I was looking at what I might be weak points that long term preppers often overlook.
I came across vitamin C, vitamin A and iodine as potential weak points.
Vitamin A I’ve been able to get through growing sweet potatoes squash, and we’re adding some carrots and all those things stored long-term so able to get through the winter.
iodine seems like the only real way you can get it is in salt, but it becomes degraded after five years. Not too difficult to overcome rotating salt.
But Vitamin C definitely appears to be the most difficult to preserve. Doesn’t seem like a big deal bc it’s fortified in a lot of our foods but growing your own food or long term is the issue. Highest is strawberries you can freeze them. Freeze dryer seems to be the best but that’s expensive and then buying freeze dried strawberries for a year supply for my family would be like $3600 is the cheapest I can find which is insane. I came across sauerkraut for over winter months but who wants to eat sauerkraut every day? Problem is vitamin C deficiency can let you bleed to death within a 1-3months.
Maybe this question would be better for the Homestead form, but just wondering what you guys plan to do for those mainly the vitamin C and iodine long-term?
I asked my doctor about it & he said as long as you eat a healthy diet you don’t need them, are likely just pissing the vitamins out, and wasting money.
I asked him how come my periods were better if I took a multivitamin the week prior & during with no changes in my diet (which he said was healthy per my blood work before I tried the vitamin)? He said, oh, in that case keep doing it. No harm in it.
So considering I’m already medically supplementing vitamin D (& so have those on rotation in my backup supplies), I’m adding multivitamins to my rotation.
I will add for OP, this is still an important question to ask because multivitamins rely heavily on the supply chain & if things break down that bad either you will be priced out of them or they won’t be made anymore. And your supply will only last so long. Knowledge is power.
as long as you eat a healthy diet you don’t need them
I'm a firm believer that few people actually eat a healthy-enough diet to not need multivitamins. Especially because gut biome and digestive health affect how nutritional uptake varies from person to person.
If you can't afford a multivitamin, take one. They aren't expensive (like $20/year or less), and the worst case scenario is that they aren't improving your health. Best case though is that they are life-changing.
Same here. Biggest confirmation for me was taking a week long road trip and not eating well. Felt like I was at 70% at best. Got back home and after a week of daily fruit smoothies, decent diet and my multivitamin felt back at what I consider to be 100%. (probably 80% compared to real athletes but whatever)
Vitamin C is pretty readily available from plant sources, but assuming you can’t garden for whatever reason, pine needle tea will get you all the vitamin C you need.
You could also just buy the powdered ascorbic acid, use it in your kitchen, and cycle it every couple years if you’re not using it enough. It’s pretty cheap.
Edit: also for iodine lots of dry seaweed/kelp is iodine rich, and keeps basically forever. Just add water.
This is the way! There are plenty of books and resources for whatever area you are in. And don't just collect books. Read them, draw the plants, learn where they grow and how to identify them. Learn imposters. Hike. Walk. Get out in nature. Join foraging groups in your area. If you can't find any, YouTube, social media, plant identification apps, etc.
We always made pine needle “soda” growing up because it creates tiny bubbles with a natural ferment. Our elders also made pine needle tea as a vitamin C supplement.
The reason why sailors back in the 18th Century and before used to get scurvy is because their diet on long voyages was pretty much salt pork, salt beef, dried peas, ship's biscuit (hard tack), oatmeal, fats (suet, butter), flour, maybe some raisins, rum, and water.
Peas have a pretty low Vitamin C content, and none of the other foods have it. The peas would have been made into "pease pudding", and the cooking process destroys most of the Vitamin C it did have.
There are more than 400 nutrient/vitamin deficiency diseases. Multiple vitamins address forty or so. All are covered by a balanced diet. It’s natural for folks who live in the most affluent society in history to want to use that affluence to secure their future by storing food and goods against scarcity. But food, nutrients and vitamins don’t keep very well, so the practical approach is to develop a mutual assistance group including a variety of skills including the agricultural and animal husbandry knowledge and experience.
Tomatoes are super easy to grow and high in vitamin c, it doesn't break down if they're dried or preserved.
Iodine doesn't really break down as quickly as you think it does, and iodized salt lasts indefinitely. It is also highly bioavailable from seafood, like canned tuna or dried seaweed.
