A new study attempts to explain why polar bears are healthy despite eating a diet that is high in fat. The animals appear to break many traditional dieting rules yet they do not suffer from heart disease, as humans would when eating a similar diet.

A genome comparison yields clues to why polar bears quickly evolved to cope with a diet rich in fat.

When the genomes of polar bears and brown bears were compared, it was noted that the polar bear is far younger as a species than previously thought. The polar bears diverged from brown bears less than 500,000 years ago.

Fast evolutionary tricks, such as in the genes that handle how fats are metabolized then transported back into the blood, have enabled polar bears to survive in the Artic, according to scientists.

Rasmus Nielsen, a UC Berkeley researcher who took part in the study, said in a statement, “The promise of comparative genomics is that we learn how other organisms deal with conditions that we also are exposed to.” Nielsen continued, “For example, polar bears have adapted genetically to a high fat diet that many people now impose on themselves. If we learn a bit about the genes that allows them to deal with that, perhaps that will give us tools to modulate human physiology down the line.”

Eline Lorenzen, one of the lead study authors and a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley, said in a statement, “For polar bears, profound obesity is a benign state…we wanted to understand how they are able to cope with that.”