We’re always told to eat your greens, but this isn’t the case for pandas
A new Study finds exactly how pandas gain weight… even though they only eat bamboo
Pandas eat between 26 to 84 pounds of bamboo each day and It turns out the animals’ gut bacteria changes in the season when nutritious bamboo shoots become available.
“This is the first time we established a causal relationship between a panda’s gut microbiota and its phenotype,” says Guangping Huang, one of the study’s authors.
“We’ve known these pandas have a different set of gut microbiota during the shoot-eating season for a long time, and it’s very obvious that they are chubbier during this time of the year.”
Pandas only consume bamboo, which is a poor quality diet low in fat.
The authors believe the bacterium could lead the bears to store more fat.
