show transcript

play-now-my-lord posts:
PREHISTORIC PROTO-MONKEY: I don’t need ascorbic acid. From my cells. I eat fruit all the time dude. I’m better than that
OTHER PREHISTORIC PROTO-MONKEY: I agree with your lifestyle and will fuck you raw to prove it
GUY LOOKING FOR THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE 36,530,125 YEARS LATER: ow oof my shitty british teeth

  • @SkullgridEnglish
    19•1 day ago

    people get scurvy if they don’t eat enough citric fruit.

    the meme says (this isn’t information I know), that an ancestor to monkeys, instead of producing ascorbic acid “from their cells” (through… “other means” , I guess like how our bodies can turn food into various chemicals) , eats fruit to get ascorbic acid instead.

    This seems to have an evolutionary advantage, as the other monkey had sex with that fruit eater explicity to have kids.

    Thus, when the guy sailing doesn’t get ascorbic acid from fresh fruit , he gets scurvy which fucks up his gums and teeth.

    • @[email protected]English
      18•1 day ago

      Yeah, the cells of most animals have the ability to make their own vitamin C, very likely including our ancestors if you go back far enough. The evolutionary reason why we stopped is probably simply because our bodies stopped needing to make it due to our fruit diet, so individuals that didn’t make the acid had a little bit more energy and nutrients to spare that would’ve otherwise been wasted to make it when it’s not needed. Over millions of years that small difference was enough for them to survive to parenthood slightly more often than their peers, slowly edging them out of the gene pool.

      Evolution generally pushes bodies to conserve resources, so unnecessary things are usually dropped if the environment doesn’t require them for long enough. Kinda like how creatures living in dark caves eventually evolve to stop wasting the resources to make eyes and pigmented skin.

        • @[email protected]English
          3•1 day ago

          Ahh, that doesn’t help then. How much heat, could dehydration? Otherwise I guess the only option left is alcohol.

          • @[email protected]
            3•1 day ago

            AFAIK it won’t destroy all the vitamin c if you only heat it for a short time, but they didn’t do “cooking for a short time” at the time, in part because you need to cook for longer to kill all the germs. Dehydration typically means either oven (often even hotter than boiling) or drying in the sun, and UV rays are generally pretty descructive so I wouldn’t bet on that method either (sailing ships probably tried raisins at some point, though it’s pretty much down to luck whether they figured out that it helps against scurvy (in the hypothetical case that raisins contain sufficient vitamin c)).

            There’s quite a few preservation methods that don’t involve heat, though, like submerging in salt, vinegar, oil, sugar and indeed alcohol.