You have to drink skim milk, eat lots of fish and/or supplement. God knows what our ancestors did. I guess they walked around half naked to catch the rays and warm up faster. And we don't make vitamin C either. now how come dat? Pauling was mystified. Only animal that does not make C in the body. And we get B12 from bacteria in meats, or in eggs. So we cannot be totally vegetarian. Of course if we were we would have three stomachs, all grinding teeth, and an 80 foot intestine. Our teeth would grow constantly because of advanced tooth decay from pure vegetable diet. Strangely though only race that developed double teeth sets at adulthood were the Indians, practically a total meat eating race. (meat diets are far less prone to cause decay to teeth) So they needed the teeth for chewing hides. They used hide a lot I guess. They (Injuns) sometimes got their C from cedar bark tea in the winter. (possibly also pine needle tea, and birch sap) Champlain, if he had any brains would have made that report and beat the limeys to the fruit solution. They showed him that and he still did not realize that his men had scurvy and that was the cure.
If there were not orange juice, milk and bread supplementation mandated in northern countries, children would get rickets and all ages would suffer from many more bacterial and other ailments. D3 is possibly the most important essential element (essential means it must be provided externally by food or other source ) to the immune system support.
Another major shortfall in our bodies is vitamin E. It should not be, but something in our poisoned diets is killing it and has been that we know of since the Korean war. (by military and other autopsy) 25% of all people have such high blood toxicity from foreign substabces that they have no serum vitamin E whatsover. This is very serious and could cause widespread sub clinical degeneration. The possibility that (excess) alcohol is partly a culprit is there. This is seen in all ages. Lindane was a major E killer for decades.
Pauling believed that C was the main vitamin shortfall in the human body and he believed that due to its vital role in histamine suppression, and collagen production, its lack could cause widespread degeneration that over decades shows up as high rates of HD and cancer. He was part right but C cannot usefully operate except in concert with the almost 4000 bioflavonoids. I am frankly shocked that he was seemingly not aware of Szent-Gyorgy's pioneering research in this area. Bioflavonoids are far more responsible as anti-scorbutics than C itself. A lime or lemon has only 28 mgs of C in it. Its bioflavonoid content however, is considerable. Ditto cedar bark.
The probable greatest difference between ancestral diet and our own, apart from its sporadic nature, was the much greater ancient folate intake. Paleolithic man got 20 times the folic acid we get today normally. Now it was never a problem that it masked B12 deficiency which takes 5 years to show up. It must be therefore that ancient man ate a fair amount of lightly cooked/smoked/dried meat, fish and eggs. (What I would like to know is when man began to cook.) We adapted or were selected/weeded out to/by the diet available, everywhere we lived. One thing is for sure, we ate whatever was at hand, and when we could. The diet fad was "eat this stuff or die". And sometimes you had to run to catch it. We could duplicate these conditions in modern supermarkets if we opened them up a bit, made the produce a bit fresher, (running start) then gave the customer a meat cleaver and let him go after it himself. Healthier.
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