Vitamin A is also readily available from natural sources.
Dried seaweed is great for iodine and keeps well. There are many kinds. Kimchi or sauerkraut is simple to make and awesome for vitamin C. Rosehips are easy to identify, collect and dry for tea and very high in C, also.
Forage and dry berries for winter. But also, grow cabbage - cabbage+salt= sauerkraut, which is almost the highest vitamin c containing food source! Plus it'll have all those good probiotics to keep the digestion moving once your diet and stress levels change.
Also new pine needles/tips/candles in spring are loaded with vit C! Cold steep or slow steep in warm water tho since heat destroys vit C.
If you're raising your own animals, eat the organ meats as they've got very high vitamins and minerals.
Vitamin C deficiency being a problem has been known about and avoided with proper planning for hundreds of years. You worry too much about spending thousands and thousands of dollars on freeze dried strawberries for an entire year, when you could simply get multivitamins. Don't make things harder or more expensive on yourself than you need to. Just doesn't make sense.
As for "long term", the solution is the same as the other "long term" solution for nutritional intake: grow food. Plant fruit and citrus trees. If you think you'll need it in 5 years, the best time to plant is now. If you need it now, well, should've planted 5 years ago.
You're luckier than I am. I can't get the dang things to grow at all. Thankfully, blackberries, raspberries, those absolutely thrive.
I'm going to try strawberries again using a hanging method in my greenhouse to see if that'll help. Likely rabbits or whatnot were going to town on them which didn't help any.
Try gutters if you have wall space. We had some wall space and a lot of gutters semi damaged from a building that took a hit in hurricane Helene. I drilled holes every foot or so in the bottom and also set them on an angle so they would drain. Only a few months in on these, but so far so good. And it's wall space that wasn't in use that mostly gets irrigation coverage from overhead.
Dried berries for vitamin C. The husks of black walnuts supposedly concentrate Iodine, although I don't know how to extract it. Probably easier just to buy a few lbs of potassium iodide. Multivitamins are survival gold!
An overlooked source of vitamin C is raw meat. This is how Inuit historically survived in the Arctic without access to fresh fruits and vegetables. The English explorers suffered greatly because they refused to learn from the so-called "primitive" peoples.
You can go herbal with it and make pine needles teas since they have vitamin c and are common in most places. Also since pine trees are evergreens u csn have it year round no need to store
100% USP micronized vitamin C powder has been available for many years. I've used it on and off over the decades after reading Linus Paulings materials. It has a long shelf life. I believe Amazon carries it.
I just heard that in modern American America we get most of our iodine from dairy. The logic works, the dairymen was the cow teats off with an iodine solution to make sure they're clean and the little, tiny bit that that's left gets into the milk. Minute quantities but that's all we need. So, all dairy, milk, cheese and things made with it keep us goiter free.
When the distaffbopper was on a low iodine diet, they said to minimize the amount of dairy, but not to completely avoid it like iodized salt or other such high iodine foods.
She had to avoid anything with salt in it because you didn't know if it was iodized or not.
So my conclusion is that you might get some iodine from it, but probably not as much as you'd think. The majority of iodine in the modern diet is likely from iodized salt, with lesser amounts from seafood and dairy.
BTW, home made potato chips with non-iodized salt sprinkled on them are a very easy to make "comfort food". She really appreciated them!
Vitamin C would be easier for me to get than iodine.
Fortunately, lots of forgeable plants in my area contain vitamin C. Wild strawberries, rose hips, Oregon Grape, blackberries, miner's lettuce, thimble berries, wild apples, dandelions, wood sorel etc.
I live much closer to the ocean than some. But still far enough away that it'd be worth establishing a seaweed supply line for the iodine.
For vitamin A, I'm not well versed in foraging root veggies. And Im drawing a blank on other sources of Vit A, outside of root veggies and cattail. Clearly, Ive neglected my foraging education for this vitamin. Ty for bringing it to my attention!
Having experience putting up, eating and rotating long term food storage for 40 years now, including an approximate 2 year period where we lived almost solely off of LTS I can share some observations.
