Nutrition is the science of providing living things with the vitamins, minerals, proteins and fats they need to grow and live healthy lives. Many of these nutrients cannot be manufactured by the body and are obtained through diet. Very little is known about the nutritional needs of wild apes, because getting exact measures of how much and what food an ape ingests is nearly impossible. As a result, providing them with the appropriate diet in a zoo setting is a daily challenge. Lincoln Park Zoo scientists conduct rigorous nutritional research to try to meet this challenge.
Cholesterol
Because of the difficulty of getting accurate nutrition measures in the wild, human nutritional guidelines are often used as a proxy for apes. For example, humans are told that their serum cholesterol concentrations should be at or below 200 milligrams per deciliter. Zoo gorillas, on average, have cholesterol concentrations measuring 240. Is that too high? Yes, according to human standards. But what’s normal for a gorilla? Analyzing blood samples from free-ranging gorillas may help answer that and other questions.
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