Response to Otso / mactonite from Fediverse ( bae.st ) re: Vitamin C on Carnivore Diet

[Dissident]

Some Background:

I have been using more than a pound of Strawberry Jam a day ( mixed with plain whole yogurt ) and considered it my primary source of Vitamin C. i was basically using Stawberry Jam like most people would use Rice, Pasta or Potatoes. I currently have four 3-pound jars in the pantry for example.

Essentially it was my bastardized version of Fruitarian element to an otherwise Carnivore diet, but i hated dealing with fresh fruits and berries because they are expensive and spoil quickly, sometimes before they even fully ripen and i enjoyed the simplicity and cost effectiveness of using preserves.

Strawberries are one of the densest sources of Vitamin C and even though i always knew that heat denatures Vitamin C i was under the assumption that SOME of the Vitamin C survives, because for example 2/3 of Vitamin C survives Pasteurization of Orange Juice and because i was eating SO MUCH of Strawberry Jam i didn’t really care HOW MUCH of the Vitamin C made it through the cooking process, because so long as even just only 10% made it - i would be fine.

well during the course of my argument with Otso / mactonite on NOSTR / Fediverse:

i finally checked and the actual amount of Vitamin C in my strawberry jam was ZERO.

luckily i only been relying on Strawberry Jam for vitamin C for maybe a month or two as my diet is basically always an experiment in progress but i was certainly already starting to do damage to myself with Vitamin C deficiency.

as soon as i realized i was killing myself i instantly downed some synthetic Ascorbic Acid scraped from the bottom of my previous empty container and ordered a new 8 pound pail of Ascorbic Acid to make sure i won’t run out again for YEARS.

So anyway, Otso / Mactonite has now asked the following:

and i will do a FULLY CUSTOM response, even though i had addressed these issues before here:

Carnivore Diet and Vitamin C

i just received my kilogram of pure Vitamin C powder for the THIRD time from Amazon … 2.2 pounds of pure Vitamin C ( Ascorbic Acid ) powder for $17 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AYIM9Y8?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details that’s about $8 per pound retard carnivores will pay $25 per pound of ribeye steak that contains ZERO vitamin C and will then claim that Zero is ENOUGH vitamin C because reasons … well what are their reasons ? the answer is you shouldn’t even care what BS they come up…

and here:

Supplementing Vitamins and Minerals

I would be curious to see what the current opinion is on this. I remember some Twitter threads back in the pre-covid era where you had expressed doubts about supplements and that they may be harmful. On the other hand, you also stated that you used them for long periods. My own experience is mixed, though I actually still use them intermittently because I had some troubles when using them daily.

but since Otso / Mactonite has basically saved my life LOL i feel it would be impolite to just refer him to a link.

[Dissident]

if meat didn’t have vitamin c then every animal would have scurvy.

1 - most animals, carnivores and herbivores alike, synthesize their own Vitamin C and do not need Vitamin C in the diet. Humans are one of the few rare animals who cannot synthesize Vitamin C and need Vitamin C in the diet.

2 - meat doesn’t contain vitamin C but liver does.

pictured: Grass Fed Beef Liver.

in fact the body stores Vitamin C in the liver. How much of it makes it through cooking ? I guess it depends. It is known that the leader of a pack of wolves gets to eat first and he always eats the liver, then other wolves eat what is left. So the leader of the pack would get Vitamin C directly from the diet … however, Wolves are able to synthesize their own Vitamin C, so it doesn’t really matter ( Liver is also a rich source of many other nutrients ).

Sheep are herbivores so technically they wouldn’t need to synthesize Vitamin C ( as they would get plenty from the diet ) and yet they do synthesize their own Vitamin C anyway. This is similar to how Humans get Cholesterol from the diet but also synthesize our own as well. Sheep synthesize Vitamin C mostly in times of stress. This is why also you need to supplement Vitamin C when you’re sick for example - the demand for Vitamin C is increased during stress, illness etc.

it goes without saying that our Paleo ancestors would never throw the liver out. liver is the most nutritious and the most delicious part of the animal. healthy liver tastes like chocolate candy. i LOVE liver, but Americans don’t eat liver because they are not accustomed to it. also because liver from sick animals tastes horrible, and most farm animals in America are sick.

you should only buy organic liver from young animals and check to make sure it is healthy in color ( no signs of yellowing ). the picture above is what liver should look like in terms of color. good liver also tastes sweet. if it tastes bitter - throw it out.

even if you have to throw out half of the liver you buy on average you will still be getting good value in terms of nutrition per dollar from the other half that you eat. liver is is that nutrient dense.

i always had liver as a child in Soviet Union because my sadist Jew father falsely believed Liver was a poison and he never passed an opportunity to poison his children. But i learned to love liver and always looked forward to eating it and still do to this day.

so to sum up: meat does NOT contain Vitamin C and animals do NOT get scurvy because they all either get it from diet or synthesize it themselves and in fact in 99% of cases BOTH !

