40 Fun Facts About Vitamin C

Which popular pet rodent, like humans, cannot make its own vitamin C and can develop scurvy without fresh vegetables?

The guinea pig gave science its first lab model of scurvy in 1907, when two Norwegian doctors fed the animals only grains and flour. Most other rodents make their own vitamin C.

British sailors earned which nickname from a Royal Navy ration meant to keep scurvy away?

Limeys began as 'lime-juicers' in the 1850s. The navy had swapped lemons for a fruit from its Caribbean colonies, unaware that it holds only about half as much vitamin C.

Cooks squeeze lemon juice, a natural source of vitamin C, over sliced apples to slow which unappetizing change?

Browning begins when enzymes in the cut fruit meet oxygen in the air. Vitamin C is one of the compounds food makers add to sliced produce to hold that reaction back.

Scurvy, the disease caused by a lack of vitamin C, famously attacks which part of the mouth?

Gums can swell until they grow over the teeth, as a chronicler of Magellan's voyage around the world recorded. Sufferers then struggle to eat at all.

Captain Cook took which sour German staple on his Pacific voyages to protect his crew from scurvy?

Sauerkraut keeps its vitamin C as long as it is not cooked, so it was one of the few preserved foods that could protect a crew on a long voyage.

In advanced scurvy, what gruesome thing can happen to old wounds that had long since healed?

They reopen because scar tissue needs constant upkeep, and without vitamin C the body cannot maintain it. Bones that had knitted after a break can come apart again too.

Which animals carry the same broken gene that stops humans from making their own vitamin C?

Monkeys and apes lost the gene's function with our shared ancestors, soon after the first primates appeared. Lemurs and other wet-nosed primates kept theirs.

Which American chemist, winner of two Nobel Prizes, urged the public to take huge daily doses of vitamin C?

Linus Pauling's 1970 book Vitamin C and the Common Cold set off a craze for megadoses. Later trials found that regular supplements do not stop people catching colds.

To prevent scurvy, the Royal Navy long mixed citrus juice into sailors' daily ration of which watered-down spirit?

Rum diluted with water was known as grog. An 1867 law went on to require British ships to give every sailor a daily ration of the juice.

Which crunchy salad vegetable, once ripened to red, holds more than twice an orange's vitamin C by weight?

Bell pepper in its red form supplies 158% of the daily value of vitamin C per 100 g, against 59% for orange flesh. Green ones hold less.

Which Australian bush fruit can hold around fifty times more vitamin C than an orange, gram for gram?

Kakadu plum has been measured at up to 5,300 mg of vitamin C per 100 g, among the highest of any natural source. It has been a traditional bush food and medicine for centuries.

Inuit traditionally got vitamin C without fruit partly by eating muktuk, the raw skin and blubber of which animal?

Whale skin eaten raw holds up to 38 mg of vitamin C per 100 g. Muktuk is usually cut from the bowhead, though beluga and narwhal are used as well.

Eating vitamin C with a meal helps the body absorb more of which mineral, whose shortage causes anemia?

Iron is absorbed more easily because vitamin C donates electrons that keep the metal in the form the gut takes up best.

In most mammals, which organ makes all the vitamin C the animal needs, so no fruit is required?

The liver does the job in cats, dogs and cows, so none of them ever needs fruit. Reptiles make theirs in the kidneys instead.

Most species of which nocturnal mammals have lost the ability to make their own vitamin C, just as humans have?

Bats lost the vitamin C enzyme on their own, one of several times the same ability has vanished in evolution. Some fish and songbirds lost it too.

Which fuzzy-skinned fruit, renamed by New Zealand exporters in 1959, supplies a full day's vitamin C in 100 grams?

Kiwifruit gives 103% of the daily value of vitamin C per 100 g, and gold varieties give even more. Exporters dropped its old name, which had linked it to the gooseberry.

Vitamin C is essential for making which structural protein found in scar tissue, cartilage and blood vessels?

Collagen fibers need vitamin C to twist into their triple helix. Without it the body's connective tissue weakens, which is why scurvy brings bruising and bleeding.

Which chemical name for vitamin C was coined in the 1930s to honor its power against scurvy?

Ascorbic acid joins a-, meaning 'without', to the root of scorbutus, the medical name for scurvy. Its discoverer had first called the substance hexuronic acid.

Because vitamin C dissolves in water, the body quickly gets rid of any excess mainly through what?

Urine carries surplus vitamin C out of the blood rapidly, which is why even very large doses rarely poison anyone.

A Nobel-winning scientist found in the 1930s that vitamin C could be extracted in bulk from which red spice?

