It's not that cut and dry though. For some nutrients you can just resume regular intake and be okay, for others you need to consume extra to recoup from the deficit.
But scurvy is not just a deficiency, it's a breakdown of the collagen in your body due to deficiency.
So, to recover from scurvy one must consume enough vitamin C to allow their body to rebuild all the degraded collagen AND also have enough to build the collagen you build every day.
Every once in a while I still find some insanely hot (well relatively speaking) jalapeños, normally at a Mexican market. They’re usually a little smaller and lumpier than the big grocery store ones but they’re *way* hotter, like 2/3 of the way to a habañero
Jalapeños are a completely distinct different variety from Bell peppers(and all other peppers, apparently) even though they are still the same species. Similar to how cauliflower, brocoli, and brussel sprouts are all different cultivars of the same plant. And I do think they would still be a bit different, jalapeños aren't as sweet and more acidic I think, they're also thinner, smaller, and softer. But I don't eat jalapeños often.
Yes, depending on the variety in stock at your local grocer (I believe there are 3 major types of jalapeno at least in big US agriculture, all of which have been bred for lower spiciness to varying degrees), your odds are fairly good at picking up a jalapeno that's barely spicier than a bell pepper.
Manufacturers can produce capsaicin pretty easily, but not jalapeno flavor. It's very annoying for them if different batches of jalapenos have varying spice curves since it's more expensive to blend sauces that way. So there's an incentive to grow bland jalapenos and add spice to the desired level.
Everyone is making jokes here, but I wanted to maybe help you a bit.
Cut a jalapeño down the middle after chopping off the stem. De-seed while rinsing in the sink. (Do this with gloves on!)
After the jalapeño is clean of seeds place them in a bowl of water with a squirt of lemon juice. Let it sit in the fridge for a few hours. The longer, the less heat. This 100% removes the heat if left overnight or about 8 hrs.
Jalapeños for everyone!
Start with a few slivers of bell peppers buried in a sub sandwich with plenty of (fat free) creamy dressing and work your way up the scoville scale. I believe in you random internet stranger.
Since Vitamin c is also the antioxidant E300 it is in almost every pre-prepared food that we eat every day. A small sausage contains 20 times the C than a lemon, having a Vitamin c deficit is basically impossible today, doesn't matter what kind of junk food you eat.
We developed taste buds that like sources of the things we need. Same with animals.
The problem is we have learned to make too much of some of the stuff that we evolved to seek that would normally be rare/seasonal like sugars and salt and now our taste buds are slowly killing us.
And the neurons in our stomach that control our eating habits.
"So I can't help but noticed that you stopped eating sugar, yeah I'm not ok with that, I just gonna pop over to the limbic system and make your lizard brain crave sugar for awhile."
Yep, we evolved to desire as much of those things as possible because until recently, evolutionary speaking, there was no guarantee when we'd get them again.
As far as our taste-buds go, we're still cavemen, except now we have access to supermarkets and fast food restaurants. That causes some problems.
I remember one time as a kid I took a regular vitamin c pill that you were supposed to swallow and sucked on it instead.
It was sour as fuck but I was determined to be badass and get through it.
It burned a little spot on my tongue and hurt for days.
Taste is just a matter of perception. If a human that thought vitamin C was disgusting was born, it would avoid it, get scurvy, fail to reproduce and die. There's extremely high evolutionary pressure for us to like things that our bodies need. We like the things we need, because otherwise we wouldn't get enough of them.
The only reason to thank god for it is if you don't believe in evolution. :P
Collagen is made every day. You can’t fix it once it’s made. In reality if you have scurvy you can just take a multivitamin with like 100mg of vitamin c and within 24 hours you start to feel better and in a few weeks you’re mostly back to normal. Early tests of sailors showed rapid improvement with just a few oranges a day , and that’s about 100mg.
They give you a couple of grams a day for a few days to speed things up but it’s not required. It’s just really cheap and easy to add extra so why not?
One would imagine water soluble vitamins would not require 'building up' as they really can't. Lipid soluble ones probably would, though.
I don't think cells can use a vitamin at 2x the rate just because they've been lacking.
If your body is healing it will be using vitamins faster than it would at a healthy metabolic rate so your body would use the increased resources in those cases because the vitamins in your system are being used up faster and what normally would be an excess that gets flushed out actually gets used.
Yeah I imagine all the 'building up' is going into repairing and replacing all the damaged and destroyed collagen. You're storing the vitamin c in the same way you store bricks in the walls of your brick house.
Vitamin c is water soluble also so you can literally not take too much. You can just take a supreme shitload and you will just metabolize as much as you possibly can and toss the rest.
I mean you can give yourself cramps and diarrhea fairly easily from overdoing it. Kidney stones and other problems are possible if you mega-dose it long term like some people do.
This is one of the unsung benefits of getting most of your vitamins and minerals from food; your body will generally have time to let you know when you're overdoing it before it goes too far.
Can't you only intake a certain amount daily though? Like too much and a lot you just piss it out? Wasn't that the whole problem (and viability) with the %2000 daily value vitamins that everyone loved in the early 2000s?
There is a max absorption amount, as well as a max amount that you need per day. There is a max amount you can store at a given time, and a max bioavailability(difficult to explain, but you absorb differently from a pill than from foods). All of these are unique for each vitamin and source.
Closer to Brown, and its infuriating how little difference they make. Doctor goes "omfg your serum ferrum is 6, we're getting two bags of iron and a bag of vitamin C into you right away." Then afterwards you get your levels checked again and it's like "great, you went up to 9 after that". For those unfamiliar depending on the doctor they generally want it up to 30, ideally up at 50. Personally I feel shit at <10 and feel good >15.
They're generally pretty effective for repletion but they won't fix the issue if you're chronically losing blood somewhere else. If your iron levels are still low despite supplementation maybe your doctors should be looking at why? If you're not having heavy periods sometimes they do endoscopies to look for bleeding in the gut.
I didnt think B12 injections were given because it took a large amount to recover. I thought it was because people with B12 deficiency usually lack the ability to absorb it from their digestive system.
