There's a near identical tale behind scurvy. Scurvy, most of everybody now knows, is caused simply by a deficiency of vitamin C. But this is something that took thousands of years to grasp, with millions of people falling victim to it in the interim. During the age of sail losing large chunks of your crew, largely due to scurvy, was just part of life. Part of the reason the cure was so difficult to discover is because it sounds folksy or homeopathic. As scurvy is caused by a lack of vitamin C, a simple way of preventing it is eating fresh fruits or meats.
Imagine somebody told you you could prevent some terrible and frequently fatal disease, that's spread worldwide, by eating limes. And this was already well within the age of formalized science and medicine. This was also further confounded by the fact that the vitamin content of things such as lemon juice degrades over time in storage, and even more rapidly in certain types of storage. And so some scientific experiments to test its effectiveness were inadvertently hamstringing themselves. It's made even more fun by the fact that humans need external sources of vitamin c while some common lab animals such as mice and rats do not - and internally make their own. You can withhold external vitamin C from a mouse for years and you'll never see scurvy.
Its ironic that I think this particular tale has slowly been lost to many in society, even though we have so many direct references to it. For instance the slang for a Brit as a limey came from the fact that the British Navy was the first to start dosing their sailors with lime, with tremendously positive affects to show for it. Maybe the biggest one is vitamin C itself. Vitamin C is now called ascorbic acid. But when it was first discovered it was known as hexuronic acid. So huge was the effect of scurvy it was renamed for its discovered anti-scorbutic (against scurvy) effect. Ascorbic was just a shortening of anti-scorbutic. And this happened as recently as the 1930s!
Reminds me of how the British stationed in 19th century India used to use quinine to ward off malaria. Apparently in its raw form it's incredibly bitter so the soldiers started to mix it with water and sugar and voila - tonic water was born.
Some bright spark added gin and the rest is history...
It’s bitter because it’s actually quite poisonous, and your tongue is warming you about that. Dave Arnold’s excellent Liquid Intelligence has a section on making your own tonic with pure quinine powder, and he admonishes the reader to mix with a blender, because an ubcombined chunk of pure quinine could actually hospitalize someone if it ended up in their drink.
Tonic water made with actual quinine rather than the synthetic stuff is great. It seems preferable to the pills, though I suspect you’d have to drink a lot.
Edit: The WHO suggest treating severe drug resistant malaria with 500mg of quinine orally every 8 hours. A 1 litre bottle of tonic water should not contain more than 83mg according to the FDA.
Drinking 6 litres every 8 hours is a bit much.
https://apps.who.int/medicinedocs/en/d/Jh2922e/2.5.2.html#Jh...
I prefer my mixed drinks with tonic over any other mixer. As you note, off the shelf tonic has very little quinine nowadays. When I had to take the pills I was headed to an area with a known malaria risk.
In general the Royal Navy added lime juice to whichever alcohol they issued to sailors as daily rations. Usually it was rum but could be other booze if the rum ran out. Officers would watch to ensure each man drank his dose instead of trading it away.
I in particular am interested in the vitamin K2, which comes almost exclusively from organ meats. If I had to bet on one nutrient that’ll get the “duh you should’ve been eating X” in a century or two, it’d be K2.
\piqued. Very high nutritional density, but these days everyone prefers lean muscle meat, and are put off by organ meats (sadly, myself included). People used to eat them routinely, e.g.: lambs fry, steak and kidney pie, lamb's brains, tripe (lungs), heart.
Tripe is stomach. Lung is not always consumed, but is sometimes. Scottish haggis and related scandi dishes are made from "the pluck" which means lungs, liver/fry and tongue.
Liver in particular used to be something of a comfort food staple in at least parts of the US. I'd encourage people to use fresh veal liver if available rather than the frozen beef liver that may be in the back of a freezer in a supermarket somewhere.
I also like veal kidneys and sweetbreads but rarely see them.
Every now and then you'll see them on a restaurant menu and you can sometimes get them from a butcher (although TBH they're probably more prep work than is worth it for me). But, yeah, pretty hard to come by.
I’d argue that the health of the sailors, who were in a sense the lowest of the low was not a concern for a long time. Ships were disgusting — you could smell a military ship coming.
As early as Vasco de Gama people were aware of the power of citrus to stop scurvy — they may not have known why, but they were aware.
With the British, there was an ROI to consider as the supply of sailors were tight, and they had attrition due to things like malaria as well.
Worse than this: they switched from lemons to limes, assuming that they were equivalent (and cheaper). And then came to doubt the theory that citrus prevented scurvy as some pre-modern pre-scientific relic.
Was there no source of Vitamin C that was cheaper, less perishable, and more easily available in Northern Europe in all seasons, than citrus? I don't know how exotic lemons were at the time, but I'd guess loading up on lots of citrus in a Northern European port could be rather expensive?
Sauerkraut. Any kind of fermented vegetable would do but you really need something with relatively high vitamin c content and it’s really easy to destroy.
For Northern Europe at that time I would think that kale would be the best source. You can harvest fresh kale for most of the year. No idea how the vitamin c holds up when you dry it. I'm unsure if sea buckthorn was growing in Northern Europe at that time, but if it was it would be a near perfect source, save for the trouble of picking them. Today you could eat Rosehip too, but that plant is so invasive that it needs to be seriously kept at bay.
Remember that, without understanding the chemistry, running an experiment was difficult. Aside from the expense, I doubt people would be enthused about doing trials of alternative foods when people would get scurvy if the food turned out not to work as well.
Imagine somebody told you you could prevent some terrible and frequently fatal disease, that's spread worldwide, by eating limes. And this was already well within the age of formalized science and medicine. This was also further confounded by the fact that the vitamin content of things such as lemon juice degrades over time in storage, and even more rapidly in certain types of storage. And so some scientific experiments to test its effectiveness were inadvertently hamstringing themselves. It's made even more fun by the fact that humans need external sources of vitamin c while some common lab animals such as mice and rats do not - and internally make their own. You can withhold external vitamin C from a mouse for years and you'll never see scurvy.
Its ironic that I think this particular tale has slowly been lost to many in society, even though we have so many direct references to it. For instance the slang for a Brit as a limey came from the fact that the British Navy was the first to start dosing their sailors with lime, with tremendously positive affects to show for it. Maybe the biggest one is vitamin C itself. Vitamin C is now called ascorbic acid. But when it was first discovered it was known as hexuronic acid. So huge was the effect of scurvy it was renamed for its discovered anti-scorbutic (against scurvy) effect. Ascorbic was just a shortening of anti-scorbutic. And this happened as recently as the 1930s!