Last winter there was a man in Sweden who got trapped in his car for “just” two months. He was able to melt snow for water, but had no food. From what I understand it’s surprising that he survived that long, and the theory is (or was, at least) that the extremely cold temperatures helped to make that possible.
He made frequent stops for fresh fruits and vegetables.
If you are referring to scurvy, for most animals, dietary Vitamin C is irrelevant, since their bodies produce the equivalent of a dozen grams or more a day in a human (one of the very few species that can’t synthesize it).
Also of note, the amount of Vitamin C needed to prevent scurvy is much lower than the RDA (75-90 mg/day), as long as you don’t have any infections or injuries:
I’m tellin’ ya, he’s still gonna go blind without vitamin A. As has been mentioned, sunflower seeds have some vitamin C, but no vitamin A. Nor does jerky.
Actually I wasn’t referring to scurvy; I was making a joke about how the diet the OP proposed looked so similar to bird food. The bits about the mirror and the shell were intended to reinforce the joke.
And thank you for making me explain it. My career as a comedian has reached its pinnacle.
Jerky meat appears to be quite fibrous in texture, but apparently in reading about jerky nutritional specs this does not translate to useful dietary fiber. I sit on the throne corrected.
I have first hand experience with cancer patients in hospice who are already off pretty bad and are dying from cancer and have lost a lot of weight already, and yet who have survived over a month on water alone. This includes both of my parents (bad luck), where I was the primary care giver, and so I know that they were not cheating. They were not overweight.
When you’ve stopped eating and moving around, your daily calorie expenditure can drop well below 1000. That means losing roughly 1-2 lb a week. That is the equation you have to solve. Full stop. If you are 100 lbs overweight you can survive over 50 weeks, and even then you have many weeks of getting “under weight” before you burn all your remaining fat and muscle stores.
They always told me jerky would make me go blind.
Jerky is lowfat and I believe sunflower seeds in the shell are as well. Is the OP taking a chance with rabbit starvation?
As alluded to above, meat contains Vitamin C. Humans are the only animals who don’t synthesize it, but we can get sufficient amounts from meat sources. There are Inuits and Aleuts who go for many months eating nothing but meat, and don’t suffer from lack of C.
I don’t have any knowledge about whether it’s possible to get sufficient Vitamin A without eating organ meat, though. Does the jerky contain any?
As I pointed out above, sunflowers seeds are actually very high in fat. Most nuts and seeds are (or at least the ones we eat).
There are plenty of other animals that can’t synthesize it, including other apes, monkeys, bats and guinea pigs.
Organ meats contain vitamin C, but muscle meats don’t. The nutrition facts on the Jack’s Links web site says that their peppered jerky provides 0% RDA of vitamin C. According the Wikipedia article on liver, 100 grams of pork liver provide 28% of RDA of Vitamin C. The Inuits and Aleuts don’t get scurvy because they eat things like seal liver.
Raw meat does contain some Vit C. Jerky has none.
Hmm. . . I didn’t know that about raw meat. I assume the vitamin C is destroyed by cooking. Does this happen in other foods? For example, do cooked tomatoes have substantially less vitamin C than raw tomatoes do?
If your goal is simply survival (i.e., you are prepared to accept other health detriments, including potentially irreversible ones), I think you could last quite a while. Hyponatremia (salt depletion) is the fast killer, but there should be plenty of salt in your jerky. Your diet should also provide you with all the calories you need and with adequate potassium. So you’ve got sufficient water, salt, calories, and potassium, which I believe are, in order, the quickest killers. You also have complete protein and many, but not all, micronutrients.
You probably want to eat 80 - 85% sunflower seeds, to maximize the amount of vitamin C you get; you don’t want to go much higher than that, or you’ll start getting the dreaded salt deficiency. Scurvy is the most likely killer, I think, but if you get at least 10% of your RDA that should hold death off for a considerable time, maybe for a few years.
For a related discussion (how long you can survive on just water and sugar, subsequently amended to add salt), see Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2012 July 16 - Wikipedia.
If you go by the nutrition labels on most canned food, yes, as many canned vegetables and other food with vegetables in it (which are precooked) show 0% (or only a few %) of the RDA for Vitamin C (and often little or no Vitamin A or other vitamins), which makes one wonder how so many canned foods can claim to have a “full serving of vegetables” in them. This is also why some argue that foods like pizza, regardless of how many vegetables are used, shouldn’t count as vegetables in any way.
Well, some nutrients arent lost by cooking and then there’s the fiber.
Cooking destroys about 50 % of the vitamin C in veggies. But it doesn’t take cooking to lose vit C: drying foodstuffs also wastes it away effectively, although this varies. Rose hips are one food that contains loads of vitamin C even when dried (fresh, it ranks among the most vit C-rich fruits in existence, containing up to a gram of it per 100 g).