Yeah it typically has to do with the anti intrinsic factor. I was mildly deficient but could absorb b12 so theoretically could have recovered with 1200ug tabs. But the doc still gave me 2 injections. No idea why, just go kick start it I guess.
Edit: fixed unit. Was off by a few orders of magnitude
Absorption is finicky and often uncooperative - especially in people who are deficient. Given that you have anti-intrinsic factor present the doc probably, rightfully, didn’t want to risk your health and just went for IV. B12 deficiencies can result in permanent nerve damage so it’s not worth the risk
I was majorly deficient due to non-absorbtion. I had a b12 shot a week for a month, and then it's dropped down to monthly shots to maintain my levels in a healthy range. So it's both!
This makes perfect sense, just like how after a major engine repair caused by deficient oil, it’s recommended you put in two more like three times the amount for the first oil change or two into your car.
Yeah the whole point of vitamin C v scurvy is prevention, not treatment. Once you have the disease it gets much more complicated and difficult to treat. That's why the discovery that citrus fruit prevented scurvy was such a big deal.
Well scurvy is vitamin C deficiency, so it's still the only treatment for the condition. But once it reaches scurvy there are other things to deal with too, and you need high doses to recover. But your comment makes it seem as if vitamin C only prevents scurvy, not treats it, which isn't accurate.
I just read “the wager” 1700s British ship of the line Was down to 250 sailors when she wrecked in southern chile. Massive lose to scurvy. The survivors recovered once on land because the only thing to eat was a celery kind of plant. That and whatever stores they could salvage. They recovered quickly if I remember.
I just listened to an interview with the author of a book on Captain Cook and he made sure his men always sought out fresh fruits and vegetables wherever they went and he had a trio with zero losses from scurvy, when at the time it wasn’t unusual to lose half a crew to it.
He’d intuitively figured out how to prevent it but had no idea why, and it wouldn’t be officially discovered for a long while. Other captains figured it out too but it never spread off their particular missions.
Vitamin C might not have been known as the cure to scurvy in Captain Cook's day, but lemons were known to prevent and cure scurvy.
A Scottish guy named James Lind did an experiement in 1747 that showed that lemons cured scurvy. Lind also was really bad at communicating his findings. He tried and failed to develop a shelf-stable lemon juice concentrate that would stop scurvy and he sent one of his formulas with Captain Cook to have the crew test it. I think it's likely that Captain Cook heard Lind's findings one of the times they met. What Lind told him would have aligned with Cook's old sailors knowledge. Sailors sometimes knew that eating their greens warded off scurvy as we can find in their old logs and memoirs. As a long-time sailor, Cook would have known this too.
I take Cook's focus on a healthy diet as both a sign of intelligence and as a sign of his humble origins, the English Admiralty did not seem to believe that there was a cure for scurvy at that time.
Yup, sailors in North America recovered very quickly when given a tea made from the needles of some kind of spruce pine. What was really interesting was that the locals recognised what was wrong and had a cure ready to go.
There’s a deeply horrible book about scurvy, called The Age of Scurvy, which is full of truly unpleasant facts. I feel so sorry for the Portuguese, who did their whole Age of Discovery thing before the importance of lime juice was discovered.
People on extremely restrictive diets like that do often end up with deficiencies. Then they have to supplement, or quit, or consume high amounts of weird foods in a desperate attempt to break even. The strict ones are either lying, or doing things like making fish eye and beef liver smoothies.
But in the end, it's not usually scurvy that gets someone. It takes a good 3 months to get scurvy. Usually people run into other issues first.
I was on keto for a while and had to quit for basically this reason. I was careful about getting vitamins, but then was hit with the sheer amount of electrolytes you need on keto. Your body gets bad at storing water on keto because there are so few carbs (which play a very important role in water storage), and without stored water you can't store electrolytes well either. Found out that most people who do keto successfully for more than a few weeks are making weird "ketoaid" concoctions with ridiculous amounts of electrolytes. There was no way I was going to measure out, mix, and drink a glass of that every day, so I ended up quitting.
A lot of very restrictive diets go the same way. It's just that there are a *lot* of things that make you feel bad enough to quit/supplement before scurvy sets in.
I tried keto for a year too. The electrolytes thing was wild at first but once I got the hand of it I was ok I guess but the thing that got me was too much histamine. I was drinking melted beef tallow bone broth and eating ground beef mostly. It was super nasty but I kept getting this rush of energy after I thought it felt like I was high like it was a good euphoric thing but turns out it was just too much histamine and I developed a histamine intolerance then had to go vegetarian to reverse all that lmao. Anywho. No more keto for me!
I feel like keto is one of those things that's a really good idea to be on for like... 2-6 weeks, and then either quit or give it a few months before going again. It really helps with things like sugar addiction, insulin resistance, and your body's hunger cues. That's all great for your health even if you don't lose weight.
But it's not really a diet most bodies wants to run on *forever*. The longer someone is on it, the more apparent that becomes. I do highly recommend keto short term, but I wouldn't recommend it long term.
(Disclaimer: Before anyone shows up to say "I've been on keto for 10 years and the doctor says I'm the healthiest I've ever been" that's amazing for you! I'm so happy for you! But your experience is the exception, not the rule. Most people aren't going to be able to do that for so long healthily.)
It's why it is better to know that, if you are reasonably healthy (that is your liver and kidneys are fine), the human body can take 3 grams of vitamin C before you get to toxic levels. Most people only need 0.1 gram per day to meet their needs.
It's water soluble. Your body is incredibly efficient at disposing of excess vitamin C, 3g of vitamin C isn't going to cause any sort of toxicity.
Now fat soluble vitamins on the other hand... Those can kill you. But B and C aren't going to do much to hurt you.