Some carnivores i spoke with tried to argue that meat contains Vitamin C but the amount is below measurement threshold. This is certainly plausible yet i am not sure it is relevant.

[Dissident]

no carnivore ever has gotten scurvy?

No carnivore ( or almost none ) ADMITS to getting scurvy or to supplementing Vitamin C … but we KNOW these people LIE ALL THE TIME.

how many times have you read stories about Vegans getting caught eating meat ? it happens all the time. what makes you think Carnivores don’t secretly eat Fruits or take Vitamin C ?

and remember only carnivores who DO NOT EAT LIVER actually need a separate source of Vitamin C.

the position adopted by Carnivores on this is interesting - they REFUSE TO ADMIT that without Liver they will be Vitamin C deficient … but they also consider eating Liver as a badge of honor … so you’re ENCOURAGED to eat Liver as a carnivore but you’re told it is optional ( it really isn’t ).

think of what would happen if a person got Scurvy on Carnivore - would they admit that they are an idiot so that everybody would laugh at them ?

no, they would either:

1 - quit carnivore with a fake excuse like “my GF made me quit”

2 - start to secretly supplement without admitting it.

3 - learn to love Liver.

[Dissident]

and again fruits are not a good source of vitamin c anyway because they’re high in carbs

depends on what fruits. certainly my Strawberry Jam was high in carbs ( almost all of them added ) but it had zero Vitamin C to begin with so …

raw strawberries on other hand:

https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/167762/nutrients

for every 100 grams, have 60 mg of Vitamin C and just 5 gram sugar ( 7 gram carbs ).

so to get a full RDA ( recommended daily / dietary allowance ) of 90 mg Vit. C you would only consume 8 grams of sugars and 10 grams of carbs with strawberries. this is a non issue. some aboriginals are known to consume honey by the bucketloads. sugar from strawberries would be literally a drop in such a bucket.

pictured: Hadza “Honey Hunter” holding bee nest ( note the abs )

the Caveat with Aboriginal Honey consumption is that it is SEASONAL.

it isn’t lavish eating and high carbs and sugar that is killing Americans. it’s doing that YEAR ROUND.

in other words its OK to gain weight sometimes as long as you cut down to absolutely shredded ( like the man pictured ) AT LEAST ONCE EVERY YEAR.

it’s when you get fat and then just keep getting fatter every year and never return to baseline that’s when you get diabetes, heart disease and die.

and remember modern fruits are Frankenstein foods. wild fruits are sour ( Ascorbic Acid is sour ). fruits in supermarket are sweet ( cultivated to be that way ). you will be 100% fine eating fruits so long as they resemble wild fruits ( high Vitamin C, low sugar ) and so long as they are not your entire diet year round.

even when i was growing up in Soviet Union our fruits ( Apples, Grapes ) were not half as sweet as what you Americans have. what you have is Frankenstein Sugar Water Bags not fruits. you will have to use some judgement when shopping.

[Dissident]

ascorbic acid doesn’t work

it’s possible. i haven’t personally conducted any controlled studies on the matter so it’s always a possibility.

however i paid $35 for 8 pounds of Vitamin C. it would cost $20,000 to get same amount of Vitamin C from Fresh Strawberries.

granted, just one dollar worth of strawberries per day would meet your Vitamin C RDA, but still, a dollar a day over 80 years is $30,000.

you could save a bunch of change by instead using half a dollar worth of strawberries per day and then throwing a gram of Ascorbic Acid on top of that.

seems like a good way to hedge your bets to me.

basically Ascorbic Acid is so cheap it makes no sense NOT to use it, even if there is only a 10% probability that it works, but i suspect the real probability that it works is more like 99%.

on other hand if there is even a 1% probability that it doesn’t work - that is a reason enough to eat fresh fruits, but perhaps not to try to hit optimum levels but rather bare minimum levels and then fill the rest with Ascorbic Acid all the way to the “optimum” which is probably closer to 1 gram per day than 90 mg / day.

[Alkiphron]

It’s actually impressive that jam loses basically all of its nutritional value in the processing. I wonder if that’s a quirk of their particular mass market method of processing and whether other preserves might have at least some nutritional value. I had hoped that jam and yogurt would be a bit better for me than that.

I’m not buying the story about ascorbic acid not working either, although apparently there are shelf life considerations with it losing about 10-20% of efficacy within a couple of years. And I still have a bag of ascorbic acid probably from before I moved, so around 2021. Really I ought to be making Vitamin C “lemonade” a couple of times per day.

