It’s horrible, deadly — and insanely easy to fix. But America’s troubles with food insecurity means millions are closer to the scurvy zone than we admit.
It’s horrible, deadly — and insanely easy to fix. But America’s troubles with food insecurity means millions are closer to the scurvy zone than we admit.
By Leigh Cowart
Right now, there’s about a cup of orange juice in my gut, sloshing around and mingling with my stomach acid as it delivers all the vitamin C that I require for the day. I’ve got some major bruises on my knees, and so once the essential nutrient hits my body’s internal transport system, the orange juice that I just drank will play an important role in wound healing, preventing future capillaries from bleeding too easily, and with any luck helping me perform enough sweet, sweet collagen synthesis to make it look like I sleep regularly. Vitamin C may be the most important water-soluble antioxidant in human plasma, and is required for all plants and animals. But while most other animals can synthesize their own supply, humans — along with other primates, guinea pigs, capybaras, some fish, and some bats — have to get theirs elsewhere. Hence the orange juice.
The problem is that not everyone gets enough. And when vitamin C goes missing from a diet for long enough, the results can be explicitly unpleasant: scurvy.
We act like scurvy is long left behind, a throwback disease, forgotten and dust-covered and banished to antiquity. But this scourge of sailors is, in fact, not something that humanity has outgrown. It still happens, and probably more than you realize.
Scurvy, the most extreme result of prolonged lack of vitamin C, is, in a word, unpleasant. In three, it’s “fatal if untreated.” The d
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