Paprika is a staple of Hungarian cooking, and it gave Albert Szent-Györgyi far more vitamin C than animal tissue had. He won the 1937 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Which Scottish naval surgeon ran a 1747 shipboard experiment showing that citrus fruit could cure scurvy?

James Lind gave twelve sick sailors different remedies aboard HMS Salisbury, and those fed oranges and lemons fared best. It ranks among the first controlled clinical trials.

Which ancient Greek physician described scurvy's symptoms more than 2,000 years ago?

Hippocrates wrote of the illness long before anyone knew a missing nutrient caused it. Pliny the Elder later described sailors eating sea kale to keep it away.

In wartime Britain, with oranges scarce, which wild hedgerow fruit was collected to make vitamin C syrup?

Rose hips hold about 426 mg of vitamin C per 100 g, several times the level in an orange. German submarine attacks on cargo ships had cut off imported fruit.

Magellan and his officers probably escaped scurvy on the Pacific crossing thanks to a preserve made from which fruit?

Quince paste was a delicacy reserved for the captains, and it happened to contain vitamin C. Most of the ordinary crew showed symptoms of scurvy.

In 1536 Iroquoians saved Jacques Cartier's scurvy-stricken men with a tea brewed from which part of a conifer?

Needles of the tree, thought to be eastern white cedar, made a tea later shown to contain 50 mg of vitamin C per 100 grams. No such remedy was available at sea.

Which large South American grazing animal, popular in zoos, develops scurvy unless its food includes vitamin C?

Capybara are the world's largest living rodents, and captive ones that go without vitamin C have shown the telltale mouth disease of scurvy.

US nutrition experts estimate that which group of people needs 35 mg more vitamin C a day than everyone else?

Smokers have lower levels of vitamin C in their blood, because the damage done by inhaled smoke uses the vitamin up. Secondhand smoke has the same effect.

Vitamin C neutralizes harmful free radicals before they damage the body's tissues, a job that earns it which label?

Antioxidant molecules such as vitamin C hand over electrons to reactive compounds, disarming them. Food makers add the vitamin to products as a preservative for the same reason.

Scurvy, once endemic in Scotland, all but vanished there by 1800 after the arrival of which crop from the Americas?

Potato crops failing in Ireland's Great Famine of 1845 brought scurvy back, a sign of how much vitamin C the humble tuber had been supplying.

Swallowing more than two or three grams of vitamin C at once most often brings on which unpleasant side effect?

Diarrhea is the common threshold side effect of megadoses, often with cramps and nausea. It is why US guidelines set an adult upper limit of 2,000 mg a day.

Which country, home of the 1960s fermentation method behind modern production, makes most of the world's vitamin C?

China makes well over half of the world's supply. Its two-step method lets microbes do work that older factories did with chemical reactions.

A popular home-made film developer mixes vitamin C and washing soda with which everyday drink?

Coffee gives the Caffenol recipe its name and supplies the plant compounds that darken exposed film. Vitamin C is so easily oxidized that it is also used in commercial photographic developers.

Animals and vitamin factories alike build vitamin C starting from which simple sugar?

Glucose becomes vitamin C through a chain of four enzymes. Humans are missing only the last of them, called GULO.

Which tropical fruit, also called the Barbados cherry, is picked while green because its vitamin C falls as it ripens?

Acerola supplies some 20 times the daily value of vitamin C per 100 g, and the unripe fruit is harvested for industrial use of the vitamin.

Which Portuguese explorer lost over half his crew, largely to scurvy, while opening the sea route to India?

Vasco da Gama lost 116 of his 170 men, by one historian's count. Scurvy is estimated to have killed at least two million sailors between 1500 and 1800.

On European food labels, vitamin C added to keep products fresh is listed under which E number?

E300 is the code for pure vitamin C, while E301 to E304 cover closely related salts and esters that do the same job.

In which country did chemist Tadeus Reichstein devise the 1933 process that first made synthetic vitamin C in bulk?

Switzerland's Hoffmann-La Roche bought the patent and in 1934 became the first company to mass-produce synthetic vitamin C, under the brand name Redoxon.

Which Royal Navy commodore's 1740s voyage around the world became notorious for its terrible losses to scurvy?

George Anson still came home with the treasure of a captured Manila galleon. The surgeon who later tested citrus cures for scurvy dedicated his treatise to him.

Vitamin C was first isolated in the 1920s from which hormone-producing organs taken from animals?

Adrenal glands hold some of the body's highest concentrations of vitamin C. Albert Szent-Györgyi purified it there years before he could prove it was the factor that prevents scurvy.

Wartime Britain gave young children free vitamin C syrup made from which dark berry, grown at home?

Blackcurrant growing was encouraged by the government because the bushes suit the British climate and the berries are rich in the vitamin. The syrup went to under-twos.