I wonder a bit on the "provide unlimited food and use that to determine what they should eat" - if applied to children we'd learn they should subsist entirely on a diet of candy and soda.
That's actually sort of been tried. See "Clara M. Davis and the wisdom of letting children choose their own diets" [1].
Briefly, Davis took a group of newly weaned infants in the 1930s and let them choose what and how much to eat from a set of 33 food items. The experiment was designed so that the caretakers would not influence the children's choices.
I don't think candy and soda were among the 33 items--I believe they were all reasonably nutritious foods but with very different mixes of nutrients. All the kids ended up choosing diets from among those items that fit well with their individual nutritional needs.
> The foods she offered the children were varied, but all were generally thought to be healthy. Their intrinsic goodness meant that it would have been difficult for her small charges to veer too far from the nutritional straight-and-narrow.
In other words, give people the illusion of choice, and they're more willing to accept your limitations. I don't see any evidence here that children (or anyone) have some kind of special insight into their own bodies' "nutritional needs" - to the extent such things are even individualized - but rather, that most people will eat a balanced diet when given the choice. E.g. none of the children became vitamin deficient because none of them chose to eat entirely one kind of food.
Agreed. It doesn't even have to be a ton of choices. Often, give kids the choice of "this is dinner, eat it or you can wait til breakfast if you aren't hungry" is surprisingly effective. And doesn't have to be a fight.
Ha! Yeah, you do have to not be a jerk to the kids. Such that they still learn more from imitation than they do lectures or dictation. If you want them to see that "skipping dinner to have a snack" is not the norm, you have to not do it.
Which, to bring it back to this thread, I find it very unlikely that unlimited access is at all a universal good idea. Might have worked on 2 of our kids. Would fail dramatically on 1 of them, though.
Similarly, anyone that says that just give their pets unlimited access to food, is lucky to not have one that would just binge forever.
> Similarly, anyone that says that just give their pets unlimited access to food, is lucky to not have one that would just binge forever.
I didn't know until I had one that a lot of huskies will actually only eat when they're hungry.
It's usually nice, because I can just leave the food down and she'll eat when she wants. It's not so nice when I'm dog-sitting and she doesn't eat promptly, so the other dogs usually raid her bowl.
> if applied to children we'd learn they should subsist entirely on a diet of candy and soda
Forgot where it is, but I remember reading a study in which gradually-sweeter water was given to kids of different ages. A clear trend emerged: water became too sweet quicker for older kids. For infants, the water saturated before they stopped drinking.
> if applied to children we'd learn they should subsist entirely on a diet of candy and soda.
In the case of animals, this would involve providing unlimited foods similar to what would be found in their natural environment.
If we gave kids their choice of naturally-occurring foods to eat, it probably wouldn’t be too terrible. My child was much more into things like broccoli and certain vegetables than I would have guessed.
Introduce processed foods and all bets are off, though.
> If we gave kids their choice of naturally-occurring foods to eat, it probably wouldn’t be too terrible. My child was much more into things like broccoli and certain vegetables than I would have guessed.
In what sense is broccoli naturally occurring?
It's a heavily artificially selected vegetable not available outside very specific regions before the 20th century.
I'd assume that applies to the rest of the vegetables you've mentioned.
But maybe kids would sicken themselves of it if given freedom? Seems to work ok with addictive games, to let them overdo it themselves? A hard topic to study scientifically.
Since I was a child old enough to know what a bear was, I've been taught bears are omnivores. I don't know what these people are smoking... No, I do know, it's clicks.
> "There's certainly this long-standing idea that humans with Ph.D.s know a lot more than a sloth bear or a brown bear," said Robbins.
Yeah! What do PhDs know, anyway?! I've always been suspicious of PhDs. It's their shifty eyes. But seriously, is it really necessary here to blame PhDs? How often are PhDs in charge of bear diets at zoos? And I can't think of even one bear that has ever published anything of significance. Sure, there are plenty of Dr. Bears, but they're mostly MDs.
I remember the segment from the first season of Planet Earth that surprised me the most was the video of grizzlies foraging for thousands of moths just prior to hibernation.
I read the article and found it kind of strange. from what I understand is that they gave giant pandas (a bear that doesn't eat meat) a choice between high protein or high carb diet, that they choose high carbs and then concluded feeding bears high protein diet is killing them. Now they did also find that in 5 Chinese zoos that did give the pandas high carb diets that they had giant pandas that successfully reproduced.
It seems to me generalizing Giant Pandas to all bears is probably not a safe generalization, nor does this necessarily show that it gave the giant pandas longer lives. I think that the giant pandas are seemingly more ready to mate is good evidence, but there could be other variables explaining that.
It would indeed be strange to generalize a study on Pandas to all bears, which is why the paragraphs after the discussion of Panda bear diets discusses similar research in sloth bears, polar bears and grizzly bears.
It's a lot easier to generalize to "all bears" when you have convincing studies of 4/8 species of bears (but only, to my count, ~10% of the global bear population because there are a lot of American Black Bears).
Terrible article and title. Anyone that knows anything about bears knows they aren't carnivores. Meat only makes up a portion of their diet and some bears eat no meat. Seems like the author has no knowledge of bears
Not to be glib but I think the fact that bears are stereotypically depicted as eating Honey might have been the first clue.
EDIT: To be fair, clicking beyond the headline, it looks like the ongoing practice at zoos has been to feed them a carnivore diet of mostly meat, which is apparently bad for them, and this article recommends otherwise, which seems sensible.
These zoos need to get caught up on the latest research. I believe according to Yogi et al. their diet primarily consists of honey and campers' picnic baskets.
Right, so that's the thing, polar bears do eat (almost?) exclusively meat. But the zoos are feeding them too much lean meat, and not enough fat. You know, like seal blubber.
Yeah that was my point. The title is a little misleading. And in fact what they're really saying is that bears are not being fed a diet consistent with their nutritional makeup in the wild.
Which is likely very true of all animals in captivity.
That's not really true. Berries are not in season for much of the year in lots of bear habitat. Sure they do eat bearies, but are far more opportunistic in what they consume including grass, roots, herbs, insects, nuts... honey! I assume bears in Iowa have a lot of corn in their shit.
