Tigers eat meat, and not a whole lot else. So why don’t tigers get scurvy?

Scurvy is a disease resulting from Vitamin C deficiency, and the main source of Vitamin C in this world is plants. Tigers don’t eat salads with their water buffalo, so where do they get their Vitamin C from?

Tigers, and most creatures for that matter, can synthesize their own Vitamin C and do not need to consume it in their diet. Us humans on the other hand do need to consume Vitamin C in our diets, because we no longer manufacture our own Vitamin C. That gene was switched off a long time ago because most of our calories came from plants and thus our diets were rich in Vitamin C.

The human body is expert in maximizing energy efficiency, therefore it won’t make something if it doesn’t need to.

Not producing Vitamin C was all well and good 10,000 years ago, but now we find ourselves in a cultural time warp, in which human culture and the technologies that go along with it have evolved MUCH faster than the human genome. In other words, its possible to never eat green things these days, and a lot of people actually don’t.

Look at people next time you are on the side walk. The signs of Vitamin C deficiency are  EVERYWHERE.

Red eyes, runny noses, lingering coughs, receding gum lines, hardened arteries, long healing times, and blotchy, look-older-than-you-are skin to name just a few. Despite all the Vitamin C supplements out there, most of us are deficient in Vitamin C.

“But I take 5 megadoses of Vitamin C a day!!” you might say. That’s not really going to matter if your body can’t absorb the Vitamin C and use it. Well why can’t most of us absorb adequate Vitamin C even when we DO get enough of it?

Three words.

Too much sugar.

See, sugar (glucose) and Vitamin C both us the same carrier molecule to enter your cells, where they can both be put to work. I’ll bet you know the name of this molecule too.

That’s right, insulin.

Insulin’s most notorious role is in storing glucose in response to increases in blood glucose levels. Insulin acts as both an anabolic hormone (growth & repair) and a  mytogenic hormone (growth stimulating) and helps to store a host of other nutrients, including fat and protein.

A high blood glucose level (too much sugar) is a toxic stimuli to your body’s cells and  forces them to down regulate the number of insulin receptors on their surfaces. This forces the pancreas to make more insulin, in effect “yelling louder” at the insulin receptors to accomplish the same task of storing excess blood glucose.

This is how insulin resistance develops. So what does this have to do with Vitamin C??

Remember, glucose and Vitamin C both use the same insulin receptors to enter cells. They literally compete with each other, trying to squeeze in through the same door! Having high blood glucose levels means less Vitamin C enters your cells. This poses a major problem for your white blood cells, which require LARGE amounts of Vitamin C to function normally. White blood cells are the workhorses of your immune system, and if they’re not functioning normally, you get sick.

If we were to take the tiger out of the wild and feed it a bunch of bread, pasta, potato chips, crackers, chips, and cookies you can bet we’d have a diabetic tiger on our hands. It wouldn’t matter that the tiger can make it’s own Vitamin C because none of it would be able to enter the cells. Our tiger would be very sick, overweight, have joint problems, and only be able to run down a giant flank steak.

Sound familiar?

That’s because it is. You probably have a close friend or family member, or several, that fit this description.

The solution is in the quality of the decisions you make when feeding yourself and your family, not a bottle of Vitamin C pills. Stay away from the potato chips, the white bread, tons of pasta, and all the other processed junk food out there.

If it’s not fit for a tiger, it’s not fit for you.