RawPetMedics Tuesday Live: Vitamin C

Good evening, how are you doing everybody? A theme tune to come into. I hope you like our poster. I do want to say thank you to Christina for pulling up some of these graphics. I don't know where she gets it from.

Sexy? Is it a touch sexy? Anybody think that when they saw the oranges?

Conor, that's just you.

Not until you mentioned it, mate.

I didn't think that.

That looks like a bulb.

Okay, she wanted to know what you said about it.

We're all on the same page there. I definitely just saw a bomb straight away. Two oranges. Oh, very good.

That's only because I said, can you see it yet?

Yeah, you meant the vitamin C, did you?

Yeah, that's right.

See everybody jumping in here. Rach Mac has got the honor of being the first one in. Hey Rach, nice to see you.

Rachel Mac is always first in, isn't she?

Really, really great.

Yep, yep. Fantastic. And just to remind you that you can catch us on Patreon. On www.patreon.com/rawpetmedics and also on your favorite podcast medium, whether it's Apple or Amazon or whoever it might be.

You can—

we can come with you when you walk the dog. So look at that, that was me doing a Jeremy Clarkson.

When you walk—

yeah. Oh, Jeremy's going—

I thought you were trying to do your sexy voice, Nick.

I gave up on that a long time go.

Yeah, there's no need now. Um, Jeremy Clarkson's gone quite a bit, bit green now. He's doing a bit of farming and whatnot. I feel like he's easing off the, uh, the, um, kind of anti-green rhetoric and probably taking little small steps towards it, I imagine. But I don't listen to the guy, so I don't know. But somebody said that he has— that's a good thing because he has quite a following, doesn't he?

Yeah, baby steps. But yeah, he's— I mean, he's petrolhead, you know, in a massive, massive way, obviously. But if he is, I think he is promoting some kind of thinking about regenerative or, you know, more gentle farming agricultural techniques. So yeah, yeah, which is brilliant.

Yeah, little steps. Yeah. Guys, if you're listening to us on podcast, don't forget to give us a rating. So you can, you can give us ratings anywhere essentially, but we don't push that enough. So listening is great. It's always free to listen, of course, but don't forget to give us that rating as well. We need to climb up those charts. We want to be first. In at least America. I think that's a small kind of aim, and so we need a few, just a few more ratings to break that top 2,000 dog-specific podcasts. And so do apply yourselves, we would appreciate that very much. Yeah, tonight, so guys, we're doing a bit of vitamin C tonight, and this was such a good idea of Nick's because, you know, individual nutrients, you know, there's just so much you could talk about. If you Google the effect of a single nutrient deficiency on any health issue, like physical, mental health, you'll always, like each vitamin, it's almost like each vitamin and mineral plays an intricate role somewhere along the line. But vitamin C is surely the one that vitamin C, D, these are some of the most commonly talked about. And you can't say more interesting 'cause we have vitamin, how much do I know about vitamin K? But this vitamin C stuff is great. Who wants to start us off a little bit about vitamin C? Nick, you wanna go?

I would love to, I'd love to. I'm just going to start way, way, way back in here, right in the beginning. So, scorbutic. Okay, let's start with definitions. It's always a good place to start. Scorbutic. Gentlemen, did you know what scorbutic means? Nor did I. But if you think of ascorbate, which is vitamin C, that's a clue. Scorbutic is relating or pertaining to scurvy. And therefore, if you have a— you've isolated a molecule, as they did in about 1931 or so, what are you going to call it? A scorbate against scurvy. So that's, that's how you can— that's how you can remember ascorbic acid as being vitamin C. So absolutely marvelous. And I'm in the— at the moment I'm reading Moby Dick, which is all about whaling. I'm not a fan of whaling, but it did happen. And this is an amazing book of the whole thing. Even if, even if you don't particularly enjoy what he's talking about, the way he describes it is incredible. It's almost Shakespearean, but Shakespearean such that you can read it because it was produced in 1861. And I'll tell you, it's one of the most gripping books I've, I've read in, in, in a very long time. Novels that I've read in a very long time. And this does pertain to scurvy because there's no mention of scurvy. Okay, well, I'm on chapter 106 and not one mention of scurvy. Whereas when you look at the, the, the, the military voyages, long-distance voyages, maybe in the 1700s, more sailors died of scurvy than died in battle. That's how bad it was. And so, so it got me thinking as to what were sailors doing that the Navy wasn't doing. And one of the things they were doing, they were eating fresh meat on a fairly regular basis. They would go for 4-year tours, and sometimes they'd be away from shore for months and months and months. Okay, whereas when you've got a, a navy boat they go away from shore for, say, 3 months or so, and they start coming down with scurvy. Start coming down with scurvy. Sorry, that was Siri. So it's— I thought, there's— what's, what's the difference between the two? So then I had a conversation with you two guys over the weekend and said, why don't we talk about, about scurvy and getting, getting vitamin C from meat, which is not what you think of. First of all, we have described this this, but you know, we talked about Shanahan and getting vitamin C from meat and that regenerative meat is much higher in vitamin C. So that's really where I wanted to, to go with the thoughts. And so I've looked up dogs produce vitamin C, they produce about 30-40 milligrams of vitamin C from their liver derived from glucose. And that's why, Conor, you were saying that in the AFCO regulations there's no guidelines for how much vitamin C, and that would be— that would suggest that's possibly why. And so you think, well, they produce vitamin C, which is brilliant, but when you compare it with a mouse—

