How are bears so huge? If I ate nothing but berries and salmon I’d probably be really slender.
Bears tend to eat larger portions.
Depends on how much you ate, but similar to us, bears can be omnivores (though they tend to eat more meat type stuff): They’ll eat whatever they can, which can definitely include a lot of berries and fish, but they also eat nuts, roots, insects, honey, carrion, etc.
You might be underestimating how nutrient-rich a steady diet of salmon can be.
According to a ranger in Denali I spoke to: It depends on where the bears live in relation to the food. Coastal grizzlies are much larger because they have plentiful fat and protein sources like salmon. Inland grizzlies that live near glacial streams don’t have that food source and subsist on larger quantities of berries and the like and are noticeably smaller than their coastal counterparts.
So the food sources directly impact the sizes of the animals within the same species. The grizzly I saw in Denali appeared no larger than well-fed black bears I have encountered in the Sierra Nevada range. I say appeared, because it very well may have been larger. But it certainly didn’t look like the ones near the coast.
Kind of an answer, but I’m not a bear biologist.
I’ve heard that bears feeding on salmon will eat only the high-value parts of the salmon and abandon the rest to scavengers, so I can believe it. More efficient when there’s a lot.
They also eat apples, plums, quinces and other fruit. They can reach them standing on their hind legs and are also good climbers.