Animal products like meat, cheese, milk, and eggs are very common in many people’s diets. That said, you may have been wondering about the types and amounts of essential nutrients that they contain.
In this article, we’ll focus on answering one common question – Do Animal Products Contain Vitamin C?
Quick Answer: Generally, animal products contain little to no Vitamin C. Most animal products are incomparable to oranges and other fruits in terms of Vitamin C content. However, certain animal products, such as certain types of liver do contain some Vitamin C.
To get a proper overview of the Vitamin C content of animal products, we researched different animal products and analyzed their Vitamin C content.
Let’s took a look:
How Much Vitamin C Do Animal Products Have by Quantity?
Most animal products are actually devoid of Vitamin C.
Eggs, whole milk, cheese, and most meat parts coming from chickens, pigs, and cows have no Vitamin C content whatsoever.
Liver was the only real exception:
- 100 g of pork liver has 165 kcal and 23.6 mg of Vitamin C or 0.143 mg of Vitamin C per 1 calorie.
- A beef liver of similar weight, on the other hand, only has 1.9 mg of Vitamin C while having 191 kcal in total. This amounts to 0.009 mg of Vitamin C per calorie.
Are Animal Products a Good Source of Vitamin C?
In order to figure this out, let’s compare animal products to oranges.
Oranges are one of the faces of Vitamin C. You would always assume that oranges contain large amounts of Vitamin C and that is true. 100 g of fresh oranges actually contains only 47 kcal but has an absurd 53.2 mg of Vitamin C. Computations will show that per 1 kcal of oranges, you get about 1.1 3mg of Vitamin C.
Since most animal products do not contain any Vitamin C, we can only compare to a product such as pork liver which has around 0.143 mg of Vitamin C per calorie.
Compared to the 1.13 mg of Vitamin C per calorie in oranges, pork liver has around 9-10 times less Vitamin C per calorie. You’d have to eat around 500 calories of pork liver to reach 71.5 mg of Vitamin C which would get you in the range of recommended daily limit of 60 mg – 90 mg.
That said, if you want to hit your daily requirements for Vitamin C, your best bet is to include high Vitamin C fruits and veggies such as oranges, Brussel sprouts and mangoes.
Hey, I’m Joey. I’ve been cooking since I was a little kid and love everything about it. You can find my writing about food, kitchen appliances (such as blenders) and much more. Thanks for stopping by!