I'll just come in there, Nick, just because I think the guys need to know. So they produce their own vitamin C. I believe it works out at about 11 milligrams per kilo per day that they can produce themselves?

30 or 40, my friend.

I think that they produce themselves. So I saw a reference that said 11. So that's interesting.

Okay. Yeah, but it's in the same ballpark per kilo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

And also to notice there that of all the animals that can— I mean, humans can't, which makes us slightly unique. Us and guinea pigs, isn't it? Primates and guinea pigs can't make their own vitamin C. Most other animals can. But dogs are particularly poor at it compared to other dogs. And there's a reference there that he highlights, the rate of vitamin C synthesis in the dog's liver tissue is lower than other animals and comparable species.

So I thought that totally— we've got a mouse who's producing 275 milligrams per kilogram. Yeah.

Oh, wow.

And you've got a— which is interesting because they're omnivorous/herbivorous— a rabbit who is pretty much a herbivore, is producing for themselves 226, and yet you have a dog—

wow—

only producing 40. So yes, they can produce it, but they're not producing much, which is possibly why they benefit from the addition of that. And this is a reference that I've put up. I put up on Patreon, and there you can see the, the species who can produce their own, uh, who can produce their own, um, vitamin C, and those who can't.

I believe the ones in gray are the ones that can't.

The ones in gray? Oh, that's kind of— look at that, that's why humans and bats— oh, interesting. So if you're a vampire bat, you must get your vitamin C from blood.

Therefore, that's a good point.

Isn't that good?

Wow, that's a good one.

Wow.

Okay, so there you go. That's, that's kind of— I think that's, that's really interesting. I don't think it gets us anywhere, but it's kind of interesting.

Yeah, the, the small dose, the small amount of that vitamin C, and, and you've alluded to the fact that AFCO, the governing body for— not because even the governing body, but they put out recommendations and they don't put any vitamin C in the recommendation. So a lot of dry foods don't add vitamin C unless they're trying to preserve the food, because vitamin C can be used as a way to control the acidity in the food, or what is it, it's a regulator or something. But, uh, so a lot of dry foods don't have vitamin C because healthy dogs produce a small amount of it, as Nick said, not a whole lot. But that kind of ignores the fact that unhealthy dogs don't seem to make a whole lot of this, if any at all. And hence, studies show sick dogs benefit enormously from vitamin vitamin C. So if you're a dry-fed dog and you're sick, good luck because you're not getting vitamin C from your dry food if you're feeding the same complete dry food unless you've got a specific prescription diet with added vitamin C. And there's loads of studies here. I got this from the Whole Dog Journal, credit to her. And she said in 1942, we've known since 1942 dogs with skin diseases are particularly low in vitamin C. Other researchers have found that the blood levels of vitamin C to be so low, even non-existent in dogs with fevers, and who exercise hard, sled dogs after a race, hunting dogs in the middle of a hunting season. In fact, researchers can measure the level of stress a dog experiences, mental or physical, by measuring the degree of depletion of the vitamin in the dog's blood. And lastly, conversely, many studies have found that dogs, just like humans, when supplemented with vitamin C, show greater resistance to disease and a better ability to recover from injuries or illness. That all adds up to It doesn't sound like vitamin C is not needed by the dog. That sounds to me like vitamin C is needed by the dog. Poor at it, as Nick just highlighted, and when sick deprived of it. And you need it every day. It's a water-soluble vitamin, so you need to eat vitamin C. It's not something you store in the fat stores, so you need to eat vitamin C pretty regularly. That doesn't have to be an everyday thing, but it helps, you know, especially when you're sick. So I just wanted to put that in. This doesn't say—