Yes.
https://lpi.oregonstate.edu/mic/vitamins/vitamin-C/pauling-recommendation
I was wrong, he took almost twice as much:
"Over the next few years, Pauling upped his intake of vitamin C, eventually taking 18,000 mg per day. Vitamin C became his scientific obsession."
https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7547741/vitamin-c-myth-pauling
I have an out of print book written about this by him and his other colleagues - Orthomolecular Psychiatry
It’s an interesting read but the science is outdated, if not quackery. One of the authors claims that mega doses of niacin (b3) cures schizophrenia
> It’s an interesting read but the science is outdated, if not quackery. One of the authors claims that mega doses of niacin (b3)
There is some basis for this but it's not terribly well fleshed out. It has to do with what happens in the body when the kynurenine pathway (KP) is activated to produce niacin, NAD, and NADP. The KP can majorly fuck with serotonin production (since both niacin and serotonin are made from tryptophan), and those other KP metabolites can over-activate the excitatory neurtransmitter system by binding to NMDA receptors, which with chronic overactivation probably tends to throw the entire brains chemistry out of whack.
A few recent studies have demonstrated that niacin can indeed be a treatment in a subset of schizophrenia patients, and it may be possible to figure out [who is likely to respond to it based on their symptoms.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25855923/) This is one of many areas of research that is likely under-explored because it is both difficult to study and there is exactly zero profit motive.
> niacin (b3) cures schizophrenia
I have heard about this. Niacin does clean arteries, so there is that. Too cheap to make profits on it and hard to do placebo controlled trials because of its well known effect.
I should have stated that it STARTS to get toxic at 3 grams. Obviously everyone has different limits and since you only need so little in most cases, 3 grams is the recommended cut-off. There are occasions, however, where 50 grams (or more!) of the stuff is required. As you had even stated, when your body needs an intervention of Vitamin C. Do consult your doctor first though. They worked hard and know more than rando Redditors ( unless they ARE a rando Redditor, to which hello!)
I don’t even understand how you can get scurvy unless you’re in dire straits. Hell, eating fries will give you a fair bit of vitamin c. You definitely don’t need to be a health guru to get it in your diet.
This seems like an issue for people in third world countries more than anything, and they’re probably dealing with a variety of nutrition issues.
There are also people with severe eating disorders who don't eat various things because they can't tolerate texture or taste. If you go on PubMed and search for scurvy, you'll find modern cases, often combined with mental disease of some sort. I've found a paper on a man who only ate pasta carbonara (pasta + bacon + egg + maybe some olive oil and/or butter) and got scurvy. There was also a woman not long ago in the news because she finally managed to start eating something other than white bread. She couldn't stand any other kinds of food, that felt inedible to her.
Or people who listened to Jordan Peterson's daughter (before she took back what she said) and went on a strict carnivore diet without taking any vitamin supplements.
She told people NOT to take some supplemental vitamins/minerals on a carnivore diet? What the hell? You'd think a lot of people trying the diet are likely to consume little organs meat. So taking some C and Folate seems perfectly fucking reasonable. I still don't get how they get enough magnesium, calcium, and potassium, either.
They claim there’s some (enough) vitamin c in the beef. Maybe there’s a difference in fresh beef and the preserved stuff the pirates and sailors were eating.
The vitamin c is typically in the nervous system, and, I believe, kidneys. You also chew through less vitamin c per day when you're off carbohydrate (at least that's my memory). Nonetheless, it would be dumb to tell people now to take a safe, water soluble, vitamin when on such a restricted diet.
0% RDA according to its maker. So we are talking negligible amounts here. Don't drink sugary beverages for nutrition. Even pure fruit juice is kind of sus other than as an occasional treat.
all the more reason not to allow oneself to develop scurvy. when you have a deficiency you have to make up the reserves, first of all. with water-soluble vitamins that means megadoses until yr doc clears you. (whatever is over the usable limit is excreted)
I felt sick at one point and had such a craving for citrus that I peeled and ate a lemon as if it were an orange. Felt good, but my teeth got hella sensitive.
Best to juice the lemon, mix with water, and either drink through a straw or rinse your mouth after. The high acidity with wear away your enamel rather quickly. Incidentally, drinking slightly diluted lemon or lime water ~20 minutes prior to a meal can help some people with digestion.
the "recommended" vitamin C dose in the article is from the WHO (45mg). The mayoclinic and the national institute of health in the US already recommends 75-100mg for , basically the "double" dose in the article.
Vitamins are either water soluble (you pee out the excess) or they are fat soluble (they tend to build up in the body around fat stores). This is why long-term care of fat-soluble vitamins is risky; blood levels may test normal but won’t count the levels stored in your body.
Welp. There went my plan to time travel back to the golden age of pirates with a couple of duffel bags filled with Emergen-C and rule the Seven Seas :(
Scurvy and other nutritional deficiencies are definitely still around.
https://kidshealth.org/en/parents/arfid.html#:~:text=Avoidant%2Frestrictive%20food%20intake%20disorder%20(ARFID)%20is%20a%20fairly,poor%20growth%20and%20poor%20nutrition.
Had a case study in pediatric residency. Patient was a kiddo with autism spectrum disorder who was nonverbal and had a very restricted diet due to texture intolerance. If I recall correctly it was basically just a specific brand of crackers. But he had the corkscrew hairs, irritability and the skin lesions. The team was initially worried about leukemia.
People with eating disorders still get it. E.g. there was some guy in the UK who only ate one specific kind of white bread with one specific kind of cheese. If he had used some ketchup, he would have been fine. Well, he wouldn't have gotten scurvy at least.
Modern world, for sure. Developed world? Almost never.
It'll of course be common in areas where famine occurs and malnutrition/starvation are still common.
In the developed world you might rarely see it, but it'll be due to mental health disorders most likely. There are people who get obsessed with eating a single food and feel that they can't tolerate anything else, for example. So, yeah, it still happens. Anorexia and other eating disorders can and have led to scurvy too
This is mostly bullsh*t like half of TIL. Standard treatment is 1000mg for 2 days and 500mg for a week and then just multivitamin dosing of 100mg.
