The obesity epidemic has spread to the gorilla house at the zoo because……………..

Zoo living is good living 

I wake up from a peaceful night’s sleep to a scrumptious breakfast, consisting of a bucketful of tasty fruits.  Today, the zookeeper has included bananas, paw-paw, some squash and a little cooked sweet potato. After a leisurely breakfast , I amble over to one of the “trees” in the enclosure. I deftly  clamber up to the top of the tallest “tree” to get a good view of  the humans who pass by at regular intervals throughout the day.   Groups of humans jump up and down and admire me – some of them make me smile as they pat their chests and honk, others peek out from little boxes (strange).  I spend most of the day mooching around, moving in and out of the sun.   Just before the sun dips below the horizon, another bucket load of fruit arrives. The evening snack over, I pop inside and settle down on the fresh straw bed which has been prepared for me.  Within minutes I am fast a sleep.

Extract from a day in the life of  Mokolo

 UNTIL NOW !

Weight watchers for gorillas

Zoo keepers at Cleveland zoo have their gorilla’s on diet,  because it turns out zoo living may be good living but it certainly isn’t healthy living. Just like their human keepers, zoo gorillas are succumbing to lifestyle diseases.  Heart disease is the top killer of zoo gorillas.

The bucketfuls of vitamin-rich, high-sugar, high-starch foods are out.  Mokolo is now eating green. Each morning a wheelbarrow full of green stuff topped off with half a banana is wheeled into the enclosure.

Buried within the half a banana is Mokolo’s multivitamin tablet.  The green stuff includes young tree branches, lettuce, dandilions and endives.  To savour the greens requires tearing, biting and picking, feeding now takes up a good part of the day.

The new diet sheds excess pounds

The calorie count in the new diet is almost double that of the traditional fruit feasts but Mokolo has lost the extra flab.  Blood tests suggest both insulin resistance and inflammation are down so the change in diet had health benefits.

Zoo keepers still believe Mokolo’s BMI is not equivalent to wild gorillas so next up they will be introducing Gorilla aerobics.

High sugar, high starch not good

A diet high in sugar and starch is not good for gorillas but it isn’t all that  good for humans either.  High levels of sugar cause a compensatory rise in insulin.  The combination of high sugar and high insulin causes inflammation in the blood vessels.  This inflammation causes atherosclerosis aka cardiovascular disease.

So take a “leaf” out of the gorilla diet plan – cut the high glycemic carbs.

Apes shed pounds while doubling calories – Case Western Reserve University Think publication 

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Further reading

Being apple- or pear- shaped irrelevant when it comes to heart risk	Insulin steers the assembly of killer blood clots	It is not ALL in your genes but on your dinner plate