Vitamin C Blood Levels of Jordan Peterson Who's Eaten Only Meat for 5 Years

Call me a nerd. I find this kind of thing fascinating!

Last week I mentioned the strange phenomenon where people who eat only meat don’t develop scurvy even though they don’t consume fresh fruits and vegetables. The Inuit eating a native diet didn’t develop scurvy but when they began working for whites in Canada and eating their carb-heavy food, they did develop scurvy ruling out a genetic component.

Along those lines, below are the recent vitamin labs that Jordan Peterson (well-known Canadian psychologist) made public here. He has been eating strict carnivore for five years:

Notice that vitamin C, the last on the list, is green which means Peterson’s blood levels of C are healthy.

How Is this Possible

Fresh meat, as it turns out, does have a small amount of vitamin C in it: 15.92 mcg/g for grain-fed and 25.30 mcg/g for grass-fed. Perhaps, when one does not eat carbs, this small amount of C isn’t utilized for carb synthesis so continues to circulate in the blood.

This study published in the British Journal of Nutrition compared vitamin levels between subjects on a very low-carb diet (less than 4% calories from carbs) with others on a moderate-carb diet over four weeks. Researchers found:

Interestingly, plasma vitamin C concentrations increased on consumption of the LC (low carb) diet (P < 0.05).

Although subjects decreased their intake of vitamin C, since less than 4% of their calories were coming from carbs, their blood levels of vitamin C increased! Fascinating!

I’ll continue to research this, but if anyone has further clues to this mystery, please:

On the environmental front: