In the past, infants who were not breast-fed were fed cow's milk. Then doctors began advising that cow's milk fed to ...

Emil-Kunkin on September 25, 2022

Hi Jing Jing,

We are presented with a scenario in which doctors made a recommendation that mothers who do not breastfeed and choose to feed their babies cows milk boil the milk in order to prevent infection. However, this advice lead to an increase in scurvy, a disease that is caused by lack of vitamin C, among those infants who drank the boiled cows milk, but not among those who are breastfed.

While this is a must be true, I would treat this as a paradox. The simplest explanation for this scenario is that something about the boiling destroys the vitamin C in the cow's milk, which is why those babies got scurvy. Indeed, this is what A suggests.