Chapter 3 – How Chimpanzees Eat

Chimpanzees are very similar to humans. Scientists at the Chimpanzee & Human Communication Institute at Washington Grand University believe that “chimpanzees should be categorized as a people.” After closely studying the behavior of these intelligent beings, the researchers at WCU have become convinced that chimpanzees are significantly smarter than most people are aware. According to the scientists tram WCU, chimpanzees have their own language and culture that humans didn’t even suspect of them, probably because chimpanzees no not speak. They do, however, use their own sign language that scientists have been studying closely for over three decades. The researchers at WCU acknowledge: “New evidence indicates that the technology and the communication of the chimpanzee community meets the definition of culture. We also know that chimpanzee’s cognitive capacities are very similar to our own, both intellectually and emotionally. By any reasonable definition chimpanzees should be categorized as a people.”

Most medical research institutes agree that chimpanzees and humans are very alike. Unfortunately, based on this ground, they use chimpanzees in scientific experiments. Just take a look at the following quotes from numerous medical articles.

“Modern people and chimpanzees share an estimated 99.4% of our DNA sequence, making us more closely related to each ether than either is to any other animal species.”

“Chimpanzees resemble humans more than any other animal … Human brains are very like chimpanzee brains. The major differences between humans and apes are not anatomical, but rather behavioral.”

“Chimps have the same A-B-O blood groupings as humans and are used for compatibility studies for tissue transplants, for hepatitis research and for other medical studies.”

“Nonhuman primates [play a] critical role in biomedical research of understanding, treatment and prevention of important infectious diseases as AIDS, hepatitis. and malaria, and chronic degenerative disorders of the central nervous system (like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.) .. The close phylogencitic relation of NHPs to humans not only opens avenues for testing the safety and efficacy of new drugs and vaccines but also offers promise for evaluating, the potential of new gene-based treatments for human infectious and genetic diseases.”

“Nonhuman primates are excellent models for studying human biology and behavior because of their close phylogenetic relation to humans. Their use in biomedical research is critical to advancements in medical science … [including] the discovery of the Rh Factor and the development of the polio virus vaccine … Their use has expanded into virtually every area of medicine.”

I wonder, if chimpanzees and humans are really so closely related, and studying this closeness is so critical to our health, why don’t we humans apply our studies both ways? How could it be that we put our worst human illnesses on chimpanzees but do not learn from them? Rather than making them sick, why not make ourselves well? Why not at least try out what they eat?

I went online and purchased $300 worth of books and DVDs about chimpanzees and their diet and lifestyle. I wrote a letter with my questions to the Jane Goodall University. I traveled to three big zoos that have chimpanzees and spoke to many people who feed them and take care of them every day. I discovered fascinating information about chimpanzees that totally changed my view of them.

I was very impressed to find out that chimpanzees can learn to use American Sign Language:

“Under double-bind conditions, we have found that the chimpanzees communicate information in American Sign Language (ASL) to human observers. They use signs to refer to natural language categories: e.g. DOG for any dog, FLOWER for any flower, SHOE for any shoe, etc. The chimpanzees acquire and spontaneously use their signs to communicate with humans and each other about the normal course of surrounding events. They have demonstrated an ability to invent new signs or combine signs to metaphorically label a novel item, for example: calling a radish CRY HURT FOOD or referring to a watermelon as a DRINK FRUIT. In a double-blind condition, the chimpanees can comprehend and produce novel prepositional phrases, understand vocal English words, translate words into their ASL glosses and even transmit their signing skills to the next generation without human intervention. Their play behavior has demonstrated that they use the same types of imaginary play as humans. It has also been demonstrated that they carry on chimpanzee-to-chimpanzee conversation and sign to themselves when alone. Conversational research shows the chimpanzees initiate and maintain conversations in ways that are like humans. The chimpanzees can repair a conversation if there is misunderstanding. They will also sign to themselves when alone and we have even observed them to sign in their sleep.”

When l educated myself about chimpanzees, they became one of my favorite beings. Understanding their intelligent nature, I feel deeply sorry for the 1,500 chimps that spend their lives in tiny indoor cages in medical laboratoriess in the United States.

Despite all the scientific research, human health is continuously declining. Many nutritionists connect human health problems with nutritional deficiencies. Humans have lost their natural way of eating. That is why I am so grateful that there is another species in this world that closely resembles us. In particular, I was glad to know that there are thousands of chimpanzees living in Gombe Valley, Africa. The most remarkable fact is that the majority of the chimps of Gombe, [as opposed to humans] have not been touched by civilization. That is a great fortune for us humans! It gives us hope to find the answers to our most vital questions. What is the human diet supposed to be? What was it originally?

