Short Stuff: Scurvy

Scurvy seems like a terrible way to go: Your gums swell so you can’t eat, your teeth fall out and your brain and/or heart hemorrhages. Fortunately, all you need is an orange to cure you. Or some – blech – broccoli. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Yeah, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
There's Jerry the scurvy dog, and this is short Stuff.
Like I said, I'm already wasting time. Let's start year.
Good lord, I can't believe this is a show. It is, Yeah,
for like twelve years almost yeah, ish eleven. I think

(00:28):
Short Stuff in particular, though Chuck Um is just about approached.
It's one year anniversary. That's great, yep, the little bro.
So let's talk about scurvy, which is uh a disease
that you can get when you don't get enough vitamin
C for a long period of time. So it's gotta
be a long period of time. If you go without

(00:49):
vitamin C for a few days or a few weeks,
even you're gonna be fine. But if you are let's say,
on a pirate ship, and you go months without vitamin C,
then your toast and technically any ship or technically any
um massive land movement where you don't have vitamin C

(01:09):
in your diet, or even if you just choose not
to eat vitamin C, you can you can be living
in the middle of an orange grove. Just a total jerk,
but it takes about it takes about like two to
three months before the effects really start to set in. Um.
But it is really odd to think that, Like, yeah,
I hadn't thought about that. You could just remove vitamin

(01:31):
C from your diet. It wouldn't be that hard. Um.
You know everyone thinks like, well, oranges, lemons, limes rich
in vitaminc. True, But did you know that broccoli has
about twice as much vitamin C as an orange? Yea,
And I love broccoli and then and you hate it. Yes,
but I would eat broccoli if I was starting to
show signs of scurvy. I prefer to eat the oranges

(01:51):
and the limes and lemons because I love me some
citrus too, maybe a grapefruit here. They're uh not in
the grape fruit a little bitter for me, But that
would would choke it down if my life depended on it.
Sure you should try. I've got something for you, then
chuck fresh squeezed grapefruit juice and orange juice, fresh squeezed
in equal equal proportions. I think I've had it mixed

(02:12):
in and can have it. And also think I have
a thing for my childhood in the seventies and early eighties,
when half a grapefruit covered in sugar was like a
meal for moms. And I don't know, it just bucked
me that and caughta cheese. Yeah, that was a super
seventies diet thing. All right, So let's talk about vitamin

(02:33):
C because it's super interesting to me that tons of animals,
four thousand kinds of mammals even can produce their own
vitamin C, but humans primates more specifically, Yeah, that's a
big one. Guinea pigs and fruit bats lost of the
ability to a long time ago. Yeah, and other animals

(02:54):
can synthesize vitamin C so they don't need to ingest
it um like you were saying, because they have a
function in goolo gene, the goolo no lactone oxidase gene,
which is beautiful words um. But the goolo gene, we
have a full script of it. It's there. There's just
some mutation that occurred way back in our evolutionary history,

(03:16):
which is pointed to by the fact that other apes
can't synthesize vitamin C either. So this have been way
before humans were around. And as a matter of fact,
the fact that there we do have a goolo gene
that is no longer functioning, is pointed to is evidence
of evolution by people who still argue such things. Um,
But the fact that the gholo gene is there but

(03:37):
not functioning is the whole reason. We can't produce vitamin C,
so we have to ingest it elsewhere, which wasn't a
problem at least at first when we were just strictly
a subtropical species like we evolved to be initially, yeah,
because we were surrounded by fruits and vegetables and ate
him a lot. But then as we you know, migrated
around the globe to places where that stuff wasn't so abundant,

(04:00):
quickly became a problem, it did. And so, um, there
are vitamin C pops up in other like non subtropical
crops or crops that we've adapted to non subtropical climates,
which is to say, everything outside of the tropics and subtropics, right, Um,
red peppers, yeah, red peppers. Potatoes, onions are another one. Tomatoes,

(04:26):
So there's tomatoes and actually, strangely enough, some raw meat.
And then say, like the livers of certain animals are
also very rich in vitamin C, which is why um,
people living up in the Arctic circle like Inuit populations
and other indigenous tribes that lived way far north surprisingly

(04:46):
didn't suffer from scurvy because they have plenty of vitamin
C and they're almost entirely meat rich diet. It pops
up in other places. But if you if you don't
get it, you can't synthesize vitamin C, which is extremely
important to building collagen in your body, which it turns
out collagen is way more important than just keeping your
your cuticles of your nails healthy. Yeah, we need collagen.

(05:08):
It's a protein. And if you like you're connect to
tissue and your body staying healthy and connective, then you
need that collagen. Uh. Bones are gonna get a lot
of their strength from collagen fibers. Uh. If you have
like a a boo boo on your skin, collagen is
gonna heal it. It'll help the walls of your blood
vessels stay strong and healthy. If you like to keep

(05:31):
your blood inside your vessels, you're gonna love collagen. In
other words, that's right. And if you are getting enough
vitamin C, which they say is about seventy to ninety
milligrams a day, you're gonna be burning through about eight
to ten milligrams of this vitamin C if you want
to keep synthesizing that collagen, right, so, you want to
have a store reserve of it at all times, and supposedly,

(05:52):
if your store drops below three milligrams to try, that's
when the scurvy starts to happen. And it's gonna first
start to be noticeable very faintly. You're gonna feel weak,
maybe a little bit of fatigue. It's not gonna be
You're not gonna be like it's scurvy. I'm I'm a
scurvy dog. Uh. It's gonna take a little longer and

(06:12):
some other stuff to really um to really point to
the fact that you are suffering from scurvy. You'll go
through weight loss due to reduced appetite, and then the
real dead giveaway for a lot of people is that
you start to get Your mouth just undergoes a massive
horrific transition in a number of ways. Yeah, it's pretty gross.
We're talking bleeding gums, swollen gums, teeth loosening and falling out.