I think they're ignoring— these early researchers, they were ignoring the fact that you can get vitamin C from wild-type meat. Yeah, so maybe that's what was topping them up, possibly in a wild scenario. Also, the stresses would be very different and possibly more easy to cope with. I've got a list here of the physiologic effects of ascorbic acid. Yeah, what does vitamin C do in the body? It's a really long list, but I'm just going to pick out some highlights. Detoxification of histamine, phagocytosis with white blood cells, phagocytosis, metabolism of drugs, tubulin cartilage formation, and muscle tubulin, muscle motion, fat metabolism, immunity, cancer. Bren, you've got some, some stuff on cancer. I think that would be really nice to hear that. Diabetic complications, cataracts, and vitamin C— lack of vitamin C, uh, periodontal disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and infections. So everything, it's pretty much everything. Yeah, I mean, I knew vitamin C was great, but it's just— it's the key to everything. And we're going to talk about Wendell Belfield and giving high doses for things like distemper and all sorts disease processes, but it really is, it's kind of the Rolls-Royce of the vitamins, if you can say such a thing, because they all—

it's a great one to start with. And I think from a point of view of a lot of people are asking the question, okay, well, how do dogs make their own vitamin C? What's this about conversion within the liver? So I think we sort of need to bring in— sorry if this blasts a few people that are bored stiff with structures and everything else, but actually the really important thing is this is generated from glucose. And so, you know, lots of people think, well, hold on, we've been talking for years now about not giving sugars, and all of a sudden we're now saying this is something that actually dogs can use glucose for. Why are sugars so bad? And I think it's really important to understand, you know, the amount of sugar that they could convert into vitamin C could quite easily be made from the conversion of protein excess in through the pyruvate pathway into glucose and then converted on at that point. So we're not talking you need to sugar load your dog to make them have higher levels of vitamin C. Far from it.

Yes, yes. But the other side of that is this is in humans, if you have a lot of sugar or starch in your diet, then the sugar competes with the absorption of vitamin C. And this is perhaps why all those sailors, those military sailors eating biscuits, got scurvy, because they're eating biscuits and molasses and rum and goodness knows what. And that will compete with absorption of vitamin C. So it may not have been a lack of vitamin C. It could have been that their diet was impeding their absorption of the tiny amount of vitamin C that they need. They were going to get from other sources like beef and what have you, because for humans they only need about 10 milligrams a day to get rid of the symptoms of scurvy. 10 milligrams is absolutely nothing. Most people will net 500 milligrams without—

that's a really important point, is that, look, there's a level at which you will be free from obvious symptoms of a lack of deficiency, which is that whole 11mg up to 30mg that we were talking about. And there's actually optimizing the level of vitamin C so that it can improve your building of collagen, improve your immune systems, act as an antioxidant, but also act, you know, in the cancer site case of actually converting into creating hydrogen peroxide in those cancer cells, strangely enough, almost killing them with, you know, the bleaching fizz of, you know, of chemistry. And I think really we need to be aware of those levels. I mean, they're talking— we were talking just before the show, it went up to almost 5 grams. That's 5,000 milligrams. Usage, even slightly more in some of the antiviral cases. But this is where a lot of people will talk about what is the bowel tolerance. So let's, you know, we've talked a bit about where it comes from. Yes, the liver has a role to play in forming it naturally, but actually a lot can be gained from the nutrition to optimize levels. Let's talk a little bit about what have you heard, Conor? You've written a whole book on vitamins and minerals.

Yeah, I think—

what's your take on how much we should be giving?

