You know, sailors used to get scurvy because of C deficiency back a couple centuries ago. Vitamin C degrades really easily, but is there any way you can store it long term other than pills or tablets? I’m just wondering if it would have been possible to do this in the past with the technology that was available.
Fermented cabbage, AKA Sauerkraut.
- Smoked Meats
- Dried Meats
- Pemmican
- Jerky
To prevent scurvy you don’t need megadoses of vitamin c - you need tiny amounts of real meat with no glucose. Glucose and Vitamin C both compete on the glut-4 transporters - so in a modern high glucose (carbohydrate) diet, you need a bunch of vitamin C to win those competitions. In ancient diets glucose load wasn’t really a factor, so the meat is sufficient by itself.
The most common sufferers from sucurvy were sailors eating hard tack
and not eating much else. That is basically a fully carbohydrate diet, which means lots of glucose, which means lots of glut-4 competition for the little meat they did have in their rations.
Pemmican appears to be the ultimate survival food, fueling ancient expeditions across the americas and the arctic. It’s a mix of dried meat and suet (fat), very energy dense, provides complete nutrition, and extremely storable for years/decades as long as it is kept dry.
When I saw that picture I heard the *clack!*
Yeah sailors had jerky, smoked meats, and dried meats and still got scurvy. Hudson Bay colony had pemmican and still had scurvy outbreaks. The problem is most of the sources you noted destroy much of the vitamin c. Pemmican is a super food for macros but sucks for micros and still needed some forage to supplement.
On your glut-4 note: glut-4 is important for cellular transportation and diabetes can harm it’s use leading to oxidative stress but it’s not significant in uptake from food to serum which is the important part when we’re talking about dietary vitamin c.
Hudson Bay colony had pemmican and still had scurvy outbreaks.
This is a very interesting statement. I spent 15 minutes looking for references on hudson’s bay company and pemmican and scurvy and I couldn’t find anything. Can you point me at an account I can read please?
Vilhjalmu Stefansson’s book “The Fat of the land” chapter 10 calls out the pemmican wars (with hudson bay) specifically because pemmican was known to cure scurvy
A first nations history wiki saying the same https://gladue.usask.ca/node/2845
I’d love to read something more specific!
Updooting for Max Miller
In a living body impaled on a spike in Vlads front yard.
oranges, anything related to citrus family.
Jam is the classic way to preserve fruit.
Making jam involves heating the fruit, which destroys the ascorbic acid.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2021/february/finding-cure-scurvy
Gilbert Blane was appointed to the staff of Admiral George Brydges Rodney as Physician to the Fleet in 1779. Blane was a medical reformer who was convinced by Lind’s original experiment with citrus and appreciated the need for a practical way of storing them. After considerable experimentation, he determined that adding 10 percent “spirits of wine” (i.e., distilled ethyl alcohol) to lemon juice would preserve it almost indefinitely, without destroying its beneficial properties.
Vitamin C is heat sensitive but pickling is fine and a good reason why pickled cabbage is popular in places with cold winter. See kimchi and sauerkraut. Beyond that, it’s straight up foraging for greens and berries but that only really works if you’re moving a low enough group of people to allow foraged greens to be an option. Plenty of leafy greens allowed enough vitamin c to stave off scurvy for many ancient armies and sailors. The other option was uncooked organ meats.
Nice, thank you!
In fruit.
It’s not ancient but blackcurrant syrup aka ribena was originally developed for this purpose when other fruit supplies were running low in Britain during the war
Got a spruce tree? Grab the newer green tips on the branches and check it in some hot water. That tea is full of Vit C, and tastes like Christmas smells. And the tree isn’t going to go bad.
Cabbage.
Sauerkraut is apparently a reasonable way to store vitamin C for a long time. I imagine cabbage in its own doesn’t keep too well.
Cabbage does store better than most greens, but no, not as long as a preserve would.
Citrus.
British sailors got the moniker “limey” because they usually had limes specicially to ward off scurvy.
But funnily enough scurvy was also called “the English disease” in some languages.
Yes, but you can’t shelf citrus for like a year. I’m asking about long life preservation methods, not necessarily for sailors back in the day but in general.
Fresh meat contains vitamin C, as most animals can synthesize it themselves. Jerky is uncooked, just dried.
Fermentation can develop vitamin C, depending on what you’re fermenting. Cabbage is probably the most famous example, but pretty much everything you ferment produces at least a little.
Jam, or other preserved and/or dried fruits i would guess were common.
Jams are preserved by canning, which introduces heat, which destroys vitamin C.
Here’s a really interesting article on how it was discovered that citrus would help. They were also able to preserve citrus and citrus juice with alcohol. They could also turn it into a concentrated syrup without too much loss of vitamin C.
From what I just read, they didn’t do this, but dried citrus, when dried at a cool temperature, retains the majority of its vitamin C.
That’s a cool read, thanks for sharing
Yeah. Fruit! Lots of fruits have vitamin c.
Almost everything has vitamin C. Except for water, sand and anchovies.
I’m surprised by anchovies lacking it but you appear to be correct, even for raw anchovies. I tried looking at a handful of other raw fish and they also have no vitamin C.
I guess that makes sense, if fish could supply vitamin C I can’t imagine scurvy would’ve been a problem for long.
Dried chili peppers are a good source
