I’m not a doctor, but some quick googling indicates that trichinosis symptoms start after a few days of being exposed to the worms, while scurvy symptoms show up after a few months of vitamin C deficiency[0].

I’m pretty sure I - as an ignorant person in this area - could figure out if people around me sometimes ate something, and then got sick within a few days, that maybe I shouldn’t eat that thing.

I doubt I’d be able to figure out that I should eat something on the basis of people getting sick after not eating a whole bunch of things for a few months.

0 - at least one source I found claimed scurvy symptoms could show up as soon as one month after “severe” vitamin C deficiency, but that “more noticeable symptoms would appear later.

Well, they knew it was tied to sailing, long voyages, and diet.

Scurvy became a problem with the age of sail, and even in the 1500's sailors were recommending citrus, making pine needle teas, and similar efforts.

I think it is amazing that people figured out how to treat and prevent scurvy without a functional understanding of biology, and 300 years before Vitim C was discovered.

I think the fact that they DID figure it out supports the theory more than a couple hundred year delay undermines it.

How many tens of thousands of years did people have to figure it out?

Most of that can be explained by it being the first time to have a long-term trip without fresh fruit and it was discovered fairly quickly, they just didn't have anything that persevered vitamin C since it denatures fairly easy.

Science always has a find an issue, then resolve it any other path is just luck. The sailors of other countries other than Europe did have ways of remedying this issue through various ways.

That argument doesn't hold, it's false equivalence. It's much harder to detect the lack of some nutrient in your diet overall vs the consequences of eating a specific meat.

Doesn't this kind of prove his point? People got sick a lot before they found a pattern and fixed their diet.