Inuit Diet and Vitamin C

When Westerners first encountered the Inuit, a nutritional paradox confronted them. In the 17th century, Western science had discovered that sailors who endured long periods without fresh fruit and vegetables were subject to scurvy. The Inuit, who consumed no fresh fruit or vegetables through the long Arctic winters, somehow managed to remain scurvy free.

Early Experiments

Early Arctic explorers experimented with imitating the Inuit diet and found that it did indeed ward off scurvy. Explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson conducted controlled medical experiments at the beginning of the 20th century to demonstrate the nutritional adequacy of the Inuit diet. However, vitamin C's discovery in the 1930s made possible a full explanation of how the Inuit diet prevented scurvy.

Vitamin C

Scurvy, due to lack of fresh fruits, was a problem known even by the ancient Greeks and Egyptians to afflict soldiers on long marches and especially sailors on extended voyages with no access to fresh food. By the 18th century, some nations began to add lime or lemon juice to sailors' rations to combat scurvy, but they still had not identified the precise cause of the disease. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi first identified vitamin C deficiency, which is the actual cause of scurvy, through a series of experiments conducted in the 1930s. He was awarded the Nobel prize for his discoveries.

Vitamin C in the Traditional Inuit Diet

Recent scientific studies have evaluated the vitamin C content in many components of the traditional Inuit diet and shown that it contains adequate Vitamin C for scurvy prevention. Sources of vitamin C include raw caribou liver, seal brain, raw whale skin and raw kelp. By freezing and then eating these foods raw, the Inuit benefit from vitamin C that would be destroyed by the cooking methods traditional in southern latitudes.

Modern Inuit Diet

Vitamin C deficiency has become more common among the Inuit in the twentieth century as they moved from traditional hunting communities to villages where processed foods were common and traditional foods unavailable. Subacute scurvy became especially common in Inuit communities in the middle of the twentieth century.