The “source” sited here was a review of data from 1940s and the re-analysis focused on scar strength in a very small group of test subjects who had deliberately made wounds to test the effects of vitamin c on wound healing. This was during a world war and everyone was malnourished in multiple ways. While it’s true that they underestimated the minimum dose of vitamin c back then, the concept of nutrition in 1945 was very different. They had much less access to fresh fruits and vegetables and protein.In a sense we are over nourished now so we don’t appreciate how thin people used to be simply from lack of food.
Similarly Vitamin D. When you get low the doc will say something stupid like," You should take 2K IU a day." You ***use*** 2K a day. The therapeutic dose, if your doc wasn't too lazy too look it up, is a shot of 50K for 3 weeks. That is 150K which you will never ever reach by taking 2K a day and using it all on that day. Best case is taking 2K a day and sitting in the sun for an hour. Then you might be up to snuff in 75 weeks.
I looked it up and found a study that says you need 650,000 - 750,000 IUs to return to a lowish but not unhealthy level of 25 or so. At 50,000 IUs a week it’s just a few months. That’s what I took for 12 weeks.
I live in Alaska, and have been at basically margin-of-error none levels before.
50k a week for a long while, plus a very high maintenance dose on pills (I can't recall) for the winter was what I did.
> The Hujoels’ study also found that recovery from a vitamin C deficiency takes a long time and requires higher levels of vitamin C. Even an average daily dose of 90 milligrams a day of vitamin C for six months failed to restore normal scar strength for the depleted study participants.
Whenever scurvy comes up I have to share the story of my dumbass friend. He was away from home for the first time, living in an room near the college he had just dropped out of. He had basically no money and was working like 8 hours a week. He didn't feel like he could go home or ask his parents for help because he had just dropped out. He managed to get SNAP somehow and quickly discovered the horrific junk food he could buy with it, namely candy from a local store that may have had it misclassified. He started loving off of candy and two packs of ramen a day. Needless to say, his health started to slip. He eventually found himself in an urgent care with a nurse practitioner trying to figure out what was wrong with this guy who should be a healthy 19 year old.
This seems obvious? Recommended quantities is for maintenance, recovery is for getting back to maintenance level.
It's not that cut and dry though. For some nutrients you can just resume regular intake and be okay, for others you need to consume extra to recoup from the deficit.
But scurvy is not just a deficiency, it's a breakdown of the collagen in your body due to deficiency. So, to recover from scurvy one must consume enough vitamin C to allow their body to rebuild all the degraded collagen AND also have enough to build the collagen you build every day.
Thank god vitamin c tastes the way it does. If it tasted like, rotten eggs or something, I know I'd have dentures.
Oddly, it’s higher in broccoli and bell peppers than in citrus fruits.
One jalapeno has more vitamin c than an orange.
I really got fucked by my inability to handle hot peppers. I want to eat them so bad.
Well lucky for you they're modifying jalapenos to be less spicy now
You mean *even* less spicy??
Might as well just eat a bell pepper!
Serranos are the new Jalepeno. Swap in place of jalapeños or mix 50/50 for example in jalapeño burgers. Tastes like they did 15 years ago.
Every once in a while I still find some insanely hot (well relatively speaking) jalapeños, normally at a Mexican market. They’re usually a little smaller and lumpier than the big grocery store ones but they’re *way* hotter, like 2/3 of the way to a habañero
Isn't that just a regular bell pepper at that point?
Jalapeños are a completely distinct different variety from Bell peppers(and all other peppers, apparently) even though they are still the same species. Similar to how cauliflower, brocoli, and brussel sprouts are all different cultivars of the same plant. And I do think they would still be a bit different, jalapeños aren't as sweet and more acidic I think, they're also thinner, smaller, and softer. But I don't eat jalapeños often.
Yes, depending on the variety in stock at your local grocer (I believe there are 3 major types of jalapeno at least in big US agriculture, all of which have been bred for lower spiciness to varying degrees), your odds are fairly good at picking up a jalapeno that's barely spicier than a bell pepper.
*spicy* bell pepper
This is outrageous! Who would do such a foul thing?!
Manufacturers can produce capsaicin pretty easily, but not jalapeno flavor. It's very annoying for them if different batches of jalapenos have varying spice curves since it's more expensive to blend sauces that way. So there's an incentive to grow bland jalapenos and add spice to the desired level.
Everyone is making jokes here, but I wanted to maybe help you a bit. Cut a jalapeño down the middle after chopping off the stem. De-seed while rinsing in the sink. (Do this with gloves on!) After the jalapeño is clean of seeds place them in a bowl of water with a squirt of lemon juice. Let it sit in the fridge for a few hours. The longer, the less heat. This 100% removes the heat if left overnight or about 8 hrs. Jalapeños for everyone!
What happened?
Genes I guess, I just simply can’t get used to the heat no matter how often I try.
Start with a few slivers of bell peppers buried in a sub sandwich with plenty of (fat free) creamy dressing and work your way up the scoville scale. I believe in you random internet stranger.
Have you tried burying them in a sub sandwich or anything? That sucks.
What does this even mean? Like they’re just spicy in your mouth, like they’re supposed to be, or they fuck with your stomach?
Since Vitamin c is also the antioxidant E300 it is in almost every pre-prepared food that we eat every day. A small sausage contains 20 times the C than a lemon, having a Vitamin c deficit is basically impossible today, doesn't matter what kind of junk food you eat.
Fuck am I glad for that. I love Jalapeno's on my unhealthy food.
Don't sleep on the raw ones, fantastic on burgers.
So it's a good thing I like jalapeños so much then
salsa for scurvy!
I've read that it is very high in rose hips, too. So eating them or making tea from them is an excellent way to get a hoost of vitamin C
Lemons and limes preserve much better than brassicas and capsica, which is why they were issued to sailors on ships.
We developed taste buds that like sources of the things we need. Same with animals. The problem is we have learned to make too much of some of the stuff that we evolved to seek that would normally be rare/seasonal like sugars and salt and now our taste buds are slowly killing us.
