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[scrdest]

Fur is made of the above ingredients as well, that's the point of the comment.

[Shadowlord]

According to Google, one NLEA serving of broccoli contains 220% of a 2,000-calorie diet's worth of vitamin C

so he's not wrong I guess :v

To be honest, anything more than 100% is a waste. Your body can store some for when you have a deficiency, but only so much and you actually get enough Vitamin C from an average diet anyway.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find a diet where you never eat more than you need of every single micro-nutrient. One of the only reasons we need a varied diet is because we need all those minuscule amounts of micro-nutrients. Many animals just make their own, and thus can survive on a single food diet. Technically speaking, a housecat is entirely made up of air, water and cat food.

Cat food contains a bunch of stuff, you know. :V

We could make human cat food but people would get upset at the lack of variety, I expect.

[King Kitteh]

According to Google, one NLEA serving of broccoli contains 220% of a 2,000-calorie diet's worth of vitamin C

so he's not wrong I guess :v

To be honest, anything more than 100% is a waste. Your body can store some for when you have a deficiency, but only so much and you actually get enough Vitamin C from an average diet anyway.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find a diet where you never eat more than you need of every single micro-nutrient. One of the only reasons we need a varied diet is because we need all those minuscule amounts of micro-nutrients. Many animals just make their own, and thus can survive on a single food diet. Technically speaking, a housecat is entirely made up of air, water and cat food.

Cat food contains a bunch of stuff, you know. :V

We could make human cat food but people would get upset at the lack of variety, I expect.

It's pretty much just meat, with some drugs so your cat will like it even though it's mush. Wild Big Cats are purely carnivores AFAIK and that's what I was getting at. An example is that cats won't get scurvy if they don't eat things with vitamin C, this is because they naturally make it themselves.

We could in theory make a food for people with all the required nutrients. But it would be completely artificial, while some cat foods are natural.

There is however one natural food source that has all the nutrients people need, however I think you'll find it a little hard to source:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It's human breast milk 

[Orange Wizard]

The downside of using breast milk as a nutrient source is that the woman also needs access to those nutrients. I suppose you could set up some kind of absurd chain where each woman feeds the next, but by that point we're blurring the line between fetish and crime against humanity.

[Rose]

There's Soylent, for which there's a thread on this forum.

[penguinofhonor]

I think you're confusing "cats can synthesize vitamin C" with "cats can synthesize vitamins in general." I've read a couple sources saying they can't synthesize vitamins A or E. And even with the vitamins they can synthesize, it seems they still benefit from eating them. Here's part of the ingredients list on my cat food, listed after the meat and stuff:

vitamins (Vitamin E Supplement, L-Ascorbyl-2-Polyphosphate (source of Vitamin C), Niacin Supplement, Thiamine Mononitrate, Vitamin A Supplement, Calcium Pantothenate, Riboflavin Supplement, Biotin, Vitamin B12 Supplement, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride, Folic Acid, Vitamin D3 Supplement), Taurine, minerals (Ferrous Sulfate, Zinc Oxide, Copper Sulfate, Manganous Oxide, Calcium Iodate, Sodium Selenite)

[Reelya]

No, the vitamin C thing is a specific thing. I've heard it cited as "cats" before. Which is both true and misleading. All mammals can synthesize vitamin C, except for primates and a couple of other weird exceptions. So, humans and other primates are the odd ones out because we lost the ability to make our own vitamin C (due to injesting a diet rich in vitamin C, and therefore not needing the gene).

I don't know why the folklore on that attached to "cats", since "dogs", "rats", "horses" or just about any other mammal can do that.

[Rolan7]

That's pretty cool about the vitamin C synthesizing, I didn't know that.  I wanted to add that, in addition to all the complex stuff in cat food (meat is pretty complex), my cat chewed a lot of grass.  Though that behavior is a bit mysterious apparently, and probably has more to do with digestion than a nutrient source.

Only somewhat related WTF, rabbit starvation reminds me a lot of the Atkin's diet.  Apparently we can only metabolize so much lean meat at a time.

[TheDarkStar]

So cats are good sources of vitamin C.

[TempAcc]

Well, thats one extra use for stray cats :v
Man, cats are like, the ideal victorian ship animals. They hunt and kill rats onboard, and when things get dire, you can eat them and avoid scurvy!

[Reelya]

The best bit about the vitamin C thing is that all primates still have the vitamin C genes, they're just deactivated. So there has been some research about how to turn it back on. The coolest thing is that we can see specific mutations in primate vitamin C genes that are common to many ancestors. So not only are they all broken, they're broken in the same actual genome loci.

Yeah, cats and grass might be due to fiber.  As to "why" animals do things that have clearly evolved, I think it works on three levels (for both animals and people). There's the personal "why", the biological "why" and the evolutionary "why". So the cat eats the grass because it's tummy hurts and it's learned that grass helps that. The biological reason is that it helps with digestion, and the evolutionary reason is because healthy digestion => less death, more babies.

[Akura]

On a warning label for baby wigs: "Do not, under any circumstances, laugh while your child is wearing the wig."

This is right next to "Do not leave baby unattended" and "Keep away from fire".

[TD1]

What I'm reading is that you should put the wig on the child, light it on fire, leave the room and laugh manically.

[TheDarkStar]

What I'm reading is that someone actually decided to put the wig on the child, light it on fire, leave the room and laugh manically.

ftfy

[Teneb]

What I'm reading is that you should put the wig on the child, light it on fire, leave the room and laugh manically.

Nah, the wigs are known to spontaneously ignite when targeted with derisive laughter.