Oh, oh, now I sent you a piece there from another vet, so let's just fob it off on her and blame her if I'm wrong. But the dosage is— I'll share the dosages up on, on the Facebook page now in a couple of minutes, and so people will have an idea. But you can give— there's a lot of questions coming in the side here, but, um, the thing is, as I say, vitamin C is water soluble, so it's not easy to overdose on. You can give quite large doses, as we're going about later, some huge doses have been given to fix, you know, from dogs that are stamper, people with cancer, you know, intravenous vitamin C. And for dogs, you're talking at the moment, small dogs, 150 to 500 milligrams per day. That's for a small dog. It's quite a lot. And medium dogs, 250 milligrams to 1,500 milligrams. So you can see the variation, the size of the variation just shows how kind of unsure people are. And but even before we talk about doses, it's which vitamin C are you giving? Because there's lots of different types of vitamin C. We can talk a little bit about food sources at the end and stuff. That's easy stuff to Google, but it's what type of vitamin C you're giving because there's a few different types. And the most common term you'll see out there when you talk about vitamin C is ascorbic acid. And ascorbic acid, as one dietitian was explaining to me on a, on a video there recently, Ascorbic acid is actually only one part of the vitamin C complex. So this was very new to me. So what they were saying was that Royal— this comes from Royal Lee, who's somebody that would have talked a lot about this stuff back in the past. But they would say a vitamin is more of a complex. It's a lot of things going on, of which ascorbic acid and vitamin C is just one part of it. We realize this with vitamin E, there's, you know, tocotrienols as well as tocophenols and all sorts of things. So this is— it's a much more complex kind of molecule than we thought what it was. And ascorbic acid is just one part of it, but they like the ascorbic acid part of it because they can replicate it in the lab and they can sell it to you cheap. And so ascorbic acid became really, really cool, but the problem is it's not easily absorbed. It's not well absorbed at all, as with every time they isolate something. Bloody hell, it's just poorly absorbed, particularly with vitamins and minerals. The body does not like taking in this stuff if it's different, and ascorbic acid is no different. So when you start talking about dosages to dogs, it's like, well, what, what strength is the capsule you're giving you know, is there fillers used, or do they add in all sorts of bits and pieces? How pure? There's a number of different types of ascorbic acid, but one of the top guys in this kind of field is a guy called Wendell, and he would be saying that the one he'd be aiming for would be sodium ascorbate. So that's the sodium bit, gives it away. It's mixed with a bit of salt, and so it's a sodium ascorbate. And so that would be, when I'm talking about the dosages and posting them up, it's in relation to sodium ascorbate would be the one you'd be looking for online, not ascorbic acid. And so I thought that was interesting. There's a third type called calcium ascorbate, and so it's obviously got a bit of calcium in there, and the calcium is to help with, from upsetting your dog's stomach. Ascorbic acid can upset your dog's stomach. It's poorly absorbed, so you'll lash it in and it can give them diarrhea. Calcium ascorbate helps with that effect if he's very sensitive to it, but sodium ascorbate seems to be the all-rounder that people go for, and you should buy the purest form. Of that. But the dosages, nobody's really pinning down a single dose because, as you said, it can vary from small to very, very large doses depending on what the dog needs, you know.

You've got some liposomal vitamin C there. Do you want to just— Yeah, so a few minutes on that.

So this comes as a liquid, okay, but basically, they, especially for humans but also for dogs, in order to reduce irritation but actually also increase the uptake from the gut, because as we you're saying, there's a limitation once you get to the sort of 1 gram, so the 1,000 milligram sort of dosages. It's noted that with a lot of the sodium ascorbates, you get a drop-off in absorption. So it actually drops off from being as efficient as up to 80% down to 50% absorption in some of the studies. So what they looked at is actually if you surround this with a liposomal layer, effectively a lipid layer, then you will increase the uptake of the vitamin C. So it just means that you can actually superdose your vitamin C with less irritation, but also with maximizing the absorption. So there are liposomal vitamins. So you literally look up liposomal vitamin C, and it comes as a liquid. Okay, tastes slightly weird. If you taste it yourself, it's perfectly, you know, this is human grade. You can taste it yourself, but it is supposed to be much less likely to cause irritation to the gut and much better uptake. The things that we— interesting, you were talking about the esterified vitamin C. I mean, Lambert's do a great esterified vitamin C I've been using for years and years and years. And I think definitely see less irritation of the gut in those circumstances than the classic ascorbic acid, which you'd get as the cheap, you know, pharmacy. It's beside the sweets sort of aisle, packed with all sorts of other fillers and other irritants. Less gut irritation. We must say that one of the side effects is to have diarrhea if you take too much of some of those cheap versions of vitamin C. So that would be the sort of reasoning to say, yeah, we can't give as much of that particular version. There is one other quoted side effect in a lot of studies, and that is an increase in acidity, so i.e., a drop in pH. Now, that could be great with some stones in the bladder, so things like the struvite stones, stuff like that, to keep the urine acidified. However, it would be contrary to oxalate. Okay, so oxalate crystals that if you feed too many strawberries to yourself, for example, you might end up with an excess of oxalate. And if you've got damage within your urinary tract, which acts as a nidus for crystals to build around. Okay, so you've got little blood cells or something like that causing a focus for those crystals to start building and your dog is not drinking enough. Then yes, crystals may form preferentially for some of those other unusual forms. However, if they're drinking enough and they're not got harmed urinary tracts, the likelihood of crystal formation is so low it doesn't really matter if it's going to acidify the urine slightly.

