 Ahoy mateys, ye be spreading myths about scurvy on the carnivore diet. And scurvy actually stems from pirates because they did not consume fresh foods. On a ship, as you can imagine, only preserved foods are available. And what actually prevents scurvy is any fresh food. It doesn't matter if it's a fruit, vegetable, meat. As long as the food is fresh, it will have the anti-scorbutic properties that prevent scurvy. So where did this idea actually originate? This study explains it best. The inability of muscle meat to prevent and to cure scurvy is an idea which has taken root because of the experiments of the earlier investigators. These workers did not appreciate the importance of freshly killed meat. In contradiction to fresh market meat, which means that the meat might have been much older, usually one month, two month, three month sold. Furthermore, they used the guinea pig as a test animal. This animal has a limited stomach capacity. It can therefore be fed only a small quantity of food biologically assessed for vitamin C content. With this small quantity possessed sufficient vitamin C to cure or prevent scurvy, the food was said to possess anti-scorbutic potency. If however, this small quantity did not contain sufficient vitamin C to cure or prevent scurvy, the food was regarded as one devoid of anti-scorbutic potency. More recent experiments with freshly killed meat indicate that quantities fed within the physical capacity of the guinea pig possessed anti-scorbutic value. This is almost as bad as the lipid hypothesis. And for anyone who's unfamiliar, the lipid hypothesis, the idea that cholesterol causes heart disease, was based initially off of a study that showed feeding rats cholesterol clogged their arteries. It doesn't make much sense when you feed an herbivorous animal meat. But these people were scientists and apparently they knew what they were doing. Meat does have pretty significant amounts of vitamin C, especially enough to prevent scurvy. The body only needs 10 milligrams of vitamin C a day to prevent scurvy. And according to these reports, beef meat from South America produced on pasture is an excellent source of vitamin C at 2500 micrograms per 100 grams. That's approximately 2.5 milligrams. This is 10 times higher in certain organs and tissues, almost 10 times higher in livar and fish eggs. So if you were following a carnivore diet, you would likely get two to three times the amount of vitamin C needed to prevent scurvy. And that's in the context of a high carbohydrate diet. That 10 milligram amount was used in people consuming carbohydrates. This is important because increasing carbohydrate consumption increases the demand for vitamin C. This is as a result of glute pathways in the body competing with vitamin C, glucose versus vitamin C essentially. Scurvy is a horrible, horrible disease. Your gums get so soft, your teeth fall out, you become so fatigued, you can't function and you eventually die of internal hemorrhaging. Not the most glamorous way to go. The reason for this is because vitamin C is needed for collagen metabolism. And every single cell in your body is composed of collagen. So it makes sense. Your body is essentially falling apart because it can't make cells properly. One book that is commonly brought up in the context of the carnivore diet is The Fat of the Land by William Stephenson, who was an arctic explorer. And the common theme between arctic explorers and pirates is that they had to consume preserved foods or obtain foods as they traveled. This resulted in scurvy being prevalent in both ships as well as arctic expeditions. I mean in that book The Fat of the Land is also a bunch of great information on the carnivore diet in general. Pemmigan. I'll put a PDF to that in the comments. Probably the most important book to read on this diet in general. On the topic of scurvy though, there is an incredible amount of relevant information in that book. From them doing a one-year experiment in a hospital of only eating meat and not developing scurvy. From them observing that consuming fruits and vegetables does not prevent scurvy if they sat on a ship and oxidized vitamin C being very prone to losing its anti-scorbutic properties from sitting around for too long of a period of time. You would actually have to pick the fresh fruits and vegetables or obtain them every few weeks in order for them to retain their vitamin C content. One interesting observation that Stephenson made was that if you consumed only preserved foods for about three weeks, scurvy would settle in. It would get much more severe 10 days from that point. But scurvy was actually cured from consuming reindeer meat freshly hunted for three to four days. Upon making that observation, he always advised his crew members to never consume only preserved foods. Unfortunately, not everyone on these arctic expeditions made it out alive because of scurvy. This is twofold. One, the conventional wisdom they had at the time was the same that we have now. They also believed that fruits and vegetables would cure scurvy. They didn't realize it had to be a fresh food in general. The second problem was they believed that sick people should only consume boiled foods. Maybe this was an observation they made because of bacteria in poorly sanitized setting. I don't know. But those two combinations of things resulted in them consuming foods that had very little anti-scorbutic vitamin C properties. So they would be consuming these preserved foods. They would get scurvy, then they would go hunt these animals, but they would boil the hell out of the meat and remove all the vitamin C. There's two great people to read about from that book, Robert, Falcon, Scott, as well as the Monk Expedition. I mean, really horrendous stuff. Like dozens and dozens of people died seemed like a very miserable way to go. Onto understanding vitamin C, it occurs in two forms in the body. L-ascorbic acid and L-dehydroascorbic acid. In nature, it's in the form of ascorbic acid. The body then converts it into dehydroascorbic acid because that is the preferred form for uptake by most cells. Vitamin C has so many health benefits, it's really unbelievable. And it makes sense because of how many metabolic processes it's involved in. Most people understand the