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.

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[–] 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

Vitamin C is heat sensitive but fermentation is fine and a good reason why fermented cabbage is popular in places with cold winter. See kimchi and sauerkraut, as rice or rye alone would kill you over a long winter. Similar mechanics going on for andean freeze dried potatoes to a lesser extent. Beyond that, it's straight up foraging for greens and berries but that only really works if you're moving a small enough group of people to allow forage to be an option. Plenty of leafy greens from forage allowed enough vitamin c to stave off scurvy for many ancient armies and sailors(though not all). Cook notably would beat sailors who wouldn't eat foraged greens. The other option was uncooked organ meats.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (6 children)
  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Just ate a kimchi grilled cheese, and yesterday had some with fried eggs. It is so delicious. I love sauerkraut too. Cabbage of any sort, cabbage is just an amazing food, good raw, burnt, and everything in between, delicious fermented, just good and ever so versatile.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

    I had a kimchi Reuben from a local deli a couple weeks ago. Basically a Reuben but with kimchi instead of coleslaw sauerkraut. Was insane.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    That sounds so good! Every time I get a Reuben sandwich at a restaurant it has way, way, too much meat for me - I guess they want to make it worth the price but it is unbalanced. I would make this at home though and perhaps will next week, making sourdough tomorrow, and have rye flour.

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  • [–] 43 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Jam is the classic way to preserve fruit.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago

    Fermented cabbage, AKA Sauerkraut.

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  • [–] 41 points 1 year ago* (6 children)
    • 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.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    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!

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    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.

    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.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Citrus.

    British sailors got the moniker "limey" because they usually had limes specicially to ward off scurvy.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    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

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago
    [–] 4 points 1 year ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    Dried chili peppers are a good source

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Maybe something that could be dried, soybeans could work. Would have to be properly stored to keep it dry.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    Yeah. Fruit! Lots of fruits have vitamin c.

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  • [+] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Potatoes aren't too bad a source IIRC.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    I'm kind of surprised no one has said honey. While I can't find exactly when honey was first used as a preservative, it's believed that it was first used in ancient Egypt. I also don't know if vitamin C specifically was ever preserved in honey but honey has been used as a preservative for fruit.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    oranges, anything related to citrus family.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago

    In a living body impaled on a spike in Vlads front yard.

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