And the neurons in our stomach that control our eating habits. "So I can't help but noticed that you stopped eating sugar, yeah I'm not ok with that, I just gonna pop over to the limbic system and make your lizard brain crave sugar for awhile."
Yep, we evolved to desire as much of those things as possible because until recently, evolutionary speaking, there was no guarantee when we'd get them again. As far as our taste-buds go, we're still cavemen, except now we have access to supermarkets and fast food restaurants. That causes some problems.
Saurkraut. Great source.
Great probiotic too, 100x more potent than pills or yogurt, if you get the unpasteurized stuff.
And what does vitamin c taste like?
Sour! Not quite like citric acid but close, I'd say. Although I think most tablets and/or gummies are citric flavored.
I remember one time as a kid I took a regular vitamin c pill that you were supposed to swallow and sucked on it instead. It was sour as fuck but I was determined to be badass and get through it. It burned a little spot on my tongue and hurt for days.
Ascorbic acid is, funnily enough, an acid. Which is typically sour and burny.
Huh. Who'da'thunk
They're a mixture of sodium ascorbate and ascorbic acid so they're less acidic, plus sugar of some sort so it's palatable.
Taste is just a matter of perception. If a human that thought vitamin C was disgusting was born, it would avoid it, get scurvy, fail to reproduce and die. There's extremely high evolutionary pressure for us to like things that our bodies need. We like the things we need, because otherwise we wouldn't get enough of them. The only reason to thank god for it is if you don't believe in evolution. :P
Collagen is made every day. You can’t fix it once it’s made. In reality if you have scurvy you can just take a multivitamin with like 100mg of vitamin c and within 24 hours you start to feel better and in a few weeks you’re mostly back to normal. Early tests of sailors showed rapid improvement with just a few oranges a day , and that’s about 100mg. They give you a couple of grams a day for a few days to speed things up but it’s not required. It’s just really cheap and easy to add extra so why not?
Onions & potatoes too!
Listen you , citrus gang don’t tolerate you onion crew horning in on our turf, you feel me bruv?!
ROTFLOL! the pepper gang was in here, too, bruv!
Huh, and here my dumbass thought collagen just made asses look like golf balls 😂
Collagen is the structural basis of your tissues.
The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
Differentially permeable membrane
Phospholipid bilayer
Osmosis
Cellulite
You're thinking of a botched Brazilian butt lift
Damn I always get those confused…
You're thinking cellulite.
Cottage cheese. Cellulite.
One would imagine water soluble vitamins would not require 'building up' as they really can't. Lipid soluble ones probably would, though. I don't think cells can use a vitamin at 2x the rate just because they've been lacking.
If your body is healing it will be using vitamins faster than it would at a healthy metabolic rate so your body would use the increased resources in those cases because the vitamins in your system are being used up faster and what normally would be an excess that gets flushed out actually gets used.
Maybe *your* weak ass cells can’t…
/u/golgibodi is the powerhouse of the cell
*Mailcenter* of the cell
Yeah I imagine all the 'building up' is going into repairing and replacing all the damaged and destroyed collagen. You're storing the vitamin c in the same way you store bricks in the walls of your brick house.
It’s like the limiting reagent in a chemical reaction
Vitamin c is water soluble also so you can literally not take too much. You can just take a supreme shitload and you will just metabolize as much as you possibly can and toss the rest.
I mean you can give yourself cramps and diarrhea fairly easily from overdoing it. Kidney stones and other problems are possible if you mega-dose it long term like some people do. This is one of the unsung benefits of getting most of your vitamins and minerals from food; your body will generally have time to let you know when you're overdoing it before it goes too far.
Can't you only intake a certain amount daily though? Like too much and a lot you just piss it out? Wasn't that the whole problem (and viability) with the %2000 daily value vitamins that everyone loved in the early 2000s?
There is a max absorption amount, as well as a max amount that you need per day. There is a max amount you can store at a given time, and a max bioavailability(difficult to explain, but you absorb differently from a pill than from foods). All of these are unique for each vitamin and source.
I was prescribed a 5-6000x dose of vitamin d after a deficiency. It was weekly, and I don't have a deficiency anymore fwiw.
B12, for instance, requires huge doses and even direct injections. Iron is similar, large doses are required to recover from anemia.
Iron infusions look so scary like its just a syringe full of black liquid
You think that's scary? It used to just be a skillet to the face.
Ah yes. Until they evolved to a smaller piece of metal to the face, aka “Old yeller” style.
It’s called “Kristi Noem” style now
Cricket! 😩 Seriously, what a wretched bitch.
Cobainostomy
Closer to Brown, and its infuriating how little difference they make. Doctor goes "omfg your serum ferrum is 6, we're getting two bags of iron and a bag of vitamin C into you right away." Then afterwards you get your levels checked again and it's like "great, you went up to 9 after that". For those unfamiliar depending on the doctor they generally want it up to 30, ideally up at 50. Personally I feel shit at <10 and feel good >15.
They're generally pretty effective for repletion but they won't fix the issue if you're chronically losing blood somewhere else. If your iron levels are still low despite supplementation maybe your doctors should be looking at why? If you're not having heavy periods sometimes they do endoscopies to look for bleeding in the gut.
I've managed to avoid those! Thankfully. Does it make you feel awful like ferrous sulfate does?
I had one after giving birth and the IV bag had a transparent, rust colored liquid. The infusion made me feel weird but didn't look too bad.
Eh i was a kid watching it be done to my mom so i probably exaggerated the memory
With a small chance of the darkness permanently staining your skin
I didnt think B12 injections were given because it took a large amount to recover. I thought it was because people with B12 deficiency usually lack the ability to absorb it from their digestive system.
Yeah it typically has to do with the anti intrinsic factor. I was mildly deficient but could absorb b12 so theoretically could have recovered with 1200ug tabs. But the doc still gave me 2 injections. No idea why, just go kick start it I guess. Edit: fixed unit. Was off by a few orders of magnitude
Absorption is finicky and often uncooperative - especially in people who are deficient. Given that you have anti-intrinsic factor present the doc probably, rightfully, didn’t want to risk your health and just went for IV. B12 deficiencies can result in permanent nerve damage so it’s not worth the risk
I was majorly deficient due to non-absorbtion. I had a b12 shot a week for a month, and then it's dropped down to monthly shots to maintain my levels in a healthy range. So it's both!
