Increasing evidence that bears are not carnivores
phys.org
phys.org
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wonder if bird parents feel guilty for digesting their chick’s supper.
Food has changed quite a bit in the last 90 years, especially the prevalence of processed foods and food designed to trigger various taste responses.
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.
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.
I can't recall the last time I saw bear scat that wasn't full of seeds from berries.
Or bear bells if it's Grizzly poop
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.
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'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).
Yikes.
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.
Feeding them more fat is one thing, but that doesn't really negate their mostly carnivorous nature.
Which is likely very true of all animals in captivity.