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“As urban dwellers our diet, at least in North America and most of the Western World, is at least partly responsible for an epidemic of obesity, diabetes, metabolic syndrome — and these kinds of things.

“But what about the animals that are feeding on our garbage?”

What about the raccoons?

Garbage wasn’t always the featured item on the raccoon menu. Before humans came along and built sprawling cities, raccoons, as omnivores, roamed the forests, dining on crayfish and mollusks, birds’ eggs and hatchlings, berries and grubs and more. Extensive urbanization has made it almost impossible to find a pure, back-to-the-land raccoon population, so the Laurentian researchers relied on three clusters of raccoons — 60 in total — in areas with differing levels of exposure to human garbage for the study.

One group was in farm country west of Toronto, with limited garbage sources, the second in a conservation area with moderate garbage access and the third at the Toronto Zoo, home to African lions, yes, and an abundance of fast food joints, outdoor eating areas and overflowing garbage cans.

Not surprisingly, the zoo raccoons were, on average, two kilos heavier and registered double the blood glucose level of their counterparts with the less abundant garbage sources to feast upon. In other words, the fast-food cohort was suffering from hyperglycemia. The question for researchers is, what does it all mean?

Will the internet meme of the fat city raccoon stuck in a garbage can become the meme of a prematurely dead raccoon, felled by clogged arteries and a failed heart? Will a raccoon strain of diabetes cure Toronto of its raccoon scourge, or will a creature that has grown fat and numerous be better able, physically, than humans, to adapt to the crap we eat?

Science, for now, can’t say.

“We all know that there are negative consequences to having elevated blood-glucose levels,” Schulte-Hostedde says.

“But the ultimate question is: what does this mean in terms of the evolutionary changes these urban raccoons are undergoing, and are they adapting to this change in diet? And, if that is the case, are they suffering from the same kinds of health consequences that we might expect from a mammal with elevated glucose levels?

“And we just don’t know the answer yet.”

• Email: joconnor@nationalpost.com | Twitter: oconnorwrites