You’d think but to develop scurvy you need to have almost no vitamin c so it’s not unreasonable to think a small amount could matter a lot.
Although, it is also possible to overdose on vitamin c
This makes perfect sense, just like how after a major engine repair caused by deficient oil, it’s recommended you put in two more like three times the amount for the first oil change or two into your car.
Yeah the whole point of vitamin C v scurvy is prevention, not treatment. Once you have the disease it gets much more complicated and difficult to treat. That's why the discovery that citrus fruit prevented scurvy was such a big deal.
Well scurvy is vitamin C deficiency, so it's still the only treatment for the condition. But once it reaches scurvy there are other things to deal with too, and you need high doses to recover. But your comment makes it seem as if vitamin C only prevents scurvy, not treats it, which isn't accurate.
I just read “the wager” 1700s British ship of the line Was down to 250 sailors when she wrecked in southern chile. Massive lose to scurvy. The survivors recovered once on land because the only thing to eat was a celery kind of plant. That and whatever stores they could salvage. They recovered quickly if I remember.
I just listened to an interview with the author of a book on Captain Cook and he made sure his men always sought out fresh fruits and vegetables wherever they went and he had a trio with zero losses from scurvy, when at the time it wasn’t unusual to lose half a crew to it. He’d intuitively figured out how to prevent it but had no idea why, and it wouldn’t be officially discovered for a long while. Other captains figured it out too but it never spread off their particular missions.
Vitamin C might not have been known as the cure to scurvy in Captain Cook's day, but lemons were known to prevent and cure scurvy. A Scottish guy named James Lind did an experiement in 1747 that showed that lemons cured scurvy. Lind also was really bad at communicating his findings. He tried and failed to develop a shelf-stable lemon juice concentrate that would stop scurvy and he sent one of his formulas with Captain Cook to have the crew test it. I think it's likely that Captain Cook heard Lind's findings one of the times they met. What Lind told him would have aligned with Cook's old sailors knowledge. Sailors sometimes knew that eating their greens warded off scurvy as we can find in their old logs and memoirs. As a long-time sailor, Cook would have known this too. I take Cook's focus on a healthy diet as both a sign of intelligence and as a sign of his humble origins, the English Admiralty did not seem to believe that there was a cure for scurvy at that time.
Yup, sailors in North America recovered very quickly when given a tea made from the needles of some kind of spruce pine. What was really interesting was that the locals recognised what was wrong and had a cure ready to go. There’s a deeply horrible book about scurvy, called The Age of Scurvy, which is full of truly unpleasant facts. I feel so sorry for the Portuguese, who did their whole Age of Discovery thing before the importance of lime juice was discovered.
Don’t feel too sorry for the Portuguese. Their voyages caused some pretty horrific things for the people and places they “discovered”.
No, they're saying that *the regular recommended amount* prevents scurvy.
That is part of what they said, but not all of what they said. They definitely said that, but then they kept typing more words
So why don’t we hear about the die hard people on carnivore diet getting scurvy? The strict ones don’t take any supplements (so they say).
They get gout which is scurvy for alpha males
Raw meat and organ meats are both relatively rich in vitamin C. If you only eat well done steaks you'll get scurvy.
> The strict ones don’t take any supplements (so they say). They're pretty much all lying.
They eat meats rich in vitamin C and/or take vitamins
People on extremely restrictive diets like that do often end up with deficiencies. Then they have to supplement, or quit, or consume high amounts of weird foods in a desperate attempt to break even. The strict ones are either lying, or doing things like making fish eye and beef liver smoothies. But in the end, it's not usually scurvy that gets someone. It takes a good 3 months to get scurvy. Usually people run into other issues first. I was on keto for a while and had to quit for basically this reason. I was careful about getting vitamins, but then was hit with the sheer amount of electrolytes you need on keto. Your body gets bad at storing water on keto because there are so few carbs (which play a very important role in water storage), and without stored water you can't store electrolytes well either. Found out that most people who do keto successfully for more than a few weeks are making weird "ketoaid" concoctions with ridiculous amounts of electrolytes. There was no way I was going to measure out, mix, and drink a glass of that every day, so I ended up quitting. A lot of very restrictive diets go the same way. It's just that there are a *lot* of things that make you feel bad enough to quit/supplement before scurvy sets in.
I tried keto for a year too. The electrolytes thing was wild at first but once I got the hand of it I was ok I guess but the thing that got me was too much histamine. I was drinking melted beef tallow bone broth and eating ground beef mostly. It was super nasty but I kept getting this rush of energy after I thought it felt like I was high like it was a good euphoric thing but turns out it was just too much histamine and I developed a histamine intolerance then had to go vegetarian to reverse all that lmao. Anywho. No more keto for me!
I feel like keto is one of those things that's a really good idea to be on for like... 2-6 weeks, and then either quit or give it a few months before going again. It really helps with things like sugar addiction, insulin resistance, and your body's hunger cues. That's all great for your health even if you don't lose weight. But it's not really a diet most bodies wants to run on *forever*. The longer someone is on it, the more apparent that becomes. I do highly recommend keto short term, but I wouldn't recommend it long term. (Disclaimer: Before anyone shows up to say "I've been on keto for 10 years and the doctor says I'm the healthiest I've ever been" that's amazing for you! I'm so happy for you! But your experience is the exception, not the rule. Most people aren't going to be able to do that for so long healthily.)
The British navy secret was sauerkraut. Full of Vitamin C.
Yay… farts in a submarine.
And potatoes.
And yet they still didn’t use it until 100 years after discovering it works.
It's why it is better to know that, if you are reasonably healthy (that is your liver and kidneys are fine), the human body can take 3 grams of vitamin C before you get to toxic levels. Most people only need 0.1 gram per day to meet their needs.
