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Short Stuff: Scurvy · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: There's Jerry the scurvy dog, and this is short Stuff.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Like I said, I'm already wasting time. Let's start year.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: Good lord, I can't believe this is a show. It is, Yeah,
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: for like twelve years almost yeah, ish eleven. I think
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: Short Stuff in particular, though Chuck Um is just about approached.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: It's one year anniversary. That's great, yep, the little bro.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: So let's talk about scurvy, which is uh a disease
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: that you can get when you don't get enough vitamin
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: C for a long period of time. So it's gotta
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: be a long period of time. If you go without
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: vitamin C for a few days or a few weeks,
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: even you're gonna be fine. But if you are let's say,
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: on a pirate ship, and you go months without vitamin C,
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: then your toast and technically any ship or technically any
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: um massive land movement where you don't have vitamin C
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: in your diet, or even if you just choose not
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: to eat vitamin C, you can you can be living
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: in the middle of an orange grove. Just a total jerk,
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: but it takes about it takes about like two to
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: three months before the effects really start to set in. Um.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: But it is really odd to think that, Like, yeah,
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: I hadn't thought about that. You could just remove vitamin
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: C from your diet. It wouldn't be that hard. Um.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: You know everyone thinks like, well, oranges, lemons, limes rich
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: in vitaminc. True, But did you know that broccoli has
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: about twice as much vitamin C as an orange? Yea,
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: And I love broccoli and then and you hate it. Yes,
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: but I would eat broccoli if I was starting to
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: show signs of scurvy. I prefer to eat the oranges
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: and the limes and lemons because I love me some
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: citrus too, maybe a grapefruit here. They're uh not in
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: the grape fruit a little bitter for me, But that
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: would would choke it down if my life depended on it.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: Sure you should try. I've got something for you, then
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: chuck fresh squeezed grapefruit juice and orange juice, fresh squeezed
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: in equal equal proportions. I think I've had it mixed
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: in and can have it. And also think I have
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: a thing for my childhood in the seventies and early eighties,
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: when half a grapefruit covered in sugar was like a
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: meal for moms. And I don't know, it just bucked
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: me that and caughta cheese. Yeah, that was a super
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: seventies diet thing. All right, So let's talk about vitamin
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: C because it's super interesting to me that tons of animals,
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: four thousand kinds of mammals even can produce their own
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: vitamin C, but humans primates more specifically, Yeah, that's a
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: big one. Guinea pigs and fruit bats lost of the
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: ability to a long time ago. Yeah, and other animals
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: can synthesize vitamin C so they don't need to ingest
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: it um like you were saying, because they have a
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: function in goolo gene, the goolo no lactone oxidase gene,
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: which is beautiful words um. But the goolo gene, we
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: have a full script of it. It's there. There's just
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: some mutation that occurred way back in our evolutionary history,
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: which is pointed to by the fact that other apes
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  Speaker 1: can't synthesize vitamin C either. So this have been way
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: before humans were around. And as a matter of fact,
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: the fact that there we do have a goolo gene
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: that is no longer functioning, is pointed to is evidence
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  Speaker 1: of evolution by people who still argue such things. Um,
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  Speaker 1: But the fact that the gholo gene is there but
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: not functioning is the whole reason. We can't produce vitamin C,
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: so we have to ingest it elsewhere, which wasn't a
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: problem at least at first when we were just strictly
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  Speaker 1: a subtropical species like we evolved to be initially, yeah,
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  Speaker 1: because we were surrounded by fruits and vegetables and ate
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: him a lot. But then as we you know, migrated
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: around the globe to places where that stuff wasn't so abundant,
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: quickly became a problem, it did. And so, um, there
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: are vitamin C pops up in other like non subtropical
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  Speaker 1: crops or crops that we've adapted to non subtropical climates,
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: which is to say, everything outside of the tropics and subtropics, right, Um,
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: red peppers, yeah, red peppers. Potatoes, onions are another one. Tomatoes,
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: So there's tomatoes and actually, strangely enough, some raw meat.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: And then say, like the livers of certain animals are
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: also very rich in vitamin C, which is why um,
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: people living up in the Arctic circle like Inuit populations
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  Speaker 1: and other indigenous tribes that lived way far north surprisingly
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  Speaker 1: didn't suffer from scurvy because they have plenty of vitamin
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  Speaker 1: C and they're almost entirely meat rich diet. It pops
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: up in other places. But if you if you don't
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: get it, you can't synthesize vitamin C, which is extremely
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: important to building collagen in your body, which it turns
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: out collagen is way more important than just keeping your
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: your cuticles of your nails healthy. Yeah, we need collagen.
