By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters) - In lush times,
orangutans on the island of Borneo gorge themselves on forest
fruits, packing on extra pounds in preparation for leaner years,
when they live off leaves and bark and their own stored fat.
This behavior of overeating is all too common in humans, but
rarely seen in nonhuman primates, and studying it may offer some
clues about obesity and eating disorders in people, U.S.
researchers said on Tuesday. "Orangutans make very interesting
models for studying human obesity because they are really the
only apes and potentially the only nonhuman primates in the wild
that actually store fat deposits," said Erin Vogel, an
evolutionary anthropologist from Rutgers University in New
Jersey, whose study appears in the journal Biology Letters.
"It's never been documented in any other species," Vogel said in
a telephone interview. Vogel and colleagues studied urine
samples from Bornean orangutans laboriously collected over a
period of five years by a team led Dr. Cheryl Kno