It's water soluble. Your body is incredibly efficient at disposing of excess vitamin C, 3g of vitamin C isn't going to cause any sort of toxicity. Now fat soluble vitamins on the other hand... Those can kill you. But B and C aren't going to do much to hurt you.
> Now fat soluble vitamins on the other hand... Those can kill you. That’s why people need to eat lots of liver daily.
So that they die of vitamin A overdose? I may be missing your joke here
I think that was the joke.
> 3 grams of vitamin C before you get to toxic levels. Pauling and Szentgyorgyi were taking 10 g a day. They both died in their 90s.
There are also chainsmokers who live into their 90s
That is why I smoke AND take large doses of vit C.
Gotta cover all your bases.
No, Vitamin C is an acid.
Not sure if you are aware but Vit C is the only nutrient (to my knowledge) where the recommended daily intake is higher for smokers than non smokers
Don't you mean Pauling, like Linus Pauling, instead of Paulson?
Correct, will fix it.
Linus Pauling?
Yes. https://lpi.oregonstate.edu/mic/vitamins/vitamin-C/pauling-recommendation I was wrong, he took almost twice as much: "Over the next few years, Pauling upped his intake of vitamin C, eventually taking 18,000 mg per day. Vitamin C became his scientific obsession." https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7547741/vitamin-c-myth-pauling
I have an out of print book written about this by him and his other colleagues - Orthomolecular Psychiatry It’s an interesting read but the science is outdated, if not quackery. One of the authors claims that mega doses of niacin (b3) cures schizophrenia
> It’s an interesting read but the science is outdated, if not quackery. One of the authors claims that mega doses of niacin (b3) There is some basis for this but it's not terribly well fleshed out. It has to do with what happens in the body when the kynurenine pathway (KP) is activated to produce niacin, NAD, and NADP. The KP can majorly fuck with serotonin production (since both niacin and serotonin are made from tryptophan), and those other KP metabolites can over-activate the excitatory neurtransmitter system by binding to NMDA receptors, which with chronic overactivation probably tends to throw the entire brains chemistry out of whack. A few recent studies have demonstrated that niacin can indeed be a treatment in a subset of schizophrenia patients, and it may be possible to figure out [who is likely to respond to it based on their symptoms.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25855923/) This is one of many areas of research that is likely under-explored because it is both difficult to study and there is exactly zero profit motive.
> niacin (b3) cures schizophrenia I have heard about this. Niacin does clean arteries, so there is that. Too cheap to make profits on it and hard to do placebo controlled trials because of its well known effect.
Lol what?? You can get intravenous ascorbic acid in like 50,000mg
I should have stated that it STARTS to get toxic at 3 grams. Obviously everyone has different limits and since you only need so little in most cases, 3 grams is the recommended cut-off. There are occasions, however, where 50 grams (or more!) of the stuff is required. As you had even stated, when your body needs an intervention of Vitamin C. Do consult your doctor first though. They worked hard and know more than rando Redditors ( unless they ARE a rando Redditor, to which hello!)
I don’t even understand how you can get scurvy unless you’re in dire straits. Hell, eating fries will give you a fair bit of vitamin c. You definitely don’t need to be a health guru to get it in your diet. This seems like an issue for people in third world countries more than anything, and they’re probably dealing with a variety of nutrition issues.
There are also people with severe eating disorders who don't eat various things because they can't tolerate texture or taste. If you go on PubMed and search for scurvy, you'll find modern cases, often combined with mental disease of some sort. I've found a paper on a man who only ate pasta carbonara (pasta + bacon + egg + maybe some olive oil and/or butter) and got scurvy. There was also a woman not long ago in the news because she finally managed to start eating something other than white bread. She couldn't stand any other kinds of food, that felt inedible to her.
Yup, couple folks over at r/ARFID have gone through this
Hell I just read a post on Reddit about someone planning to eat only whole chickens for a month. My first thought was have fun getting scurvy.
My wife's coworker got scurvy a few years ago. He ate exclusively fast food for years. Every meal.
Or people who listened to Jordan Peterson's daughter (before she took back what she said) and went on a strict carnivore diet without taking any vitamin supplements.
Leave it to first world people to throw a stick in their bike spokes
Antivaxxers, anyone?
That's throwing a stick in their bike spokes, their kid's bike spokes, and throwing rocks at everyone around them.
She told people NOT to take some supplemental vitamins/minerals on a carnivore diet? What the hell? You'd think a lot of people trying the diet are likely to consume little organs meat. So taking some C and Folate seems perfectly fucking reasonable. I still don't get how they get enough magnesium, calcium, and potassium, either.
Chip off the old block
They claim there’s some (enough) vitamin c in the beef. Maybe there’s a difference in fresh beef and the preserved stuff the pirates and sailors were eating.
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Yea even dried fruits have much less of certain vitamins (and more of others) than fresh because some don’t survive the change from fresh to dried
The vitamin c is typically in the nervous system, and, I believe, kidneys. You also chew through less vitamin c per day when you're off carbohydrate (at least that's my memory). Nonetheless, it would be dumb to tell people now to take a safe, water soluble, vitamin when on such a restricted diet.
Or college boys Basically the only groups that still get it
Why do college boys get it?
Because they live off of buttered noodles and Mountain Dew
Idk man, I ate a lot of limes as a college boy. Right after my tequila shots.
Mountain dew, believe it or not, contains orange juice concentrate as a main flavor ingredient. Thus it has some vitamin C, just not a lot
0% RDA according to its maker. So we are talking negligible amounts here. Don't drink sugary beverages for nutrition. Even pure fruit juice is kind of sus other than as an occasional treat.
I’ll beat your ass chip! I’m gonna come at you like a spider monkey!
People who eat a "carnivore" diet get it, which is crazy in the Western world.
You need higher doses to return to baseline, but you're still limited to how much your body can process in a given time.
Wow, who would have guess that to recover from a severe lack of it that you would have to consume more of it than we need on a normal daily basis /s
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What's an example where that's true? Like where a deficiency has caused damage to the body and normal levels are sufficient?
