Interesting article about "putrid" meat and fish in the human diet (with Vitamin C too)


(Bob M) #1

This downloads a PDF:

Hat tip to Mark’s Daily Apple.

It’s a very interesting article about theories regarding whether humans ate “putrid” meat, also referred to as “fermented” meat.

One of the theories is that muscle meat lacks Vitamin C, but this is higher in the brain, liver, spleen… The theory further is that raw meat maintains Vitamin C, while cooked meat does not. One paragraph for instance:

image

Then follows quite a bit of speculation and accountants about eating putrid meat.

Very interesting, though I doubt most people today (including me) would be eating much of this meat.


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #2

I suspect that the concern with Vitamin C is a red herring. Given that β-hydroxybutyrate activates the body’s defences against oxidation, thus greatly reducing or possibly eliminating the need for exogenous anti-oxidants, the question of what the benefit of Vitamin C is on a ketogenic diet is far from clear.

What we do know, and have known for at least four centuries, is that people who eat fresh meat do not get scurvy. But what the property of fresh meat is that prevents scurvy is not, to my knowledge, known. We don’t even know what the Vitamin C content of meat is. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says “assumed to be zero,” which means that no one has even done an analysis. And it could even be that fresh meat “prevents” scurvy simply by occupying a large enough percentage of the diet to keep insulin low enough to prevent it from shutting off our exogenous defences against oxidation.

By the way, the British sailors who developed scurvy on long deployments away from harbour did not develop the condition until the livestock aboard ship had all run out, and their diet switched to ship’s biscuit (hardtack) and salt beef. Since they were not eating their meat raw (I assure you), that means that if the anti-scorbutic property of fresh meat derives from its Vitamin C content, then Vitamin C must survive cooking in sufficient quantities to be therapeutic.


(Bob M) #3

Well, I don’t eat many foods that ostensibly contain Vitamin C, yet also don’t have scurvy. So, I must be eating something that allows me to not get scurvy. I assume that’s fresh meat, but I do wonder what something like sous vide does to meat. I often cook meat in sous vide for 6+ hours at lower temps (say, 132 F). Am I degrading the vitamins? No idea.

I do think it’s interesting that fermented/putrid meat is eaten at least by records, but very few people eat it today.


(M) #4

What do you eat besides meat?

Sauerkraut raised my vitamin C quickly in the past. I eat all my fish pretty rare these days and when I ate beef I ate it pretty rare too. If it’s overcooked something in my body feels like the “meat is dead” in a sense that i’m not getting as much out of it anymore.

I don’t know if the USDA food database has vitamin C right for meats, but for seafood there is always some in there. Shellfish and mollusks are particularly high in it.


(Bob M) #5

I don’t really eat fish much at all. Don’t eat sauerkraut (which, by the way, the article discusses as good source of vitamin c) unless it’s cooked well (raw gives me digestive issues).


#6

Even cooked fresh meat seems to contain enough vitamin C (whatever that amount is) when carbs are almost completely absent as people live on cooked meat without supplements…

Sometimes I wonder about my own diet. It’s on/off carnivore-ish so complicated but I eat very, very little vitamin C even when I am off. I mostly live on dairy, eggs (no vitamin C at all) and usually very well-cooked meat (today’s roast spent more than 2 hours in the oven). I didn’t get scurvy yet but there are carnivores who truly and always avoid plants and still don’t get scurvy, their cases are more informative. And there are the sailors @PaulL mentioned too. I do eat vegs and lemon but it’s close to zero vitamin C due to the very minuscule amounts… Hopefully one day I will have more data about these, I am curious. But it’s really hard to get scurvy. And I don’t know when and what kind of benefits consuming more Vitamin C has. I never felt the need to eat grams of it every day…

Good, soft sauerkraut is awesome, by the way. To me, at least, I love sour stuff.


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #7

The British aristocracy used to like to hang their game till it got “high,” which is very much an acquired taste. I imagine only the nobility and the rich could afford to let their food hang around till it started to rot, though.

I much prefer steak tartare and carpaccio, which are marinated, so not actually raw. But they are definitely not putrid, lol! (Nor is sashimi, for that matter.)


(Alec) #8

Dr Anthony Chaffee says that vitamin C requirements when you are carnivore is measured in nanograms… but when eating carbs it is micrograms… thus requirements are tiny on carnivore.

Because there are no carbs to compete with the uptake pathways. This is why carnivores don’t get scurvy. I’ve been pretty strict carni for 16 months now… no scurvy!


(KM) #9

I suspect Paul’s on the right track, that something about a ketogenic diet is eliminating / greatly reducing the need for C. (As opposed to meat having mystical vitamin C we haven’t measured.) When we fast, our bodies preserve our vitamins, perhaps the same is true for being in ketosis? Or perhaps hydroxybutrate or some other compound is performing the same functions.


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #10

I suspect it’s one or all of those things.