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  Speaker 1: It's a protein. And if you like you're connect to
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: tissue and your body staying healthy and connective, then you
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: need that collagen. Uh. Bones are gonna get a lot
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  Speaker 1: of their strength from collagen fibers. Uh. If you have
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: like a a boo boo on your skin, collagen is
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  Speaker 1: gonna heal it. It'll help the walls of your blood
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  Speaker 1: vessels stay strong and healthy. If you like to keep
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: your blood inside your vessels, you're gonna love collagen. In
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: other words, that's right. And if you are getting enough
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  Speaker 1: vitamin C, which they say is about seventy to ninety
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: milligrams a day, you're gonna be burning through about eight
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: to ten milligrams of this vitamin C if you want
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  Speaker 1: to keep synthesizing that collagen, right, so, you want to
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  Speaker 1: have a store reserve of it at all times, and supposedly,
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: if your store drops below three milligrams to try, that's
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: when the scurvy starts to happen. And it's gonna first
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: start to be noticeable very faintly. You're gonna feel weak,
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  Speaker 1: maybe a little bit of fatigue. It's not gonna be
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  Speaker 1: You're not gonna be like it's scurvy. I'm I'm a
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: scurvy dog. Uh. It's gonna take a little longer and
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: some other stuff to really um to really point to
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  Speaker 1: the fact that you are suffering from scurvy. You'll go
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: through weight loss due to reduced appetite, and then the
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: real dead giveaway for a lot of people is that
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: you start to get Your mouth just undergoes a massive
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: horrific transition in a number of ways. Yeah, it's pretty gross.
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  Speaker 1: We're talking bleeding gums, swollen gums, teeth loosening and falling out.
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  Speaker 1: This is my worst nightmare. It's not good. Joint and
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: muscle pain, your skin like if you you know, we
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: we talked about the collagen helping to form scar tissue
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: and heal boo boos. You will not be able to
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: heal your booboos, and old boo boos might reopen because
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: they're not healing like they should be. Bones start to
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: become brittle. It's it's really really bad and grotesque. It's
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: a bad jam for sure. Um. And then eventually, because
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  Speaker 1: you remember, your blood vessels are weak, and because you
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: remember we did our our um episode like does the
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: body really regenerate itself every seven or nine years or
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: something like that, your tissues are constantly being regenerated. But
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: part of that regeneration is from an adequate supply of
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: vitamin C. So if you don't have that, you're not
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: regenerating these things. And then eventually, some really important blood
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  Speaker 1: vessels like ones that um, that supply your brain or
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: your heart with blood are going to fail and you're
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: going to die of a blood hemorrhage in your brain
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: or your heart. That's right, So let's take a break
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: and we're going to talk about what pirates and sailors
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  Speaker 1: have to do with all this right after this. Alrighty,
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: So we kind of gave it away earlier by saying,
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: you know, if you don't have vitamin C and you're
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: in a place where you can't get it, scurvy will
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: set in. Early on, this was a problem, like during
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: the Crusades because armies were where there were no fruits
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: and vegetables. During the Irish potato famine, it was a
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: big deal. During the American Civil War, scurvey was a
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: big deal. But the early sailors of the world, the
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  Speaker 1: Vikings and the Phoenicians, they had fruits and veggies, so
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  Speaker 1: they were all fine. Between fifteen hundred and eighteen hundred, though,
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  Speaker 1: and this is hard to believe, it was the leading
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  Speaker 1: cause of naval death. Around two million sailors died of scurvy. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: like far and away the leading cause. And it was
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: like a really bad death, Like your gums would become
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  Speaker 1: so inflamed and swollen they would grow over your teeth
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  Speaker 1: and so to allow you to chew your food, because
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: otherwise you just starved to death because you couldn't eat,
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: the naval surgeons would cut your gums away to expose
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  Speaker 1: your teeth once more. This is the kind of like
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  Speaker 1: stuff that was happening to use your dying of scurvy
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  Speaker 1: um and at the time this is say, like the
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  Speaker 1: Age of Discoveries starting around you know, the late fifteenth century,
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  Speaker 1: early sixteenth century onto the middle of the eighteenth century.
