• psud@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    If it is hard to digest meat, why do carnivores have shorter guts than herbivores?

    • Aldrond@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      “Hard” doesn’t necessarily mean “requiring many resources” in this case. It has more nutrients, and as such it’s usually not digested as fully as herbivores digest plant matter.

      It’s harder on the system doing the digestion.

      • psud@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’m not getting it. Meat is hard to digest, but you can do it with a short gut, and produces very little excretion (the military “low residue diet” is meaty and low in fibre)

        But vegetables are easy, yet take a longer gut and produce enormous amounts of shit

        There’s nothing about difficulty in digestion on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat#Nutritional_information

        Have you got a source - ideally one not produced by a vegan or vegetarian source?