importance of consuming high vitamin C foods for things like fighting colds, which has definitely been demonstrated in studies. Immune system benefit through increased T cell production and immune response from the thymus gland. One point I wanted to make here was our understanding and importance placed on vitamin C. In the future, it's going to be placed on all the vitamins. When I'm talking about fat soluble vitamins A, D3, E, K2, omega-3 fatty acids, when I say all these things are super important for our health, our understanding of them will be at the level of vitamin C is at some point and everyone will recognize their importance. Vitamin C can also improve absorption of iron, particularly non-hem iron. And this might sound great to vegans, but those glute 1 pathways we spoke about earlier show that carbohydrate metabolism competes with vitamin C metabolism and vegans tend to consume large amounts of carbohydrates. I remember a natural vegan said in a video, she drank a glass of orange juice with her iron supplement, but the glucose is essentially nullifying the vitamin C consumption. Hypothetically, you could supplement vitamin C and supplement iron just like all the other laboratory foods you're eating as a vegan. I think what's going to happen is the vegan diet is going to be recognized as something we should absolutely not be doing before we actually have research on these things. These pathways are very complicated. Clinical trials are very, very hard to conduct from an ethical standpoint, unfortunately. So eventually after, I don't know, several hundred thousand vegans deteriorate in front of us, people will realize we shouldn't be following a vegan diet. We don't have to wait for this information about vitamin C and iron metabolism if every vegan becomes anemic within a year on the vegan diet. Another very important thing to note on vitamin C is it's chelating properties. A chelation is when something is bound to something else. So magnesium glycinate would be magnesium bound to a glycine molecule. Vitamin C binds to metals in the body. So in regards to heavy metal toxicity, mineral imbalances, consuming large amounts of vitamin C-containing foods might be preventative in this regard of any issues you could be having. It also has an anti-histamine effect. Vitamin C has been shown to reduce blood plasma histamine levels. And this might sound good, but unfortunately large amounts of vitamin C in the gut can also cause similar issues to those people that have histamine intolerance. So although this might be a solution and it definitely reduces histamine levels in the blood, it might not actually fix your issue. Vitamin C also has so many other associated benefits that have been hypothesized in this one study I found that I'm just going to go through them very briefly. So vitamin C has been used in the management of male infertility. It does have implications in lowering cholesterol as well as preventing the oxidation of cholesterol. Reduced vitamin C levels have also been observed in diabetic subjects, but we spoke about this earlier with the Glute 1 pathways and vitamin C metabolism. So high levels of glucose in the blood and low vitamin C makes sense. Vitamin C can also inhibit the excessive activation of the immune system to prevent tissue damage. It supports antibacterial activity. So obviously a lot of importance placed on vitamin C here. As I said earlier, I'm hoping that this importance is relevant to other fat-soluble vitamins in the near future. How do we actually get this vitamin C though? We spoke about earlier how meat does contain vitamin C and how certain organs such as liver, spleen, various glands in the body, the blood of animals, dairy products, pretty much any fresh, high quality meat products will contain good amounts of vitamin C. But wild plant foods contain substantially higher amounts of vitamin C. The cacodouplum, acerola cherries, rose hips, I'm sure you guys have heard of some of these are all incredibly, incredibly high in vitamin C. Dozens to hundreds of times higher than foods we're consuming now. I know they do make acerola cherry powder. Some vitamin C supplements are made from rose hips. Some more practical foods that you might actually have access to are currants. Certain fresh herbs like thyme have good amounts of vitamin C, so maybe grind up some thyme in your salt and sprinkle it on your steak. These anti-scorbutic foods have always been present in indigenous diets in large amounts. Now what does Frankie Boy do? Frankie Boy believes in consuming a lot of raw to lightly cooked foods. I do consume organs. I do consume foods like brain tissue, liver, bone marrow. I consume a lot of organs that are high in vitamin C, especially fish row. So I don't worry about obtaining my vitamin C from any specific supplement or food. If you were to try or wanted to try a high vitamin C intake for various reasons, I did put some on my Amazon shop. There is acerola cherry powder, there is L-ascorbic acid powder. I'm not encouraging the use of that, but if you guys do want to use it for some reason, it is available. If you guys do want to know more about collagen metabolism, I did do a video on bone broth that I will link at the end of this. Check that out. Guys, please like, subscribe and share the video if you can. As I said earlier, my Amazon shop has some vitamin C powders and various things in the supplement section you can use to increase the nutrient density in your diet. Patreon is a great way to get personalized question support. I'm on social media guys. I'm on Twitter. I'm on Instagram. You guys can check out my selfies or watch me argue with other carnivore dieters on Twitter. You guys do want to reach out to me for one-on-one consultations in regards to improving your overall health through pretty much any physical thing you can do in your day-to-day life. You can reach out to me via email frankatufano at gmail.com or through the contact form on my website below. On that website, I also have some hygiene products. You guys ask me about my teeth, my hair. I'm more into the odor and I make two, my lip balm, a bunch of floor art-free toothpaste, stuff like that on my website. If you guys do want to check that out, outside of that, you guys enjoy the rest of your week.