Historical Event
Date:
January 1, 1944
Short Description:
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An experiment in 1944 concludes that scurvy can be prevented on less than 10 mg of vitamin C per day, meaning that the Carnivore Diet could easily supply enough through meat alone.

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The Sheffield Experiment on the Vitamin C Requirement of Human Adults by H A Krebs
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Important Text:
In 1938 the League of Nations Technicaly Commission on Nutrition estimated the daily vitamin C requirement of human adults at 30 mg. In 1943 the National Research Council Committee on Food and Nutrition recommended an allowance of 75 mg. Some authorities put the daily requirements much below 30 mg.
The main facts relevant to the assessment of the requirement are as follows:
(1) A supplement of 10 mg cured clinical scurvy in all six cases examined.
(2) A supplement of 10 mg protected seven volunteers throughout the period of observation, which, for three of them, extended to 424 days.
(3) When a 10 mg supplement was withdrawn from three volunteers after 160 days and was followed by a period of 195 days during which the intake varied slightly, with an average of three of 3.2, 3.2, and 4.5 mg Vitamin C daily, no definite clinical signs of scurvy appeared.
These facts suggest that in the group under test the 'minimum protective dose' of vitamin C, as measured by the criteria of the presence of scurvy, was in the region of, perhaps somewhat below, 10 mg daily.