Human junk food is so bad for you that some monkeys living on Gibraltar who have been eating our junk food have turned to eating soil to cope with it. This is according to a study published in Scientific Reports.
Researchers studying the roughly 200–300 macaques on Gibraltar noticed that the more time monkeys spent around tourists, the more likely they were to engage in geophagy, i.e., elaborate dirt-eating. In some cases, they were seen eating dirt immediately after downing ice cream, chips, chocolate, or whatever junk a careless tourist dropped on the ground. Monkeys have had little to no human contact, and rarely, if ever, eat dirt.
Scientists suspect the soil acts as a kind of roughage that helps them digest all our indigestible junk food, which, in some cases, is probably closer to plastic than food. Tourist snacks are high in sugar, salt, fat, and dairy, which are completely out of sync with the macaques’ natural diet of plants and insects.
If eating too much of that junk can cause digestive distress and can disrupt your gut microbiome, just think what it might be doing to a monkey who is not used to eating food so rich in fats and sugars.
The monkeys were self-medicating.
There’s also a cultural layer. Different monkey troops like different types of soil. Some prefer red clay, others like roadside dirt that might have little flecks of tar in it, which also doesn’t sound great, but that’s another matter. It’s a kind of emergency adaptation that is not brought about by social pressures but by their mere proximity to humans, proving once again that we’ve created a deeply unhealthy aura to our civilization that is killing us and everything around us.
The Guardian reports that nearly a fifth of the macaques’ diet now comes from tourists’ junk food. The monkeys are doing their part to maintain by improvising a clever workaround. It is risky because soil, particularly roadside soil, can contain pollutants that carry long-term health effects, which remain unclear.
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