Carnivores Have Evolved to Pick Meats over Sweets

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazine Many meat-eating animals have lost their ability to taste sugars over the course of evolution. Sea mammals, spotted hyenas and other carnivores have all shed a working copy of a gene that encodes a `taste receptor’ that senses sugars, finds a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . An animal with a diet devoid of vegetables may have little need to detect sugars, says Gary Beauchamp, director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the lead author of the study.

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Carnivores Have Evolved to Pick Meats over Sweets