Tigers eat meat, and not a whole lot else. So why don’t tigers get scurvy?
Scurvy is a disease resulting from Vitamin C deficiency, and the main source of Vitamin C in this world is plants. Tigers don’t eat salads with their water buffalo, so where do they get their Vitamin C from?
Tigers, and most creatures for that matter, can synthesize their own Vitamin C and do not need to consume it in their diet. Us humans on the other hand do need to consume Vitamin C in our diets, because we no longer manufacture our own Vitamin C. That gene was switched off a long time ago because most of our calories came from plants and thus our diets were rich in Vitamin C.
The human body is expert in maximizing energy efficiency, therefore it won’t make something if it doesn’t need to.
Not producing Vitamin C was all well and good 10,000 years ago, but now we find ourselves in a cultural time warp, in which human culture and the technologies that go along with it have evolved MUCH faster than the human genome. In other words, its possible to never eat green things these days, and a lot of people actually don’t.
Look at people next time you are on the side walk. The signs of Vitamin C deficiency are EVERYWHERE.
Red eyes, runny noses, lingering coughs, receding gum lines, hardened arteries, long healing times, and blotchy, look-older-than-you-are skin to name just a few. Despite all the Vitamin C supplements out there, most of us are deficient in Vitamin C.
“But I take 5 megadoses of Vitamin C a day!!” you might say. That’s not really going to matter if your body can’t absorb the Vitamin C and use it. Well why can’t most of us absorb adequate Vitamin C even when we DO get enough of it?
Three words.
Too much sugar.
See, sugar (glucose) and Vitamin C both us the same carrier molecule to enter your cells, where they can both be put to work. I’ll bet you know the name of this molecule too.
That’s right, insulin.
Insulin’s most notorious role is in storing glucose in response to increases in blood glucose levels. Insulin acts as both an anabolic hormone (growth & repair) and a mytogenic hormone (growth stimulating) and helps to store a host of other nutrients, including fat and protein.
A high blood glucose level (too much sugar) is a toxic stimuli to your body’s cells and forces them to down regulate the number of insulin receptors on their surfaces. This forces the pancreas to make more insulin, in effect “yelling louder” at the insulin receptors to accomplish the same task of storing excess blood glucose.
This is how insulin resistance develops. So what does this have to do with Vitamin C??
Remember, glucose and Vitamin C both use the same insulin receptors to enter cells. They literally compete with each other, trying to squeeze in through the same door! Having high blood glucose levels means less Vitamin C enters your cells. This poses a major problem for your white blood cells, which require LARGE amounts of Vitamin C to function normally. White blood cells are the workhorses of your immune system, and if they’re not functioning normally, you get sick.
If we were to take the tiger out of the wild and feed it a bunch of bread, pasta, potato chips, crackers, chips, and cookies you can bet we’d have a diabetic tiger on our hands. It wouldn’t matter that the tiger can make it’s own Vitamin C because none of it would be able to enter the cells. Our tiger would be very sick, overweight, have joint problems, and only be able to run down a giant flank steak.
Sound familiar?
That’s because it is. You probably have a close friend or family member, or several, that fit this description.
The solution is in the quality of the decisions you make when feeding yourself and your family, not a bottle of Vitamin C pills. Stay away from the potato chips, the white bread, tons of pasta, and all the other processed junk food out there.
If it’s not fit for a tiger, it’s not fit for you.
4 Comments
Eh… yeah. I’m not crazy about your explanation. Primates began as an insectivorous order and all primates, including wild humans, still eat bugs. Unless you’re one of those people who think Homo sapiens is an herbivorous animal, there’s got to be some other explanation for us not making vitamin C.
Linus Pauling, as I just found in my web-searching, thinks we stopped making vitamin C because the primates who didn’t make it somehow dominated those who did make it. He also claims that because we were smart and could make tools and fire, that helped us survive in areas of the world in which we couldn’t get much fruit. Couple of problems with his arguments.
1. Actually, there are two major branches in the primate order, one that includes all the great apes and one that doesn’t. The branch with the great apes in it doesn’t make vitamin C. This tells me that the mutation occurred early in our evolution and domination had nothing to do with it.
2. Cooking destroys vitamin C, therefore had nothing to do with our success outside the tropics. (Tool-making? WTF?)
Weston Price said he talked to some American Indians who told him that scurvy was a white man’s disease. He was like, “Don’t Indians get it?” They were like, “Yeah, but we know how to treat it and prevent it.” Price was like, “OK, why haven’t you told us how to treat it and prevent it?” They were like, “White man knows too much to ever ask us anything.” Price was like, “Well, I’d like to know, so would you tell me?” They consulted with the chief and came back with, “You know those little balls of fat on top of the kidneys of a moose? We take those out when we butcher, and we cut them up, and we feed a piece to each member of the family.” Turns out the adrenal glands, which are on top of the kidneys, are one of THE primo sources of vitamin C. Of course, you gotta eat ‘em raw.
Before we became Homo sapiens, we became hunters. Stands to reason we were eating critter guts early on, considering that refusing to eat offal is a relatively recent development in human culture. How many kids living in the West today, especially the U.S., have had the experience of eating liver, much less traditional raw meat dishes or the like?
Vitamin C and glucose have the same receptors on cells… if we’re eating scads and scads of sugar now, and we are, that alone’s enough to wipe out any advantage we have taking vitamin C megadoses.
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