8 Ways Evolution Has Royally Screwed You Over
3. We Cant Make Vitamin C
Just think, we could have been free of the tyranny of eating our greens (or oranges), if it weren't for one evolutionary quirk.
Without vitamin C, also known as ascorbic acid, things get very unsexy very quickly. We lose the ability to produce collagen, our bones crumble, our teeth fall out and we begin to bleed from every orifice. This is what is known as scurvy.
The thing is, a lot of vertebrates can produce vitamin C themselves, meaning that they can subsist on a diet of meat and not much else without issue. The other thing is that humans actually have all of the genes to synthesize vitamin C, but they're just switched off.
At some point during our messy evolutionary history, a random mutation put paid to our vitamin producing abilities. Given that humans still exist, this probably happened in a population that was already eating a lot of fruit and veg (like, say, a monkey) and this wasn't so much of a problem.
However, now that many of us are living our dreams to fuel ourselves on tacos and KFC, that handy strand of DNA would certainly come in useful.