You get scurvy by not consuming enough vitamin C for a prolonged period, typically around three months. Your body cannot make or store large amounts of this vitamin, so it relies on a steady supply from food. When that supply drops too low, your body loses the ability to build and maintain collagen, the protein that holds your skin, blood vessels, gums, and bones together. The result is a slow breakdown of connective tissue throughout your body.
What Happens Inside Your Body
Vitamin C plays a very specific role in collagen production. Collagen fibers get their strength from a triple-helix structure, and that structure only forms correctly when certain building blocks in the protein chain are chemically modified. Specifically, an enzyme needs to add a hydroxyl (OH) group to proline, one of collagen’s key amino acids. Without that modification, collagen strands can’t pack together properly and the resulting tissue is weak and unstable.
The enzyme that performs this modification requires iron in a particular chemical state to work. Each time it completes a reaction, the iron shifts to an inactive form. Vitamin C is the molecule that resets the iron back to its active state, allowing the enzyme to keep working. Without vitamin C, the cycle breaks. Your body keeps trying to produce collagen, but the collagen it makes is structurally defective. Over weeks, this affects every tissue that depends on collagen: your skin, your gums, the walls of your blood vessels, your joints, and your bones.
Who Gets Scurvy Today
Scurvy is rare in developed countries, but it hasn’t disappeared. The daily requirement is modest: 90 mg for adult men, 75 mg for adult women. A single orange or a cup of broccoli covers it. But certain circumstances can push intake dangerously low.
People with severely restricted diets are the most common modern cases. This includes older adults living alone who eat very little fresh food, people with alcohol use disorder who replace meals with drinking, and individuals with eating disorders. People experiencing food insecurity or homelessness are also at higher risk simply because fresh fruits and vegetables aren’t consistently available to them.
Digestive conditions that impair nutrient absorption, such as Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis, can contribute even when dietary intake seems adequate. Smokers need about 35 mg more vitamin C per day than nonsmokers because smoking accelerates the breakdown of the vitamin in the body. Someone who smokes heavily and eats a poor diet faces compounding risk.
Children on extremely limited diets, sometimes due to autism-related food aversions or poverty, occasionally develop scurvy as well. Pediatricians sometimes miss the diagnosis because it’s considered so uncommon.
Symptoms and How They Progress
Early symptoms are vague enough to be mistaken for other problems. Fatigue, irritability, and aching in the legs or joints often come first. These can appear after roughly one to three months of very low vitamin C intake.
As deficiency deepens, the signs become more distinctive. Small pinpoint bleeds appear around hair follicles, especially on the shins and thighs. Hairs themselves take on a characteristic corkscrew shape, curling tightly because the weakened collagen in hair follicles distorts normal growth. Gums become swollen, spongy, and bleed easily. In advanced cases, teeth loosen because the connective tissue holding them in place deteriorates.
Bruising becomes widespread and disproportionate to any injury. Old wounds may reopen as the collagen that held them together degrades. Joint swelling, pain with movement, and poor wound healing are common in later stages. Left untreated, scurvy can cause internal bleeding, severe infection, and eventually death, though this outcome is extremely rare in settings with access to medical care.
How Scurvy Is Treated
Recovery from scurvy is remarkably fast once vitamin C is restored. Most people notice improvement within 48 hours of starting supplementation. Irritability, fever, tenderness, and bleeding typically resolve within a week. Full recovery generally takes about two weeks.
The body can only absorb about 100 mg of vitamin C at a time through the gut, so treatment is usually given in divided doses throughout the day rather than one large amount. After the initial treatment phase, maintaining a diet rich in vitamin C prevents recurrence.
Best Food Sources of Vitamin C
Bell peppers, broccoli, kale, strawberries, kiwi, citrus fruits, and tomatoes are all excellent sources. A single medium red bell pepper contains well over 100 mg. Even a small glass of orange juice covers most of your daily needs.
How you prepare food matters. Vitamin C is water-soluble and breaks down with heat, so boiling vegetables in water causes the most loss. The vitamin leaches out into the cooking water and degrades from prolonged heat exposure. Steaming preserves nutrients best because it avoids both problems. Eating produce like broccoli, kale, and bell peppers raw gives you the highest vitamin C content. If you do cook them, steaming, sautéing, roasting, or microwaving are all better choices than boiling.
Frozen fruits and vegetables retain most of their vitamin C because they’re typically processed shortly after harvest. They’re a practical option when fresh produce is expensive or unavailable, and far better than skipping fruits and vegetables altogether.