Vitamin C On a Carnivore Diet
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This article does NOT constitute medical advice.
​Consult with your physician before making any changes to your medical plan.
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If you do a Google search for the vitamin C content of beef, or deer, or pork, you will find that they report a vitamin C content of "zero". So, how do people on a carnivore diet get vitamin C? If we look at the remote Sami tribe living in the arctic circle of Norway we find that they eat, almost exclusively, reindeer. In the winter they don't have any plants growing at all. Where are they getting their vitamin C? Neanderthals would have faced a similar problem.  If you ask Google if humans can make vitamin C they say "No". I hired a metabolic doctor a year ago who specializes in working with only carnivore patients like me. I recently asked him how many of the 3,000 carnivore patients at his clinic have ever had vitamin C deficiency. He said "none, ever". I looked at videos of well-known nutritionists like Judy Cho who specifically says that she has never had a carnivore patient with a vitamin C deficiency. Why are we told that meat has no vitamin C and that humans cannot make it, yet people on a carnivore diet don't have vitamin C deficiency? What is actually going on?

The recommended dietary allowance (RDA), set forth by the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), tells us that that humans need 75-90mg of vitamin C per day depending on age and gender. But, this recommendation may be extremely flawed for a person on a carnivore diet. Why? Well, the literature explains that glucose competes with vitamin C, and a person on a carnivore diet will have much lower glucose levels than the average person for which the RDA is designed. People eating a carnivore diet often consume no carbohydrates at all and are in a state of ketosis where there body makes ATP from fat rather than glucose. Studies also show that, in order to prevent scurvy, only 10mg of vitamin C is needed per day. 

We've established that humans on a carnivore diet in ancestral tribes and in modern life don't seem to exhibit signs of vitamin C deficiency, plus the RDA seems to over-estimate the amount of vitamin C needed for people on a carnivore diet. But, where then are people on a carnivore diet getting the limited amounts of vitamin C that they still require? If you do a "Google" search for the vitamin C content of beef or reindeer or eggs it says "zero". Google acknowledges that organ meats do contain vitamin C. Several sources show that chicken liver contains over 71mg of vitamin C per 400g of liver, but that's a hell of a lot of chicken liver. That's almost a pound. You would overdose on vitamin A if you ate that much chicken liver every day. Three ounces of beef liver has about 20mg of vitamin C, but that's still a lot of liver. One person can eat about one cow per year, and a cow's liver weighs about 10 pounds (160 ounces). So, that means a person could only get 0.44 ounces per day of beef liver which is about 2.9mg of vitamin C, far less than the necessary 10mg of vitamin C to prevent scurvy. 

It turns out that beef actually has about 25ug of vitamin C per gram of beef. So if you eat 2 pounds of fresh grassfed beef you would get about 18mg of vitamin C. Of course, that is "fresh" meat. When meat is cooked it can lose some of the vitamin C content if temperatures are over 180 degree Fahrenheit. I usually cook beef to 120 degrees, so this makes sense now. Back in 1906 the arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson lived with the Inuit in the arctic for many months eating only a carnivorous diet, and he and the Inuit did not get scurvy. In 1928, Stefansson and a colleague did an experiment where they ate only meat for one year. They found that they were in excellent health. I personally have tested this on myself and found that I am in excellent health on a full carnivore diet with no symptoms of vitamin C deficiency.

When you change metabolic states the rules of nutrition change. A person on a ketogenic carnivore diet does not need as much vitamin C as a person on a diet that includes plants. The human body has a recycling feature for anti-oxidants, like vitamin C and glutathione, where they rely on a molecule called NADPH to renew them. The ketogenic carnivore diet boosts NADPH thereby providing a way to recycle vitamin C. This diagram from Nick Norwitz illustrates the point:

​Finally, we are told that humans cannot make vitamin C. But it is known that many species of bacteria can make vitamin C. This is speculation, but perhaps there are certain microbes in humans that can make vitamin C and have not yet been discovered?
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This article does NOT constitute medical advice.
​Consult with your physician before making any changes to your medical plan.