Yeah, you've just nailed a bit about the— so it is an acidity regulator. I remember it was one of the offerings when I was making raw dog food that you can you can acidify the food legally and apparently totally fine with the dog, apparently. And by throwing huge amounts of ascorbic— I mean big doses of ascorbic acid into the food. And it's like, I'm not doing that. A raw dog food manufacturer recently got caught doing something similar with a product that wasn't approved to do that. And so it's to acidify the product because microorganisms have a certain pH they like to live in. And so if you can get it down to the very lowest end, they have a hard time replicating. So that's the idea of using vitamin C when people do use it in products. Do you know what vitamin C has? These cool— it's got a couple of cool functions. It's an antioxidant, a massive antioxidant. And so it actually, it actually blocks oxygen from coming in when needs be. It's— what's the word here? I'm just looking for it. I've just lost it again. It regulates the passage of oxygen in and out of the cell, but also it nabs— you've ever heard of free radicals? That's your vitamin E becomes kind of oxidized and it turns into a free radical and starts buzzing around causing damage and you start aging. And vitamin C calms that process down and goes in and nabs a spare electron from the vibrating vitamin E and calms it down. So it actually rejuvenates vitamin E, puts it back in. So this is why vitamin C are in things like face creams and all sorts of stuff, because this is part of the process. This is part of the rejuvenation process that they pretend you can do. And but also it plays a critical role in collagen. So if you've got collagen in your creams and you've got a lack of collagen in your skin, adding vitamin C is proposed to help that. I thought that was kind of cool. But the person that was writing this was a facial cream that they were selling. I was getting some ideas from it and they said, as a demonstration, you can, you can get ascorbic acid and put it in water and then you can get old fruit like an old apple or an old lettuce leaf and you can put it in the water and it rejuvenates and the lettuce becomes crispy lettuce again and the brown will all but disappear. Now I wish to bloody hell I was Bren and I had my little chemistry set set up here like the last time you did it and a little camera and I wish I did it but I only just read about it 2 hours ago and I thought you could take rotten fruit, apple that's been chopped up, you know you've left half an apple in the fridge and I might get to it later and it turns brown and it rejuvenates that apple and that's the selling point for putting vitamin C in creams. I thought how cool is that?

No, hold on.

This is— so this is like squeezing lemon juice across the half apple that you stick in the fridge to stop it going brown.

Yeah, rejuvenate it after it's gone brown. Is it?

Well, is it truly rejuvenating? I'm going to find it on YouTube. Simply acting as an antioxidant, so it's reducing some of the oxidized porphyrins on the surface of the—

I am going to do this at home. I've got ascorbic acid in the— I'm going to do that at home. Sorry, vitamin C I have at home. I gave to Dudley when he had his operation, his back operation. Vitamin C was one of the things I added in. But, uh, like, vitamin C has been used for a cheap one. Uh, I don't know which one I had. I'm gonna, I'm gonna hold myself to ascorbic acid.

It could be.

It was very reasonable in price, so, uh, I just gave him loads of it on the ground. But, uh, so the anti-browning thing I thought was very, very interesting. Does somebody want to tell us a little bit about, um, uh, the, um, Belfield, how successful Belfield was? Well, Wendell Belfield is a big, uh, guy for vitamin C, or for vitamins and minerals He was way back in '70s, '73, something like that. He's passed away recently, but he's come up with some great stuff about— he was the first guy to use large doses intravenously to very sick dogs. What was that, distemper?

First of all, because he lost one of his own dogs to distemper, and that really, really upset him. And so he was presented, you know, sometime later with another dog and he said, let's give the vitamin C a go. And he gave the dog high doses. I presume it was intravenous vitamin C. I don't know, but I presume it was. And this dog did absolutely fantastically. And so he went on to look at giving large doses of vitamin A, C, and E, ACE, and selenium as a just a real spritz of antioxidants in order to give the body just this blast of cleansing and immune stimulation. And he has some really, really great effects. I've put a reference in our Patreon page. His book is called How to Have a Healthier Dog, and if you go on to Amazon, they'll charge you £80 for this book because it's out of print. But I've given you a link where you can get it for about £7. Don't say I'm good. So, um, it's, it's— I think it's, it's, it's one of those historic books, um, and I, I would love to get hold of a copy and just have a look at what he was up to. The other book that, that you might find useful, guys, one of the ones that I'm using is this one.

Bit of light bedtime reading, that. He could barely pick it up off the table.