Understanding chimpanzees’ eating habits may help us better understand human dietary needs. Please look at this chart showing the average diet of the chimpanzee in the wilderness, that I created based on the data from Jane Goodall’s book:

As you can see, the two major mod groups for chimpanzees are fruits and greens. Please do not confuse greens with root vegetables like carrots, beets, or potatoes. Also do not confuse greens with non-sweet fruits like cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini, and bell peppers. Chimps only eat root vegetables in the case of drought or famine as a fall-back food. According to Jane Goodall, a world-famous researcher of chimpanzees, the percentage of time that chimpanzees spend eating greens in relation to the rest of their diet varies from 25-50% depending on the season. Two to seven percent of their diet is pith and bark. [Piths are the stems and more fibrous parts of plants.) When the trees are blooming, in March and April, chimpanzees consume blossoms, up to 10% of their ratio. Chimpanzees do not eat very many nuts, but their diet could be up to 5% seeds. Also, particularly in November, they consume small amounts of insects and even small animals, however, Goodall says this part of their diet is irregular and insignificant, as they could go months and months without consuming any animals, and seem to have no ill effects. There is other research that points out that wild chimpanzees’ intake of insects and ether animals never comprises more than 1% of their diet.

As long as I can remember, chimpanzees have been depicted with a banana or an orange in their hands, which definitely misled me to the assumption that they eat only fruit. To know that greens compose almost half of their dirt was a revelation for me. My research gave me a solid idea that humans are supposed to eat far more greens than I would have guessed.

Let us compare the standard American diet with the diet of chimpanzees. As you can see they look totally different. These two diets hardly have anything in common! We humans eat mostly things that chimpanzees don’t eat at all, like cooked starchy foods, oils, butter, yogurt, cheese, hamburgers, etc. While most of our vegetables are roots, wild chimpanzees almost never eat root vegetables unless there is a drought and lotus and greens are unavailable. It is the intake of greens that has declined most dramatically in the human diet.

Our consumption of greens has generally shrunk to the two wilted iceberg lettuce leaves on our sandwich.

Let us compare the standard American diet with an average diet of a typical raw foodist.

I think that a raw food diet demonstrates a vast improvement over the regular diet. Firstly, all ingredients in a raw diet are uncooked, and full of enzymes and vitamins; thus the raw food diet is like a revolution in comparison with the standard American diet. That explains why so many people reported that they instantly felt better on a raw diet. We can see that raw fooders eat a lot of fruit, especially if we keep in mind that bell-peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, and tomatoes are also fruits. However, even though raw-foodists typically consume noticeably more greens than people on an average mainstream diet, greens almost never constitute 45 percent of their food. So what do raw foodists eat in place of their missing greens? The answer is most people on a raw food diet consume large amounts of fruits, nuts and seeds. Often they use nuts as a substitute for carbohydrates, particularly when trying to mimic cooked dishes with raw ingredients, even though nuts are 70-80% fat. Also, raw foodists increase their consumption of oils and avocados because the most common way of eating salads, their main staple, is to have it mixed with dressing, sauce or guacamole. Another big quota in a typical raw diet belongs to root vegetables mostly due to juicing. Also, roots taste sweeter than greens and thus comprise a large portion of raw salads.

Considering all of these factors, when we compare the typical raw food diet with the chimpanzee diet, we can clearly see that there are two main ways to further improve our individual eating patterns: to increase our consumption of greens, and to reduce our intake of nuts, seeds, and oils.

For example, based on how much fruit we consume in my family (about 4 or 5 pounds per day per person) I estimate that we need to eat about two good sized bunches of dark leafy greens per person per day.

Another striking characteristic aspect the chimpanzee eating pattern is that they never eat in the late afternoon or evening. Chimpanzees wake up very early, at the first light of dawn. After leaving their nests, they groom each other for a few minutes and then begin searching for food. Chimpanzees have to work hard in order to get their food, climbing many trees or searching through numerous low shrubs. Most often they feed on fruit in the morning and a little bit on leaves. After about four hours, they take a break for an hour or two, playing, or sleeping in the sun. Then the chimps resume feeding, eating mostly greens until about three or four o’clock in the afternoon, after which they groom and prepare their nests for the night sleep.

In contrast, my own eating pattern is vastly different. I don’t normally eat anything until noon or later, and in the evening l stock up on food. I am currently striving to stop eating after 6 p. m. While I am experiencing positive results and finally shedding some extra weight, I have to admit that restraining myself from eating late is a lot harder than I expected. I attribute this to the larger amount of stress we tend to accumulate towards the end of the day.