.zip
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      1 day ago

      Do you realize how much of my day would be spent eating and shitting in order to meet my macronutrient targets by consuming broccoli? I’d just be sitting around all day like some kind of gorilla.

    • fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk
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      1 day ago

      That’s kind of fascinating - though it’s only about 1/10th of the amount by weight - so something like 75g of protein would need ~300g of Steak or ~3kg of Broccoli (about 10 full heads of Broccoli).

      For plant based proteins, you’re probably better off with beans.

      • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        22 hours ago

        Broccoli stands out a bit. Cabbage and cauliflower and kohlrabi and bok choy don’t have the same protein ratio, because other brassicas we eat as vegetables are generally higher in carbs, so that their protein per calorie is lower (with more calories from carbs rather than protein).

    • Derpenheim@lemmy.zip
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      1 day ago

      That we, as homo sapiens, will never access because we do not have the gut microbiome necessary to break down and use.

      • yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 day ago

        No, I’m literally talking about the bioavailable protein for you, a human.

        Don’t forget that Homo sapiens evolved as fructivorous apes eating stuff like broccoli and our omnivorous diet is a recent development. (The bacteria-dependent digestion you mentioned is for the cellulose in grass, not protein.)

        • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          22 hours ago

          Even though your broader point is correct that our ancestral lines and closest relatives (chimps, gorillas, other great apes) primarily eat plants, I think broccoli is a bad example of what our ancestors ate. Broccoli is the result of specialized human-driven artificial breeding after the rise of human agriculture, and has a higher protein ratio than even other brassicas, like the cabbage breeds that broccoli descends from.

          • yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            17 hours ago

            True, I was going to mention that but I thought the word “like” was doing sufficient work.

            In fact, we cultivated broccoli to be sweeter, so I wouldn’t be surprised if vegetables used to have a higher protein/calorie ratio.

      • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        22 hours ago

        For broccoli? No, that’s actually a fairly bioavailable protein source, especially when cooked. Even compared to high protein plant sources like beans or lentils, broccoli’s protein is more bioavailable. It’s just there’s not that much of it, and the “protein per calorie” stat is kinda cherry picked from the fact that broccoli is low carb and low fat, rather than being really high in protein.

        Either way, though, the gut microbiomes of herbivores are mainly adapted to draw out more useful carbohydrate, not more useful protein. Cellulose is so plentiful in nature that making use of all those glucose molecules is biologically rewarding.

        Plant protein bioavailability is affected by a lot of factors, including whether the food has been chopped up, peeled, cooked, etc. Human chewing and guts (especially in modern humans) are pretty inefficient for extracting nutrients from food in the natural state because we have been cooking and processing food for millions of years.

        So yeah. Cows have complicated guts for digesting cellulose and extracting amino acids from chloroplasts, and innate chewing behaviors that mechanically process grass into mush, but we have knives and fire to do more of that stuff outside of our bodies. And cattle pick and choose grasses (including high protein leafy legumes like clover or alfalfa) depending on their own needs, as well.

  • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 day ago

    Other comments are about how gorillas have guts adapted for digesting lots of vegetation. And that’s true. But at its core, it’s just that gorillas actually do eat a ton of protein.

    They eat like 30 kg of food per day for 5000 calories, about 25% of which is from protein. That’s more than 300 grams of protein per day.

    Nothing they eat is super calorie dense, but the lack of density also means they need to eat all day. And as it turns out, the leaves they eat tend to be pretty high in protein.

    • anon_8675309@lemmy.world
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      24 hours ago

      Weird that every time you see a gorilla though, he’s just sitting there looking like a jacked freaking gorilla, not doing a dang thing.

      • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
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        20 hours ago

        Yeah like not working out or anything. I can sit around eating all day too, but my muscles just wither away.

      • Log in | Sign up@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34225517

        But for a healthy person, “it would be impossible to overdose on bananas,” says Collins. "You would probably need around 400 bananas a day to build up the kind of potassium levels that would cause your heart to stop beating… Bananas are not dangerous - and in fact they are, and always have been, very good for you."

        Adults should consume about 3,500mg of potassium per day, according to the UK’s National Health Service. The average banana, weighing 125g, contains 450mg of potassium, meaning a healthy person can consume at least seven-and-half bananas before reaching the recommended level.

        There are some people who should steer clear of foods that are high in potassium though, warns Collins - those with kidney disease.

        “These patients have a very low kidney function which can potentially see a build-up of harmful potassium levels in their blood stream because they can’t get rid of the mineral when they pass urine,” she says. “So in theory it is possible for someone with kidney disease to die of a high blood potassium level if they decided to consume lots of different food types rich in the mineral.”

        She once had a patient on dialysis who had a heart attack after eating too many tomatoes - another fruit rich in potassium. His kidneys had already stopped working so he was unable to get rid of the excess.

  • imadethis@fedinsfw.app
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    1 day ago

    You ever see the gut of a gorilla? They have much better mechanisms and microbiota to get all their nutrients from plants than we could dream of.

    Plus they build muscle by all the other things people mention, like genetics and weight lifting (their own mass).