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.
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. Famously the Iroquois would use tea made from eastern white cedar to do so.
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. It’s also really incorrect to say glucose wasn’t a factor in ancient diets. The Romans marched on porridge and bread. High carb diets are a defining feature of the neolithic and beyond.
The sailors didn’t just eat meat though… they were typically also eating large amounts of high carb hardtack (biscuits), beans and oats as all were cheap and traveled well. Traditional high carb diets need vitamin C sources or scurvy can occur. A very low carb diet can get by with very little vitamin C because it’s not longer competing with glucose, but of course such a diet was rare in past times. The Inuits diet is one well known exception where the people might go most of a year without plant sources of vitamin C and avoiding deficiencies by eating organ meat which is rich in many vitamins and minerals.
I think it was also very common for the fresh meats and salted meats to be depleted quickly, and the line sailors only left with the high carbohydrate food for months.
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!