Why Polar Bears Are Fat, But Have Healthy Hearts

Polar bears appear to be genetically superior to humans when it comes to warding off heart disease, a new study on the hefty bears finds.

What’s remarkable is that polar bears are among the most fat-obsessed beasts in the animal kingdom.

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“The life of a polar bear revolves around fat,” according to Eline Lorenzen of UC Berkeley who worked on the study. It’s published in the latest issue of the journal Cell.

“Nursing cubs rely on milk that can be up to 30 percent fat and adults eat primarily blubber of marine mammal prey,” Lorenzen explained. “Polar bears have large fat deposits under their skin and, because they essentially live in a polar desert and don’t have access to fresh water for most of the year, rely on metabolic water, which is a byproduct of the breakdown of fat.”

Our culture is fat-phobic, valuing skinny people who ideally eat low-fat diets, so how is it that evolution has led to fat polar bears that eat mostly fat?

Lorenzen and her colleagues looked at the genomes of 79 polar bears from Greenland and 10 brown bears from different locations around the globe to answer that question and more.

They first determined that polar bears and brown bears diverged less than 500,000 years ago. That’s incredible, considering that prior theories estimated the two species parted evolutionary ways up to 5 million years ago.