Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Scurvy

Episode Date: September 18, 2019

Scurvy seems like a terrible way to go: Your gums swell so you can’t eat, your teeth fall out and your brain and/or heart hemorrhages. Fortunately, all you need is an orange to cure you. Or some – blech – broccoli.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. YARN, Welcome to the Short Stuff, I'm Josh, there's Chuck, there's Jerry, the scurvy dog, and this is Short Stuff.

Like I said, I'm already wasting time. Let's start. YARN. Good Lord. I can't believe this is a show. It is. Yeah. For like 12 years almost.

Yeah. Ish, 11. I think short stuff in particular though, Chuck, is just about approached, it's one year anniversary. Oh, that's great. Yep, the little bro. So let's talk about scurvy, which is a disease that you can get

when you don't get enough vitamin C for a long period of time. So it's gotta be a long period of time. If you go without vitamin C for a few days or a few weeks even, you're gonna be fine. Right. If you are, let's say, on a pirate ship and you go months without vitamin C.

Sure. Then you're toast. Yeah, and technically any ship or technically any massive land movement where you don't have vitamin C in your diet. Or even if you just choose not to eat vitamin C. You can be living in the middle of an orange grove. Yep, just a total jerk.

But it takes about like two to three months before the effects really start to set in. But it is really odd to think that like, yeah, I hadn't thought about that. You could just remove vitamin C from your diet. It wouldn't be that hard. Everyone thinks like, well, oranges, lemons, limes, rich in vitamin C.

Sure. True, but did you know that broccoli has about twice as much vitamin C as an orange? Yeah, and I love broccoli and you hate it. Yes, but I would eat broccoli if I was starting to show signs of scurvy. I prefer to eat the oranges and the limes and the lemons because I love me some citrus.

Sure, me too. Maybe a grapefruit here or there? Not in the grapefruit, a little bitter for me, but I would choke it down if my life depended on it. Sure, you should try. I've got something for you then, Chuck. Fresh squeezed grapefruit juice and orange juice, fresh squeezed in equal proportions.

Yeah, I think I've had it mixed and can have it. And I also think I have a thing for my childhood in the 70s and early 80s when a half a grapefruit covered in sugar was like a meal for moms. Right. And I don't know, it just bugged me. That and cottage cheese. Yeah, that was a super 70s diet thing.

All right, so let's talk about vitamin C because it's super interesting to me that tons of animals, 4,000 kinds of mammals even, can produce their own vitamin C, but humans, primates more specifically. Yeah, that's a big one. Guinea pigs and fruit bats lost the ability to a long time ago.

Yeah, and other animals can synthesize vitamin C so they don't need to ingest it, like you were saying, because they have a function in gulogine, the gulonolactone oxidase gene, which is beautiful words. But the gulogine, we have a full script of it, it's there. There's just some mutation that occurred way back in our evolutionary history, which is pointed to by the fact that other apes

can't synthesize vitamin C either. So those have been way before humans were around. And as a matter of fact, the fact that we do have a gulogine that is no longer functioning, is pointed to as evidence of evolution by people who still argue such things. But the fact that the gulogine is there, but not functioning is the whole reason

we can't produce vitamin C, so we have to ingest it elsewhere, which wasn't a problem at least at first, when we were just strictly a subtropical species, like we evolved to be initially. Yeah, because we were surrounded by fruits and vegetables and ate them a lot. But then as we migrated around the globe

to places where that stuff wasn't so abundant, it quickly became a problem. It did. And so vitamin C pops up in other non-subtropical crops like non-subtropical crops or crops that we've adapted to non-subtropical climates, which is to say everything outside of the tropics and subtropics, right?

That's right. Red peppers. Yeah, red peppers, potatoes, onions are another one. Sure. Tomatoes. So there's tomatoes and actually strangely enough, some raw meat and then say like the livers of certain animals are also very rich in vitamin C,

which is why people living up in the Arctic Circle, like Inuit populations and other indigenous tribes that lived way far north, surprisingly didn't suffer from scurvy because they have plenty of vitamin C and they're almost entirely meat-rich diet. That's right. It pops up in other places, but if you don't get it,

you can't synthesize vitamin C, which is extremely important to building collagen in your body, which it turns out collagen is way more important than just keeping the cuticles of your nails healthy. Yeah, we need collagen. It's a protein and if you like your connected tissue in your body staying healthy and connective, then you need that collagen.

Bones are gonna get a lot of their strength from collagen fibers. If you have like a boo-boo on your skin, collagen is gonna heal it. It'll help the walls of your blood vessels stay strong and healthy. If you like to keep your blood inside your vessels, you're gonna love collagen, in other words.

That's right. And if you are getting enough vitamin C, which they say is about 75 to 90 milligrams a day, you're gonna be burning through about eight to 10 milligrams of this vitamin C if you wanna keep synthesizing that collagen. Right, so you wanna have a store reserve of it at all times. And supposedly if your store drops below 300 milligrams,

That's right. That's when the scurvy starts to happen. And it's gonna first start to be noticeable very faintly. You're gonna feel weak, maybe a little bit of fatigue. It's not gonna be, you're not gonna be like, it's scurvy. I'm a scurvy dog. It's gonna take a little longer and some other stuff

to really point to the fact that you are suffering from scurvy. You'll go through weight loss due to reduced appetite. And then the real dead giveaway for a lot of people is that you start to get, your mouth just undergoes a massive horrific transition in a number of ways. Yeah, it's pretty gross.