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  Speaker 1: There were just millions of people died this way, suffered
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: from this. And it's not like they didn't already know
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  Speaker 1: how to cure scurvy through like folk medicine. Um here,
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: they're people kind of figured out like, oh, if you'd
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: eat an onion, you're gonna be fine, or try some
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: citrus or something like that. But it wasn't like widely
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  Speaker 1: disseminated and certainly not scientifically based knowledge until a guy
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  Speaker 1: named James Lynn came around and in seventeen forty seven,
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  Speaker 1: uh he I think on behalf of the Royal Navy
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  Speaker 1: conducted the first controlled experiment that showed that citrus actually
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: can cure um scurvy. Yeah, I mean, James Lynn comes around.
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  Speaker 1: It says, you're on these boats eating hardtack, drinking beer
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: and salted meat, and you're dying grotesque deaths. Throw a
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: line in that beer and you'll be fine. Yeah, make
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: it a Negro MODELO. It's even better sort of because
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: scurvey can, I mean, it is really pretty easy to cure.
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  Speaker 1: You can add like you can reverse the effects of
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: scurvy if you add that vitamin C back in and
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  Speaker 1: it's really easy as that. But they didn't have access
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  Speaker 1: to it. That's why it's so closely associated with sailing, right,
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  Speaker 1: But it's still out there today. It's not like we
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  Speaker 1: cured an eradicated scurvy. I mean cured, I guess in
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: a way, but we didn't eradicate it because in poor
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: places where people don't have access to vitamin C um,
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: low income families, even in the United States, you see
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: scurvy popping up every now and then. Yeah, it's a
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: really sad situation in orange groves where obstinate people are
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: just sitting around that's suffering from scurvy. Yeah, it is
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: so um. As as malnourishment has kind of increased um
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: because of the Western diet, so have cases of scurvy.
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: Like in the developed Western world, people get scurvy. It's
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: more more frequently seen whenever there's like a terrible famine
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: or something like that. But it can't happen in people's
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: everyday lives. They can start to develop scurvy. The great
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: thing is, and this is what Lynn showed way back
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  Speaker 1: in the seventeen forties. Is that give somebody some orange
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  Speaker 1: juice or some vitamin C pills and within twenty four
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  Speaker 1: hours their gums are gonna stop bleeding. Um, within three
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: months they should be expected to make a full and
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: complete recovery. Like, it's extremely treatable. It's a really treatable disease.
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  Speaker 1: It's just before James Lynn came along and saved a
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: lot of people from excruciating deaths, there was no um,
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: kind of codified knowledge about about how to cure and
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: treat scurvy. That's right, And after a few months you're
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: completely fine. Yep, it's great, it is, it's great. It's
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: the best thing. Just go ahead and get some scurvys.
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: Just keep some vitamins you nearby, and it'll be a
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: wild ride. I've got two more things things. One, I
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: believe the reason why the British are sometimes uh pejoratively
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: referred to as limeys is because of that lime juice
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  Speaker 1: ration that the sailors got to cure scurvey. Yeah. And
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: then the second thing, you said that scurvy was kind
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: of a big deal in the Civil War. Um. I
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: saw that there was a campaign poster in Chicago. I
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: think a union campaign poster that said, don't send your
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: sweethearted love letter, send an onion because they knew that
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: onions would combat scurvy. That's great. I think that's pretty great.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: It's a great it's a great thing. We should start
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: doing that for Valentine's Day, sending on Alright, Chuck, that's
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: it for short Stuff, Right, that's right, Chuck said, right, everybody.
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: That means that short Stuff is out. Stuff you should
• 12:50
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