Another Food Myth Exploded

Myth:  Meat has no vitamin C.

Before I go any further, let’s apply common sense.  The only two mammals that cannot produce their own vitamin C are humans and guinea pigs.  So if other animals make vitamin C, where does it go?  Does it just go “poof” when they die?  I’m not saying it doesn’t, but I was not under the impression that vitamin C is a particularly volatile compound.  I mean, vitamin C supplements don’t come with labels warning us to keep them refrigerated or out of light.

I’m about to cook up some chicken livers, and out of curiosity I visited the USDA food database to see how they stack up nutritionally.  It turns out 100 g (about 3 1/2 oz.) of cooked chicken liver has 28 mg of vitamin C.

The same amount of cooked lamb kidney has 12 mg.  Sweetbreads (I’m afraid you’ll have to search under “veal thymus” to find these in the USDA database) have 39 mg, over half the recommended daily value.  Even beef tongue has a couple of milligrams.

The old “meat has no vitamin C chestnut” surely means, “the ubiquitous muscle meats that Americans eat to the exclusion of all else have no vitamin C.”

Please note that this data comes from the ultra-mainstream USDA, not from some crazy wacko like me who really believes that Vilhjalmur Stefansson actually lived for a year on nothing but meat and didn’t get scurvy.  (Stefansson was a fascinating guy; check out this reprint of his lengthy 1935 account in Harper’s of his time among the Eskimo.)