Dr. Rhonda Patrick on scurvy: what the evidence says · JRE #1178
SUBJECT: SCURVY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
And actually back when the European sailors were getting scurvy and dying of it, only about 50%, only about half of those sailors got scurvy. The other 50% didn't have any symptoms.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Patrick claims that historically only about half of European sailors on vitamin C deficient diets developed scurvy while the other half showed no symptoms. No historical naval record, ship's log, or peer-reviewed source documenting a specific 50/50 split in scurvy incidence among sailors could be located. Historical accounts instead report highly variable mortality and morbidity by voyage; for example, at the 1604-1605 Saint Croix settlement 35 of 79 men (roughly 44%) died of scurvy with more than 20 others severely afflicted, a very different ratio than the claimed even split. Modern clinical literature does support that individual response to vitamin C deficiency varies, including documented differences in how quickly deficiency symptoms appear (roughly 40 days in some controlled studies versus 161 days in one case), and that symptom presentation can be partial or missed on initial diagnosis. However, this variability in onset and presentation is not equivalent to, and does not establish, a specific historical rate of half of deficient sailors being fully asymptomatic. The specific 50% figure Patrick cites is best classified as an approximation not tied to any identifiable historical dataset.