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What is a frugivore?

• VLM 9y ago
  We're a species of primate where evolution pushed a lot of our innards to optimize to eat fruit. We've got the binocular vision and dexterity to climb trees and identify and harvest and prep fruits. Our livers are tolerant of relatively ridiculous intake levels of fructose and ethanol (by non-frugivore standards). Our ancestors were so successful at exploiting fruit as a food source that unlike non-frugivores (hand wavy mostly) our bodies don't try to generate our own vitamin-C nor do we try to store it, we just pee it out because surely we'll get a meal of vit-C fruit tomorrow, which leads to scurvy in humans that don't get fruits or supplemental sources. Non-frugivores are somewhat more frugal (ugh) with bodily vitamin C stores. Our digestive tract is long enough to digest fruits reasonably effectively but not long enough for cellulose sources (like how cows can graze), much longer than we need to solely eat meat. Our taste receptors are calibrated to sugary fruit juice which in 21st century makes us really fat when provided with unlimited sources of HFCS. Pre-historic fruit consumption is pretty much baked into the cake. Our ancestors were pretty much frugivores, although its a spectrum, there's not a binary yes/no like adult lactose metabolism for example. So being a spectrum you can make a strong argument for "omnivore with a heavy addition of fruit" or similar wishy washyness. I'm trying and failing to think of a class of omnivore that doesn't eat fruit, solely does bbq chicken breast on caesars salad type of thing... There's probably some class of omnivore that doesn't eat fruit, but maybe not and its a reasonable argument that the concept of omnivore is not really meat+plant but more like meat+fruit. There are likely scavengers that can live off meat and veg-only although not preferentially...