Yeah, that's it. Okay, it's, it's, uh, Alan Schoen and Susan Wynn, who are big names. Alan Schoen is big in the acupuncture world, uh, Susan Wynn is a big nutritionist, and, and, and this is a great book. I would imagine, um, Sally, I think you'd like it, and Karen, uh, Reid, I think you'd really like that as well. It's got— it talks about lots of different areas of therapeutics and nutrition and what have you. So it's an absolute cracker to get into. Um, what was I going to say? Oh yeah, I've got a really nice list of the, the reasons that dogs may have reduced vitamin C and therefore required the, the supplements that Dr. Conor Brady are talking about. So this list, you know, it's quite easy to get a list of things, but I was quite surprised. They talk about physical and emotional reasons why you may have reduced vitamin C in your system: gestation, i.e., puppies, lactation, growth, hard work, for example sled dogs and what have you. They also mentioned vaccines as being a physical stress, injuries, tail docking ear cropping as being physical stresses. So this really, really complete and interesting list. And then when we look at the emotional reasons that, that could drop vitamin C, this is where it gets really interesting. We've got relocation and therefore rescues. Is it that every rescue requires vitamin C? I think it's fairly, fairly likely that that's probably the case. Weaning is a stress period. So maybe we should be giving vitamin C to our pups. And very demanding training, so high-end, so all the police dogs perhaps might need it, maybe all the army dogs, maybe, you know, anybody who's doing a lot of work with their dogs. Vitamin C is generally pretty cheap, pretty easy, it's pretty safe to give. And so I think those would be some areas that I'd be thinking of of, you know, there's nothing to lose by just putting in, you know, even I normally say about 100, 200 per 10 kilos. What's— what have you— what were the figures that you just—

I have some food. Just to come back to this point that Roy Lee was making, a vitamin is a process, a union of nutrients, enzymes, coenzymes, antioxidants, and microminerals, which are your activators. So she's got 5 or 6 things in the list there. And she said, for example, vitamin C is made up of ascorbinogen. One, that's your nutrient. You've got your bioflavonoids, you've got your rutin, tyranase, factors J, K, and P. Not a clue what half these things are. Mineral cofactors and ascorbic acid. She's just listed 10 ingredients that make up vitamin C. And so it's, it's like all the different types of vitamin E. What are those called?

Not—

I'm going to say Cerevars. What's all the different types, all the lots of different isomers of vitamin E, isn't there?

Like, like in the 30s, 125 different isomers of tocopherols. 125. And imagine you can only use maximum 15.

That's right. You can only synthesize 15, 20 of them. And so you're missing the rest of that vitamin E molecule. Hence, studies of vitamin E on its own don't compare to natural source vitamin E. And it's the same with vitamin C. When they tried to use— they picked ascorbic acid, one out of the 10 things mentioned there. They just picked that and said, use lots of that. And they said ascorbic acid is actually the protector. It is the wrapper on the, on the, on the food. And what you're doing is you're buying this food and you're taking the wrapper and you're keeping that and you're throwing away the food inside. It has— it's a multiple kind of, kind of faceted thing. So getting your vitamin C from food is good. In relation to that, everyone talks about oranges. Oranges are one source of vitamin C, but they're not even that good a source. Apparently you have to eat 4 or 5 of them now compared to the oranges only 20 years ago because the soils are getting so smashed and using the same soils over and over They just give them nitrogen and whatever else.

And anyway, isn't it also taste? Because people have gone for sweeter stuff.

Okay.

And actually it's quite a sour, sharp taste.

Yeah.

So people have preferred those.

So people have gone, oh, let's breed away from those to the sweeter ones.

Yeah, that's interesting.

And then we're not getting as much.

Pound for pound, there's more vitamin C in Brussels sprouts than there is in oranges. You just can't eat too many of them. I don't mind Brussels sprouts actually, but I wouldn't be eating them every day. So 1 medium orange, and a medium orange that you buy in the supermarket, 60 to 80 milligrams of vitamin C. Okay, and that's around what most people need each day. So there is enough vitamin C in an orange to keep you going. Humans need between 65 and 90 milligrams depending if you're sick, much more. A half cup serving of peppers contains twice the amount. Of that that you need. So a half cup of peppers has twice the amount of vitamin C than an orange does. One kiwi has more vitamin C than an orange, has about the same vitamin C as an orange. One little kiwi, because it does have that sharp little taste to kiwi. And now I'm thinking, yeah, that's interesting. And then, yeah, it talks about all different— so the food source is interesting, but there is vitamin C in good quality meat depending on what the animals are being fed. There's going to be vitamin C found in fat and cartilage. So cartilage and bone is a source of vitamin C. It's a very rare source for dry-fed dogs. Just one of the reasons they want to hold on to that bone collagen. Vitamin C plays a crucial role in collagen. I'm not quite sure what that role is, but one of these lads will tell me, but it's crucial. And so you're not feeding your pet, your cat and dog, any collagen, and you're not giving them any vitamin C, which they need to manufacture the collagen. And so talk about joint ruining to leave these compounds out. What is the role of vitamin Glycosaminoglycans.

Let's just put those into detail.

No, probably. So yeah, so I think it's— anyway, yeah, I think that's interesting. Can I read out my bit about the thing, my bit about Crandon, can I? Because it's just kind of—

yeah, go for it.

