It seems that singer James Blunt, famous for writing songs like “You’re Beautiful”, admitted that he fell ill with scurvy years ago due to a carnivorous diet, or a zero-carbohydrate diet in which you eat only meat.

A disease, scurvy, which takes us back in time a few centuries, when to travel it was necessary to face long journeys at sea eating only dried meat and crackers, and which then led to the discovery of vitamin C in 1932.

In fact, scurvy is a disease that affects the connective and bone tissue, which in the absence of vitamin C, essential for forming collagen, leads to the progressive degradation of the skin and bones.

The singer said he had been on a meat-only diet for two months for fun, mostly to annoy vegans.
And the women.

via GIPHY

Well, it didn’t go very well.

CARNIVOROUS DIET: WHY RISK THE SCORBUTO

Well, it seemed that today, at least as far as modern countries are concerned, we could all forget the existence of such a horrible disease, but no.

Because in the meantime , the so-called carnivorous diet , a zero-carbohydrate diet that consists of eating only meat, often combined with intermittent fasting, has attracted proselytes. With risks like that of the famous singer, who was diagnosed with scurvy due to a lack of vitamin C in the diet. It would not be the only case. Cases of scurvy have increased in Britain.

Although proponents of the carnivorous diet say there is enough vitamin C in meat to avoid health consequences, James Blunt only needed two months of a meat-only diet to get scurvy. This is because the only cuts of meat that actually contain vitamin C are offal, spleen and lung, followed by the liver, with a vitamin content of around 60-50% of the daily requirement.

So, in theory, either you eat a diet of offal only or you don’t get enough vitamin C , when it would be enough to eat a single kiwi to get 150% of vitamin C.
This does not protect you from the effects of an unhealthy diet, but at least it makes more sense, because it is in offal that the main nutritional principles of meat are concentrated.

On the other hand, those on a carnivorous diet generally eat steaks or ribs, not to mention bacon: with the obvious consequence of not having a diet that is minimally healthy or complete.

So much so that today there are many who have gone from eating only meat to introducing other foods always of animal origin, such as eggs, fish, butter, fatty cheeses.

CARNIVOROUS DIET: THE TRUE DIET OF PRIMITIVES?

Another falsehood is that the meat-only diet is the true diet of man. As with the Paleo diet, of which the carnivore diet is an extreme variant, those who follow the carnivore diet say it is the true caveman diet.

The problem is that from the analysis of the remains of Paleolithic men analyzed in recent years, the opposite has been discovered. Already in the Paleolithic the primitive man was in fact omnivorous. In the late Palaeolithic period, he certainly already consumed cereals. In the Neolithic period, milk and derivatives.