NFC North

Fat, inactive yet healthy: Could hibernating bears hold clues to treating diabetes in humans?

Just before hibernation season, brown bears eat a lot – as much as 20,000 daily calories, enough to put on around four kilos each day. And then they barely move, for months. This is part of bears’ adaptive strategies to survive long winters without food. If we humans did the same, we would gain dangerous amounts of weight, and then we would probably develop diabetes. But the remarkable metabolism of hibernating bears avoids that, and scientists are exploring what we can learn from them to improve our own health. "Many of us are absolutely fascinated by how bears are able to gain so much weight…