Cabbage Beat Scurvy 25 Years Before Vitamin C Had A Name.

Your body can't make its own vitamin C. Most mammals can. You can't, and neither can a guinea pig, so every bit of it has to come from food.

And one of the plainest sources is the pale green head of cabbage you roll past in the cart every week. One cup, raw and chopped, gives you more than a third of the vitamin C an adult needs in a day.

It also did something no pill has ever done. This leaf helped find vitamin C in the first place…

In 1907, sailors in the Norwegian fleet kept falling ill on long trips. Doctors called it ship beriberi, and nobody could say what caused it. So two men at the University of Oslo set out to make the illness happen in an animal, where they could study it.

Axel Holst was a professor of hygiene. The other was Theodor Frølich, a doctor who would later become a professor of children's medicine. They picked guinea pigs. Fed only grain and bread, the animals fell ill. But the signs were not those of beriberi. They were the signs of scurvy, the old killer of sailors.

That was luck. The guinea pig turns out to be one of the very few mammals that can't make vitamin C, just like you.

Then came the test that matters for your kitchen. When the two doctors added fresh cabbage to the grain, the animals stayed well. Lemon juice worked too. But cabbage that had been cooked hard lost much of its power…

The Answer Had No Name Yet

Nobody knew what was in the cabbage. The word "vitamine" did not exist until 1912. So the Oslo pair had found the work of a thing no one could see, weigh or name.

Plenty of experts doubted them. A missing bit of food as the cause of a disease was a new and strange idea.

The name came 25 years later. At Cambridge in England, a Hungarian scientist named Albert Szent-Györgyi pulled a mystery substance out of orange juice and cabbage juice. In 1932, back in Hungary, Szent-Györgyi and a colleague showed it was the missing anti-scurvy factor. Today we call it vitamin C. A Nobel Prize followed in 1937.

So cabbage sits at both ends of the story: the first clue in Oslo, and one of the first sources of the pure stuff in Cambridge…

What Captain Cook Got Right

Sailors leaned on cabbage long before the lab did. When James Cook sailed the Endeavor out of England in 1768, the ship carried 7,860 pounds of sauerkraut.

The crew wouldn't touch it at first. So Cook had some served every day at the officers' table. Once the men saw their officers eating it, they wanted it too. Cook later reported only one man on board who was ever very ill with scurvy. Still, the historian Richard de Grijs points out that a few deaths on that voyage may have been scurvy after all.

Here's the thing. Cook also carried malt, a thick citrus syrup and a thousand pounds of dried soup. Nobody can pull the kraut out of that mix and say it did the job alone.

And there's a myth worth dropping. You'll read online that souring cabbage multiplies its vitamin C many times over. Take a look at the numbers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA. Raw cabbage holds about 37 milligrams per 100 grams, and canned sauerkraut about 15. The jar is handy, but it is not the stronger source.

What's In A Cup Today

One cup of raw chopped cabbage, about 89 grams, holds roughly 33 milligrams of vitamin C. It also carries about 68 micrograms of vitamin K and just over 2 grams of fiber, for about 22 calories. Those figures come from USDA FoodData Central.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) sets your daily need for vitamin C at 90 milligrams for men and 75 for women. If you smoke, add 35. Your body uses it to build collagen, the protein that helps wounds heal.

Vitamin K is the cup's other big gift. Your body needs it to make the proteins that help blood clot and help build bone, according to the NIH. Most adults need 90 to 120 micrograms a day, so one cup covers more than half.

The Bite Is The Point

Slice a cabbage and you'll catch a sharp, mustardy smell. That bite starts with sulfur compounds called glucosinolates. Call them the stored compounds from here on. When you cut or chew the leaf, a plant enzyme turns them into sharp new ones. Heat wrecks that enzyme. So the question is how much cooking you can get away with.

Zoë Fuller's team at the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland, tested this on 12 healthy adults in 2007. Each person ate cabbage cooked for 2 minutes in a microwave, and on another day cabbage cooked for 5 and a half. Then the team measured a marker of the sharp compounds in their urine.

The light cook won easily. About 23 percent of the stored compound showed up as that marker after 2 minutes, against about 8 percent after the longer cook. Britain's Food Standards Agency paid for the work, and it ran in the British Journal of Nutrition.

Of course, a urine marker is not a health result. The study shows what cooking does to the chemistry, not what the chemistry does for you.

But it fits the Oslo guinea pigs a century earlier… Hard cooking takes something out of cabbage. The NIH says long cooking cuts vitamin C too, while steaming or microwaving may lose less.

Three Things Worth Knowing In The Kitchen

Two doctors in Oslo found the clue in 1907 with a few guinea pigs and a pile of cabbage. It took 25 more years for anyone to name what they had found.

You don't need the name to use it. What you need is a knife, a board and one head of cabbage.

Buy one this week. Eat a cup of it raw by Wednesday, and cook the rest fast.

Stay well,
The Healing Plate