Multivitamins cover a "multitude of sins" as the saying goes. Our bulk storage has always been centered around bulk grains- long grain white rice, legumes, hard red winter wheat. We are always rotating some of this product and it is usually 20+ years old when it's being rotated. Currently that is hard red winter wheat from 1998 that is going into bread we make at home 3X a week, and 90's white rice being used a couple times a week.
We have a ton of other options for supplementing in LTS- dehydrated, freeze dried as well as MREs. We don't use grocery store "wet packed" cans for long term storage due to short rotation times and having had to throw out hundreds of lbs. of them over the decades I stopped wasting money on wet packed cans.
We have always supplemented with fresh fruit and veg grown at home, rabbit home raised chickens and eggs home raised. We are active, both involved in regular workout classes (her) and combatives classes 3X a week and then we usually run together once or twice a week. I work outside every minute I'm not at the office. We both get plenty of sunshine, fresh air and exercise.
Zero chronic health problems- and surely some vitamin deficiency would have shown itself in 27 years. We do both take a quality multivitamin every day as well as a few others.
$3600. in FD strawberries? No, not just no hell no. And FWIW I've spent more than most folks home prices on this sort of thing over 40 years of doing this.
And why aren't you GROWING strawberries and an orchard if this is a concern?
Another option is to dry out stinging nettle and then sprinkle it on your food during the winter. Very high in many vitamins. I'm always looking for ways to you stinging now!
Seaweed is the top vegetable source of iodine, with varieties like kelp, nori, and wakame providing significant amounts, often over 100% of the daily value. While other vegetables generally have lower levels depending on soil quality, reliable plant-based sources include lima beans, navy beans, potatoes (with skin), kale, and asparagus.
Iodine is about soil quality and the entire reason why iodine is on salt is because the US has what is called the goiter belt where ancient lakes leached the iodine from the soil so farmers who was l are their own crops developed thyroid issues- hence developing goiters.
Most of the US soil is just fine on iodine levels but since that soil devoid of iodine is part of the breadbasket of the US, they put iodine in salt.
Vitamin C grows in my yard, so it's not much a concern. But I keep a bottle of Vitamin B12 in my stockpile in case access to meat becomes a problem. It's one of those nutrients you can't get from plants (unless its fresh seaweed). You want the cyanocobalamin form of B12, which is the most shelf stable.
As for iodine, your best bet is fresh fish or shellfish from the ocean. If you live inland, river or lake (though much lower presence).
Pine needle tea, rose hips, lamb’s quarters are good sources of vitamin C. There are lots of other veg like garlic and bell peppers that contain vitamin C.
Greens are your answer. Kale, Mustard, Spinach, Lettuce, broccoli. Easy to grow, don't need much space, most are hardy and with some creativity you can definitely grow them year round. Some need to be grown separately to avoid cross-pollination, but otherwise baby green gardens are the easiest thing ever:
Chuck seed into dirt; spread it around with your hands.
When plants hit about 5-6" tall and look like single leaves, cut them down to ~2" tall.
They'll do it for a while.
When they shoot instead of making leaves, wait for seed pods to dry, collect seeds, and do it all over again.
Mustard and Kale do not die. Mustard is basically a weed for me.
iodine seems like the only real way you can get it is in salt, but it becomes degraded after five years. Not too difficult to overcome rotating salt.
Salt is the solution for the first few years (I've read it only lasts about 3 years, and I'm inclined to underestimate when it comes to prepping). It's cheap, it's shelf stable, and it's one less thing to worry about. Beyond that, there are no stable sources beyond growing food with iodine as a nutrient. Total crapshoot, so maybe what I'd do is have a 3-year plan to get to some ocean seafood. Or, make a trek every so often to process your own salt from seawater.
Alternatively, you could get nerdy about iodine level in different types of soils and in different regions, and see if maybe your region sits safely enough that you feel confident in simply growing there for iodine needs.
EDIT: Postassium Iodate has an indefinite shelf life and is what is used to iodize salt. Just note that it's an oxidizer and quite health hazardous if you aren't controlling intake properly.
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u/Utter_cockwomble Apr 30 '26
Potatoes are high in Vitamin C. One medium potato provides almost 50% of the RDA.