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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

Vitamin C is hard to be deficient in, so it’s no surprise that nobody needs it. It’s why multivitamins look bad in research: it’s unethical to craft a study where people are deficient, so you’re just comparing cohorts of non deficient people.

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Humans and some other animals lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C endogenously (GULO/GULOP). Strepsirrhini (lorises, etc.) primates retained it while Haplorhini (humans and such) lost it. It's speculated that the loss is preferentially adaptive to starvation survival, which isn't really a concern anymore for overfed modern humans.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22294879/

Vit C deficiency is a concern on ketogenic/non-plant based diets

Strict keto and carnivorous diets are inherently unhealthy, wasteful, and terrible for the climate, pollution, pandemic evolution, and antibiotic resistance.

Not sure what you mean by strict keto. You’re either metabolically in ketosis, or not. And there are a surprising number of health benefits to ketosis. I’m saying this as a vegan, these are just the facts.

It may cause liver damage though.

(Also, it's a little harder but you can do a vegan keto diet: https://www.reddit.com/r/veganketo/)

Yeah, seeds, nuts and likewise nutritionally dense vegetables, like kale, can take you a long way. Alongside soy protein isolate.

you must be trying to make people sick on purpose!

It probably also does not help that the studies are done using a synthetic ascorbic acid that has the wrong pH levels and are missing the synergistic trace elements that are always found in plants that have vitamin C. So we need a large number of deficient people and to feed them a lot of raw guava or raw sweet red peppers.

I know where to find deficient people but doubt we would be allowed to experiment on them even if they volunteered and it meant free food.

That pretty much defeats the whole purpose of this research in the first place. The tested theory is that "If you get a cold, mega doses of vitamin C will help it go away faster." It's not a theory that has anything to do with "Your cold will go away faster if you also have scurvy."

Agreed it's not valid nor have any of the other studies. It would be very difficult to find someone only deficient in C. Usually when people are deficient in they are are missing many other confounding and compounding elements as well.

It's like watching Mythbusters which makes me want to make a show called MythBusterBusters. obscure reference to all the silly dogmatic scientismatic methods that show used albeit entertaining.

Hundreds of people in the uk treated for scurvy in the last year

Darn limeys. :) [Mansplaining note: British sailors were given the nickname "limey" due to the use of limes to ward off scurvy - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limey - note that limes have 1/4 the vitamin c of lemons and the processing and storage of lime juice destroyed much of the remaining vitamin c]

A relative heard of a college student who lived on nothing but Kraft Dinner and Red Bull. This student eventually had to get treated for scurvy.

I was thinking about testing volunteer Uyghurs, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz but we have to liberate them first. They are deficient in just about everything. I'm skipping ahead.

There is no such thing as natural Vitamin C. Animal livers produce it from glucose.

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