3 ms·
As far as I am aware, no studies have been performed to determine how much vitamin C (ascorbate, specifically) is destroyed when cooking something like a steak.
by ravenstine 4y ago
As far as I am aware, no studies have been performed to determine how much vitamin C (ascorbate, specifically) is destroyed when cooking something like a steak. There are studies on vegetables, but cooking meat is a different dynamic and I don't think one can be inferred from the other directly.
My best guess is that, given that most people don't want their steak totally well-done (an oxymoron really), so enough aspartate survives. The more you heat your steak and for longer, the more the aspartate breaks down. Besides a few frankly questionable incidences like the notable James Blunt (which we don't actually know the cause of), the vast majority of carnivore dieters cook their meat and don't report scurvy. Out of the currently 47k members of the r/carnivore subreddit, none have made any posts saying they got scurvy. Yes, that's a very imperfect metric, but it's better than nothing. If vitamin C was a big deal, I think there'd be many more reports of serious issues. In the ketogenic diet community, countless people complain of side effects such as "keto flu", so I don't think people who are trying to eat mainly meat are all faking that they don't have scurvy.
As I said elsewhere, I have eaten mostly meat for years and have been eating 99% meat for most of this last year. Still no scurvy. My gums don't bleed and my teeth don't wiggle. In fact my gums bled more when I was eating closer to a standard diet. Now they don't bleed at all and they're rather firm.
Also, there's the possibility of eating meat raw or mostly raw. This of course depends on the meat. Beef is typically very safe to eat in a raw state given that it has either been butchered in a way specifically to be eaten raw or seared on the outside where bacteria colonize (aka "blue steak"). I have switched to just searing my steaks, leaving the majority of the center raw, and I'm not going back. This preserves the ascorbate and also the taurine. But I actually prefer the taste and texture.
The reason that beef has very diminished risk profile in contrast to something like chicken is that cows are given feed that isn't contaminated or prone to parasites, and modern regulation has made it so that meat plants must eliminate the 5 or so major forms of deadly bacteria from their process. Even raw ground beef is fairly low risk these days, though I don't recommend it.
By the way, I'm not actually here to advocate for a meat-only diet. I make sure not to command anyone. Life as a modern human is about being able to enjoy other things besides meat. What I take issue with is fake news discouraging people from even considering having meat more than a few times a week, of which there is an overabundance.