I took a hiatus from Twitter because of current and upcoming IRL events – and also because I don’t like the way it’s going under Elon/Yaccarino – and I may just say “to Hell with it” and instead join NOSTR when I have a bit more time.

[Dissident]

@Alkiphron

It’s actually impressive that jam loses basically all of its nutritional value in the processing. I wonder if that’s a quirk of their particular mass market method of processing and whether other preserves might have at least some nutritional value. I had hoped that jam and yogurt would be a bit better for me than that.

i have seen claims that a serving of strawberry jam contains 1 mg Vit C and claims that it contains 10 mg vit C … not sure where they got those figures from … 10 mg would imply almost no loss of Vitamin C since a serving of Jam is 20 grams while 100 grams of strawberries contains 60 mg.

however when i went to check the actual label on my jam it didn’t mention Vitamin C at all. and when i used image search to look for labels from other Jams all of them either had no mention of Vitamin C or listed it as 0 mg, or said that it was “not a significant source of” Vitamin C.

i’m sure there are ways to preserve Strawberries without losing vitamins but few if any of the strawberry preserves on the market seem to be using such methods. i wasn’t able to find even one.

i guess i was the only one trying to use Strawberry Jam as a source of Vitamin C on a Carnivore diet LOL. normal people just treat it as candy, and it is manufactured accordingly.

actually i did find some products that did have Vitamin C content but they both had Lemon Juice added.

Which is another consideration - many products are fortified. for example when Milk touts high Omega-3 content it doesn’t mean it comes from Grass Fed Cows - it means it has actual fish oil added to it to compensate for the fact that the cows are grain fed and the milk doesn’t naturally have the Omega 3 content that it should have.

[Dissident]

@Alkiphron

I’m not buying the story about ascorbic acid not working either, although apparently there are shelf life considerations with it losing about 10-20% of efficacy within a couple of years. And I still have a bag of ascorbic acid probably from before I moved, so around 2021. Really I ought to be making Vitamin C “lemonade” a couple of times per day.

well the argument was that when it occurs naturally in fruits it always comes bundled with other stuff. the actual image used by Otso was this:

and using Image search i traced it to this source:

Why real food vitamin C is better than ascorbic acid — and how to tell the...

i didn’t read it, but let’s assume it is true and Vitamin C in “real food” comes with all that stuff …

but Vitamin C isn’t only found in Citrus. it is also found in Liver. Pretty sure Liver doesn’t have any “bioflavanoids” etc. Also pretty sure when Wolves and Goats synthesize Vitamin C they don’t synthesize “bioflavanoids” …

so i would also err on the side of Vitamin C and Ascorbic Acid being the same … HOWEVER ! ! !

however at the same time i would be wary of getting exceedingly reductionist with nutrition, because THERE IS ALWAYS THE POSSIBILITY OF A FATAL MISTAKE with this approach.

as Mark Twain said " i never read health books because i don’t want to die of a misprint " … this still applies today.

let’s say i prove beyond a shadow of doubt that Vitamin C is the same thing as Ascorbic Acid but tomorrow they discover another Vitamin in Strawberries that nobody knew about ? although unlikely it can’t be 100% ruled out.

on other hand we know that nobody has ever died from eating Strawberries so why not just eat the whole thing.

but also nobody died from any reasonable doses of Vitamin C as well, so may as well eat that too.

i was thinking - nutrition is like investing. you have limited resources and limited information and you are faced with uncertainty and you have to somehow hedge your bets in such a way that you don’t end up homeless / dead.

to put all your eggs in one basket you must have insider knowledge like Nancy Pelosi and i don’t have such level of knowledge so hedging bets seems appropriate.

gather as much information as you can but keep in mind that no matter how much you think you know you could still be wrong. then figure out a way to somehow not be paralyzed by this uncertainty.

[Dissident]

@Alkiphron

I took a hiatus from Twitter because of current and upcoming IRL events – and also because I don’t like the way it’s going under Elon/Yaccarino – and I may just say “to Hell with it” and instead join NOSTR when I have a bit more time.

Twitter is good for following some big and / or good accounts but is not great for having conversations.

Because anytime you open your mouth you get banned.

A good strategy is to be on twitter and simply screen shot and repost content to NOSTR and comment on it THERE.

the problem with that is you need to have the will power to say nothing on Twitter when Jews from Israel celebrate the murder of Women and Children while simultaneously playing Victims …

the other problem is that none of the Urbanist accounts on Twitter actually care what i or anybody else says. they are just paid to repeat certain lies by the WEF every day and they do that. they are also forbidden by WEF from blocking anybody so we can scream into the void. but no matter how many hundreds of times we point out the absurdity of their lies they will simply keep repeating them. gets tiresome after a while.

conversations on NOSTR are just somehow less aggravating.