So this Crandon, there was a great book there called Feeding Dogs that some legend wrote, and there's a bit in it about Crandon and we're talking about, look, you know, people get, you know, they get very, very upset about complete food every day. You must have your exact rate of vitamins and minerals every single day. And it's just such nonsense. So I was looking for a good example of that and I stumbled across this Crandon story and I alluded to it in the book and it's just fascinating. So this— I found the original source of the information here. This paper was written in 1993. It was called Self-Experimentation in Nutrition and Research. Elsie Whittleston wrote it. And the standout story here is the story about Crandon. So I'll just read two paragraphs of it. Several authors have written about the history of scurvy and vitamin C and have given vivid accounts of self-experimentation, but none so better than John Crandon. Two years later, Crandon was assigned to Dr. C. Lund at the Boston City Hospital. Lund was interested in function of vitamin C in the body, and particularly in its relation to wound healing, and his enthusiasm inspired Crandon. Who planned an experiment in which 3 individuals, of which he himself would be one, would eat a diet containing zero vitamin C for as long as it was necessary. This seemed to present no danger, uh, so I don't know how he concluded this, since the remedy was known and at hand, uh, and the plan was approved by Dr. Lund, the supervisor, which is just madness. Uh, the concentration of vitamin C in the blood will be followed, and when this reached very low levels and signs of scurvy appeared, Deep incisions will be made in the skin and muscle, and the progress of healing will be observed. Pretty good study. I thought, wow, there's a guy really just pinning his colors to the mast.

I was gonna say, thank God it wasn't on animals.

Yeah, yeah, like, I wouldn't be allowed to do it on an animal. Um, as was the custom in the United States, volunteers, in inverted commas, for scientific experiments had to be paid, but no funds were available. An aunt of John Crandon, a missionary, offered to hire two teenagers from poor families who she knew would be glad of the The 3 subjects started the experiment in October 1939. The diet consisted of well-cooked meat, butter, polished rice, cake without any fruit, and coffee. However, after 3 weeks, the 2 young volunteers were caught drinking orange juice in the cafeteria, so the study on them was abandoned, and Crandon carried out— had to carry on alone. After 2 months of no vitamin C, he varied his diet with cheese, crackers, eggs, and candy bars. He took supplements of all vitamins except C. After 41 days, plasma ascorbic acid— bearing in mind you can't store vitamin C and you need it— after 41 days, plasma ascorbic acid had fallen to zero. 41 days before his blood started registering zero vitamin C, which is the first very important thing. But it was only after 82 days that the ascorbic acid in the white cell platelet layer of centrifuged blood became zero. So now we're at 82 days with no vitamin C and the guy's still walking around. Yeah, I highlighted this bit. The first clinical evidence of deficiency was the appearance of hyperkeratonic papules after 132 days. Perifollicular hemorrhages occurred after 161 days. This is starting to sound very bad. After 3 months on the diet, an inch-long incision was made in Crandon's back, but a biopsy taken 10 days later showed the wound had healed normally. This was disappointing, but Crandon continued with the diet, and all the time he carried on his surgical work at the hospital. He began to feel very tired and his work suffered. Oh shit. Dr. Dill at the Harvard Business School was at the time studying fatigue, so he put Crandon on his treadmill to get some quantitative measures of tiredness, but Crandon passed out. This was undoubtedly the result of the lack of vitamin C, and it suggested when sudden deaths started appearing in semen. Cronin recovered from this episode and continued on for 6 months. He lasted 6 months on this diet and insisted on another incision being made, at which point the wound didn't heal and they called it quits after that. 6 months on a diet that was extremely low in vitamin C. Some would have snuck in some of those ingredients, I'm sure. But, you know, that shows you how much— and this is like a macro vitamin. This would be a vitamin you need a lot of by weight. You need to compare to other vitamins which you need way less of in weight. Limacy would be like one of the most that you would need. And this guy can go months and months without it. We don't recommend that, but it gives you some inkling of having to get the balance right or your dog's butt will fall off or something. It's nonsense. That's just, that's not the way it happens. It's not something you want to aim for. You don't want to repeat what he did. But bloody hell, I was so surprised that that was the way it went. And he was a surgeon and he kept working for 5 of those 6 months.