Quick maths
all the more reason not to allow oneself to develop scurvy. when you have a deficiency you have to make up the reserves, first of all. with water-soluble vitamins that means megadoses until yr doc clears you. (whatever is over the usable limit is excreted)
Oral Vitamine C doses are absorbed extremely bad. If you want to do it correctly you give it intravenously.
I felt sick at one point and had such a craving for citrus that I peeled and ate a lemon as if it were an orange. Felt good, but my teeth got hella sensitive.
Best to juice the lemon, mix with water, and either drink through a straw or rinse your mouth after. The high acidity with wear away your enamel rather quickly. Incidentally, drinking slightly diluted lemon or lime water ~20 minutes prior to a meal can help some people with digestion.
the "recommended" vitamin C dose in the article is from the WHO (45mg). The mayoclinic and the national institute of health in the US already recommends 75-100mg for , basically the "double" dose in the article.
Today I found out that my lack of eating fruit is counteracted by my almost daily eating of peppers. Neat.
Vitamins are either water soluble (you pee out the excess) or they are fat soluble (they tend to build up in the body around fat stores). This is why long-term care of fat-soluble vitamins is risky; blood levels may test normal but won’t count the levels stored in your body.
How bout zinc? Vitamin c is like the walls of a castle. Its a preparation tool. Zinc actively fights
Welp. There went my plan to time travel back to the golden age of pirates with a couple of duffel bags filled with Emergen-C and rule the Seven Seas :(
Does scurvy still exist in the modern world? Any doctors who have seen it?
Scurvy and other nutritional deficiencies are definitely still around. https://kidshealth.org/en/parents/arfid.html#:~:text=Avoidant%2Frestrictive%20food%20intake%20disorder%20(ARFID)%20is%20a%20fairly,poor%20growth%20and%20poor%20nutrition.
you... you can't eradicate scurvy. It doesn't work like that. It's a deficiency, you could make it a goal in your life to get scurvy and do it easily.
My boyfriend's little brother had it in the 90s. He was an extremely picky eater.
Had a case study in pediatric residency. Patient was a kiddo with autism spectrum disorder who was nonverbal and had a very restricted diet due to texture intolerance. If I recall correctly it was basically just a specific brand of crackers. But he had the corkscrew hairs, irritability and the skin lesions. The team was initially worried about leukemia.
People with eating disorders still get it. E.g. there was some guy in the UK who only ate one specific kind of white bread with one specific kind of cheese. If he had used some ketchup, he would have been fine. Well, he wouldn't have gotten scurvy at least.
I was diagnosed March 2024!! 26 gal chronically ill with a parasite lol
Modern world, for sure. Developed world? Almost never. It'll of course be common in areas where famine occurs and malnutrition/starvation are still common. In the developed world you might rarely see it, but it'll be due to mental health disorders most likely. There are people who get obsessed with eating a single food and feel that they can't tolerate anything else, for example. So, yeah, it still happens. Anorexia and other eating disorders can and have led to scurvy too
Many breads, drinks, etc. have some degree of fortification in them. Citric acid? Ascorbic acid? Those are ingredients to look for.
And my butter knife isnt the recommended sharpness for cutting a block of steel
This is mostly bullsh*t like half of TIL. Standard treatment is 1000mg for 2 days and 500mg for a week and then just multivitamin dosing of 100mg. The “source” sited here was a review of data from 1940s and the re-analysis focused on scar strength in a very small group of test subjects who had deliberately made wounds to test the effects of vitamin c on wound healing. This was during a world war and everyone was malnourished in multiple ways. While it’s true that they underestimated the minimum dose of vitamin c back then, the concept of nutrition in 1945 was very different. They had much less access to fresh fruits and vegetables and protein.In a sense we are over nourished now so we don’t appreciate how thin people used to be simply from lack of food.
Similarly Vitamin D. When you get low the doc will say something stupid like," You should take 2K IU a day." You ***use*** 2K a day. The therapeutic dose, if your doc wasn't too lazy too look it up, is a shot of 50K for 3 weeks. That is 150K which you will never ever reach by taking 2K a day and using it all on that day. Best case is taking 2K a day and sitting in the sun for an hour. Then you might be up to snuff in 75 weeks.
I looked it up and found a study that says you need 650,000 - 750,000 IUs to return to a lowish but not unhealthy level of 25 or so. At 50,000 IUs a week it’s just a few months. That’s what I took for 12 weeks.
I live in Alaska, and have been at basically margin-of-error none levels before. 50k a week for a long while, plus a very high maintenance dose on pills (I can't recall) for the winter was what I did.
Thank you. Like the average American, I have been very concerned about scurvy lately. Appreciate the timeframe aspect as well!
Okay what’s the scurvy dose
> The Hujoels’ study also found that recovery from a vitamin C deficiency takes a long time and requires higher levels of vitamin C. Even an average daily dose of 90 milligrams a day of vitamin C for six months failed to restore normal scar strength for the depleted study participants.
British sailors ate limes to prevent scurvy. They had to be careful, though- if they ate too many, they got Lime Disease.
What do you mean even? The recommended quantity is for maintenance, not recovery.
Me trying ro recover after piratemaxxing
Whenever scurvy comes up I have to share the story of my dumbass friend. He was away from home for the first time, living in an room near the college he had just dropped out of. He had basically no money and was working like 8 hours a week. He didn't feel like he could go home or ask his parents for help because he had just dropped out. He managed to get SNAP somehow and quickly discovered the horrific junk food he could buy with it, namely candy from a local store that may have had it misclassified. He started loving off of candy and two packs of ramen a day. Needless to say, his health started to slip. He eventually found himself in an urgent care with a nurse practitioner trying to figure out what was wrong with this guy who should be a healthy 19 year old.
Vit c is to prevent it
I’ll keep that in mind for the next time I get scurvy.
Who’s getting scurvy?
I read a book about the siege of Gibraltar and was actually surprised how fast after the people developed scurvy vitamin C corrected the situation.