We have been told to eat well balanced diet..How about other animals? Where do they get the nutrients?

-Karthik Gurumurthy

All animals need different nutrients like vitamins, amino acids- to build and maintain their cells and to provide energy for all the processes.

Carnivorous animals gets many of these nutrients ready-made from the other animals they eat. Vegetarian animals gets the nutrients not just by chemically changing plant material through enzymatic processes but also from beneficial fermentation microbes in their guts and from the microbes itself.

Omnivorous animals like humans and pigs, can obtain their nutrition  from both animal and plant food, or either one.

In the cow,  as an example for vegetarian, there is a multi-stomach system. In the large, multi-compartmental stomach, microorganisms ferment plant cellulose and release volatile fatty acids; acids comes into contact with cells with a large surface area that absorb them to provide much of the energy supply.

Later on in the digestive process, chewed and rechewed food enters a stomach and intestines, more like those of humans, where it is mixed with more digestive juices that change the chemistry of the food. These amino acids and other nutrients are absorbed and the bodies of the microorganisms from the stomach are also digested in this process.

When I first heard this process, I said “Holy Cow”.:)