I've got another, another heroic test, another heroic trial. This is in the 1920s. There was an Arctic explorer who was fascinated with the Inuits, and in the 1920s, when he came back from, from, you know, the northern territories in the United States, he said, he said, right, they can survive all winter without any fresh fruit or vegetables. How do they do it? How do the Inuit do it? And so he said, right, this— we're going to do a test. And he— two guys were put in a room and not allowed to eat anything but meat for an entire year. Okay, so just meat, no vitamin C from vegetables or fruit or from any other source. And what happened was they not only survived the whole year with no vegetables, their arthritis improved, their clarity of mind improved. They came out in better health after 12 months of no vegetables than when they went in. And this was absolutely amazing to to the establishment at the time. And so I think it— and, and, you know, humans are arguably omnivorous, and here, here he is, how— here are the Inuits surviving on just, um, just animal tissues. There's a story that we, we talked about previously was when the Inuits take down a— I think it's a, a moose or something The first thing they'll do is they'll go in the back and jump in just above the kidneys to get the adrenals, and that will be one of the delicacies that they will treat themselves to. And it was later found that the adrenals are very high in vitamin C. Wow. So even if they're not eating, they'll also eat moss from a moose or a caribou's stomach, or from rabbit stomach and things like that. And so they get a lot of nutrients from those. Pretty difficult for the average Westerner to get their head around that, but you know, when you're, when you're in extreme situations, you do extreme things. And so, uh, even if you can't get a hold of stomach contents from these herbivores, eating the adrenals— I would love to know what the, uh, what the, uh, vitamin C content of regular beef adrenals were versus regenerative agriculture raised animals. Wouldn't that be fascinating to look at the kidneys and the adrenals and the thyroid and all these, all these areas? I think that would be a fascinating, fascinating study.

Penny, Penny has a good point there about that Crandon story. So it's like what I was trying to think, maybe some vitamin C was sneaking in from the egg, or where in those ingredients was coming from, and she said the bacteria make it. And I went, oh, do bacteria make vitamin C?

Bacteria in the human gut?

Yes.

Any— Penny, Penny, Penny Vandermeer?

Oh, do bacteria make— Vandermerve? Vandermerve, there you go. That sounds better. Vitamin C. They make lots of other vitamins.

Yeah, yeah, they make K and they make some B vitamins. Do they make vitamin C? Oh, I'd love to know.

Well, as long as they can make the gluconate.

Oxydans produces 2.5 milligrams of ascorbic acid per mil from— I'm getting confused here. Hard words.

Wow.

Which bacteria synthesize vitamin C? Several bacteria genera are common in the distal intestine. Bacterioid, Bifidobacterium, Enterococcus, we've got them, are known to synthesize vitamins. Okay, what, vitamin C specifically? That's an interesting little slant.

There we go.

Amazing. Right, boys, 1946. Um, let's, let's have another 10 minutes on just on a few little interesting things over on Patreon. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Should we give, uh, doses, dosages out there? So a lot of people are asking, well, you so why are we not looking at, you know, the doses? You know, surely dogs get enough from their diets. I think let's round up to say they should get a fair amount, as we've just said, in the various meats, etc., as well as being able to make their own. But actually, and for the normal healthy structure, they should be fine with that. However, what we're talking about is the fact that really interestingly you can promote with massively increasing the dose. And I talk about massively increasing the dose. We're going to talk about the levels that you need for cancer and stuff over on Patreon. We're going to talk a little bit about what dosages could go up to, but I think very briefly, let's just round up, you know, for a small-medium dog, you could be looking between 125 milligrams to 250 milligrams mg. For a medium to large dog, you have 500 mg up to 750 mg. For a large dog over 40 kilos, you know, you should successively be able to give between 750 mg and a gram— that's 1,000 mg extra of vitamin C— without causing significant problems, side effects. Okay, so if your dog is slightly under the weather, you know, suffering from a virus, has, you know, some problems with healing of the skin, of healing of wounds, has some problems with just the general cognizance, things like that, then think about boosting that vitamin C to that level. If you need any more advice, then please come talk to us. We can talk to you about higher levels I'm going to do that over on Patreon.

Yeah, so, uh, somebody said there, uh, Linus Pauling— as you start talking about massive doses of vitamin C, and there are for various diseases, uh, Linus Pauling is the guy there that, that pops up. And that was, uh, I think that was Pettywood. Um, so yeah, talk about massive doses, he's the, he's the guy. He's done his own self-experimentation.

Well, there's quite a few studies now on that, and it's interesting because there's a lot of studies out there, and we're going to talk about this on Patreon that will say vitamin C doesn't work, and we'll tell you why over on Patreon. So come join us, and we're going to have some more information over there. It's been great seeing you all tonight. Thank you so much for all of your comments. We're going to be flying through all of that and trying to answer some of that information, but we love to see you all. So thank you so much for some informative questioning. It's great that we can sort of drill into that a little bit more.

So good stuff.

See you over on Patreon, guys.

Well done, guys. See you later.