(06:37):
This is my worst nightmare. It's not good. Joint and
muscle pain, your skin like if you you know, we
we talked about the collagen helping to form scar tissue
and heal boo boos. You will not be able to
heal your booboos, and old boo boos might reopen because
they're not healing like they should be. Bones start to
become brittle. It's it's really really bad and grotesque. It's

(07:01):
a bad jam for sure. Um. And then eventually, because
you remember, your blood vessels are weak, and because you
remember we did our our um episode like does the
body really regenerate itself every seven or nine years or
something like that, your tissues are constantly being regenerated. But
part of that regeneration is from an adequate supply of
vitamin C. So if you don't have that, you're not

(07:23):
regenerating these things. And then eventually, some really important blood
vessels like ones that um, that supply your brain or
your heart with blood are going to fail and you're
going to die of a blood hemorrhage in your brain
or your heart. That's right, So let's take a break
and we're going to talk about what pirates and sailors
have to do with all this right after this. Alrighty,

(08:09):
So we kind of gave it away earlier by saying,
you know, if you don't have vitamin C and you're
in a place where you can't get it, scurvy will
set in. Early on, this was a problem, like during
the Crusades because armies were where there were no fruits
and vegetables. During the Irish potato famine, it was a
big deal. During the American Civil War, scurvey was a
big deal. But the early sailors of the world, the

(08:31):
Vikings and the Phoenicians, they had fruits and veggies, so
they were all fine. Between fifteen hundred and eighteen hundred, though,
and this is hard to believe, it was the leading
cause of naval death. Around two million sailors died of scurvy. Yeah,
like far and away the leading cause. And it was
like a really bad death, Like your gums would become

(08:52):
so inflamed and swollen they would grow over your teeth
and so to allow you to chew your food, because
otherwise you just starved to death because you couldn't eat,
the naval surgeons would cut your gums away to expose
your teeth once more. This is the kind of like
stuff that was happening to use your dying of scurvy
um and at the time this is say, like the

(09:13):
Age of Discoveries starting around you know, the late fifteenth century,
early sixteenth century onto the middle of the eighteenth century.
There were just millions of people died this way, suffered
from this. And it's not like they didn't already know
how to cure scurvy through like folk medicine. Um here,
they're people kind of figured out like, oh, if you'd
eat an onion, you're gonna be fine, or try some

(09:34):
citrus or something like that. But it wasn't like widely
disseminated and certainly not scientifically based knowledge until a guy
named James Lynn came around and in seventeen forty seven,
uh he I think on behalf of the Royal Navy
conducted the first controlled experiment that showed that citrus actually
can cure um scurvy. Yeah, I mean, James Lynn comes around.

(09:58):
It says, you're on these boats eating hardtack, drinking beer
and salted meat, and you're dying grotesque deaths. Throw a
line in that beer and you'll be fine. Yeah, make
it a Negro MODELO. It's even better sort of because
scurvey can, I mean, it is really pretty easy to cure.
You can add like you can reverse the effects of

(10:20):
scurvy if you add that vitamin C back in and
it's really easy as that. But they didn't have access
to it. That's why it's so closely associated with sailing, right,
But it's still out there today. It's not like we
cured an eradicated scurvy. I mean cured, I guess in
a way, but we didn't eradicate it because in poor
places where people don't have access to vitamin C um,

(10:40):
low income families, even in the United States, you see
scurvy popping up every now and then. Yeah, it's a
really sad situation in orange groves where obstinate people are
just sitting around that's suffering from scurvy. Yeah, it is
so um. As as malnourishment has kind of increased um
because of the Western diet, so have cases of scurvy.

(11:01):
Like in the developed Western world, people get scurvy. It's
more more frequently seen whenever there's like a terrible famine
or something like that. But it can't happen in people's
everyday lives. They can start to develop scurvy. The great
thing is, and this is what Lynn showed way back
in the seventeen forties. Is that give somebody some orange
juice or some vitamin C pills and within twenty four

(11:22):
hours their gums are gonna stop bleeding. Um, within three
months they should be expected to make a full and
complete recovery. Like, it's extremely treatable. It's a really treatable disease.
It's just before James Lynn came along and saved a
lot of people from excruciating deaths, there was no um,
kind of codified knowledge about about how to cure and

(11:46):
treat scurvy. That's right, And after a few months you're
completely fine. Yep, it's great, it is, it's great. It's
the best thing. Just go ahead and get some scurvys.
Just keep some vitamins you nearby, and it'll be a
wild ride. I've got two more things things. One, I
believe the reason why the British are sometimes uh pejoratively

(12:07):
referred to as limeys is because of that lime juice
ration that the sailors got to cure scurvey. Yeah. And
then the second thing, you said that scurvy was kind
of a big deal in the Civil War. Um. I
saw that there was a campaign poster in Chicago. I
think a union campaign poster that said, don't send your
sweethearted love letter, send an onion because they knew that

(12:30):
onions would combat scurvy. That's great. I think that's pretty great.
It's a great it's a great thing. We should start
doing that for Valentine's Day, sending on Alright, Chuck, that's
it for short Stuff, Right, that's right, Chuck said, right, everybody.
That means that short Stuff is out. Stuff you should
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(12:53):
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