We're talking bleeding gums, swollen gums, teeth loosening and falling out. This is my worst nightmare. Yes, not good. Joint and muscle pain, your skin, like if you, we talked about the collagen helping to form scar tissue and heal boo-boos. You will not be able to heal your boo-boos

and old boo-boos might reopen because they're not healing like they should be. Bones start to become brittle. It's really, really bad and grotesque. It's a bad jam for sure. And then eventually, because remember your blood vessels are weak and because you remember we did our episode

like does the body really regenerate itself every seven or nine years or something like that? Your tissues are constantly being regenerated but part of that regeneration is from an adequate supply of vitamin C. So if you don't have that, you're not regenerating these things. And then eventually some really important blood vessels

like ones that supply your brain or your heart with blood are going to fail and you're going to die of a blood hemorrhage in your brain or your heart. That's right. So let's take a break and we're gonna talk about what pirates and sailors have to do with all this right after this.

["Pirates and Sailors Have to Do With All This"] On the podcast, pay dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the co-classic show Hey Dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there

when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts

or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know. All righty. So we kind of gave it away earlier by saying, you know, if you don't have vitamin C in and you're in a place where you can't get it, scurvy will set in. Early on, this was a problem like during the Crusades

because armies were where there were no fruits and vegetables during the Irish potato famine. It was a big deal during the American Civil War. Scurvy was a big deal. But the early sailors of the world, the Vikings and the Phoenicians, they had fruits and veggies, so they were all fine. Between 1500 and 1800, though, and this is hard to believe,

it was the leading cause of naval death. Around 2 million sailors died of scurvy. Yeah, like far and away the leading cause. And it was like a really bad death. Like your gums would become so inflamed and swollen, they would grow over your teeth. And so to allow you to chew your food because otherwise you'd just starved to death

because you couldn't eat, the naval surgeons would cut your gums away to expose your teeth once more. This is the kind of like stuff that was happening to you is you're dying of scurvy. And at the time, this is say like the age of discovery starting around, you know, the late 15th century, early 16th century.

Onto the middle of the 18th century, there were just millions of people died this way, suffered from this. And it's not like they didn't already know how to cure scurvy through like folk medicine. Here or there, people kind of figured out like, oh, if you eat an onion, you're gonna be fine or try some citrus or something like that.

But it wasn't like widely disseminated and certainly not scientifically based knowledge until a guy named James Lin came around. And in 1747, he, I think on behalf of the Royal Navy, conducted the first controlled experiment that showed that citrus actually can cure scurvy. Yeah, I mean, James Lin comes around, says you're on these boats, you're eating hard tack,

drinking beer, and salted meat, and you're dying grotesque deaths, throw a lime in that beer, and you'll be fine. Yeah, make it a Negro modello, and it's even better. Sort of, because scurvy can, I mean, it is really pretty easy to cure. You can add, like you can reverse the effects of scurvy if you add that vitamin C back in,

and it's really easy as that, but they didn't have access to it, that's why it's so closely associated with sailing. But it's still out there today. It's not like we cured an eradicated scurvy, I mean, cured, I guess, in a way, but we didn't eradicate it, because in poor places where people don't have access to vitamin C, low income families, even in the United States,

you see scurvy popping up every now and then, it's a really sad situation. In orange groves where obstinate people are just sitting around suffering from scurvy, yeah, it is, so as malnourishment has kind of increased because of the Western diet, so have cases of scurvy. Like in the developed Western world, people get scurvy. It's more frequently seen whenever there's

like a terrible famine or something like that, but it can happen in people's everyday lives, they can start to develop scurvy. The great thing is, and this is what Lynn showed way back in the 1740s, is that we give somebody some orange juice or some vitamin C pills, and within 24 hours, their gums are gonna stop bleeding. Within three months, they should be expected

to make a full and complete recovery. Like it's extremely treatable, it's a really treatable disease. It's just before James Lynn came along and saved a lot of people from excruciating deaths, there was no kind of codified knowledge about how to cure and treat scurvy. That's right, and after a few months, you're completely fine.

Yep. It's great. It is, it's great, it's the best thing. Just go ahead and get some scurvy, just keep some vitamin C nearby, and it'll be a wild ride. I've got two more things. Okay.

One, I believe the reason why the British are sometimes pejoratively referred to as limies is because of that lime juice ration that the sailors got to cure scurvy. Oh yeah? Yeah, and then the second thing, you said that scurvy was kind of a big deal in the Civil War.

I saw that there was a campaign poster in Chicago, I think, a union campaign poster that said, don't send your sweetheart a love letter, send an onion, because they knew that onions would combat scurvy. That's great. I think that's pretty great. It's a great thing.

We should start doing that for Valentine's Day. I love it. Sending onions. All right, Chuck, that's it for short stuff, right? That's right. Chuck said, right, everybody, that means that short stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production

of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.