Everything You NEED to KNOW About Vitamin C

So the clinical use of vitamin C. Almost everybody has probably heard of vitamin C and probably many people take it or have tried it or used it. What I want to get into here are maybe some of the lesser-known things about vitamin C that might help to inform the way that you use it as a clinical nutrient in your life or in taking supplements, et cetera. So the first thing is that humans don't make their own vitamin C. And what that means is when we were evolving at some point, we lost the use of an enzyme pathway, which most other mammals use to make vitamin C naturally without having to eat it. In the case of humans, we have to consume the vitamin C that we need, and if we don't, we will become deficient in the vitamin C. Now, if you pair that with the idea that vitamin C is going to be used up increasing amounts during stress or illness, et cetera, then if I need to get all my vitamin vitamin C from the outside, so from food or maybe supplements. And then if my body is under stress, I'm going to have higher and higher requirements. We might actually need more vitamin C now than we did in the past. So you might say, well, what happens if vitamin C runs out? Well, if I'm not getting enough vitamin C from the outside, or I am having increasing amounts of illness or stressors, et cetera, and the stressors don't have to be, you know, your classic mental emotional stress, although that's It could be an illness stressor, as we mentioned. It could be a trauma. It could be something like not getting enough sleep. It could be an environmental stress like toxins and toxicants in the environment. So if the demand is rising and the supply is not really there, I'm going to have less and less availability of vitamin C. So most people know that vitamin C is one of our primary antioxidants. So vitamin C works in a 3-part group for our primary antioxidant protection, which means it's protecting us from free radicals. It works alongside glutathione and vitamin E, and they all work together to help recycle each other so that when a free radical comes along, the 3 of them can neutralize the damage that the free radical might do. So that's one that most people would know. So certainly if our demand is up due to illness or stressors or whatever, and our supply is not enough to meet the demand, we're going to have more oxidative problems in the body at some point. One of the lesser things is it also helps with collagen synthesis. So collagen is one of the things that holds us together. We see the effects of collagen on a person's face. You can see it in the skin, in the connective tissues, et cetera. And without vitamin C, we don't have appropriate collagen maintenance and turnover. Now, of course, there are many, many things that feed into and help us with collagen, but because a lot of those things might already be inside of our body, or our body is maybe able to make some of them Etc., because vitamin C is one of these things that can be limited and we must get it from the outside. It could, over the long term, affect us in the formation of our connective tissue due to the synthesis of collagen or the lack of synthesis of collagen. The next thing, which again, people might know sort of by inference, being that people will have heard, well, vitamin C might be good for, say, colds and flus or something like that. Vitamin C is very, very critical for immune support and immune balance and immune system and cell maintenance. So one of the things that vitamin C is required for is the formation and production of your white blood cells. White blood cells then come in lots of different families, and generally speaking, white blood cells help us with infections. Now, there are certain subtypes of these immune cells that vitamin C helps to make that are more for what we would call surveillance. So their job in the surveillance part of the immune system is to essentially be forward-facing. And if we get assaulted by the latest virus that's going around or bacteria or some other thing that is contagious, a lot of these cells try and bind up those outside influences or interrupt them in some way before they become a part of a problem for us. So in that way, not only vitamin C is required for the maintenance of a lot of the immune cells, like in their formation and their activities, but also vitamin C is involved in the surveillance and preventive part of our immune system as well. Another thing that vitamin C does that unless you maybe have been anemic, you might not have heard of is vitamin C helps with the absorption of iron. So iron is one of those things that we get from our diet. And one of the ways that we improve the absorption of iron is through having vitamin C around when we are eating sources of iron. So you may have seen that there are both, of course, meat sources, right? There's also dark green vegetables. Vegetables have iron in them. There's a lot of high iron foods as well that are from the vegetable kingdom. The more vitamin C we have going through the digestive system with these higher iron foods, the more we will absorb the iron from the foods. And then finally, one of the things that vitamin C does that we may or may not realize is it also helps out in certain processes in the central nervous system in our brain. So you think of vitamin C, you know, it makes sense. It's an antioxidant. It makes kind of some sense it would be helpful with immune system. Makes sense now. We know it, you know, it would be helpful with collagen and connective tissue formation, et cetera. But also in your brain, a lot of the neurotransmitter pathways use particular vitamins and sometimes minerals together to create reactions or to create balance in the nervous system in the making of your neurotransmitter substances, et cetera. So vitamin C is going to be one of those, what we call cofactors. Nutrients that helps in the processing of certain neurotransmitters in the brain. And that's much lesser known function of vitamin C, certainly far less known than as an antioxidant, et cetera, as we've talked about. And then finally, vitamin C in some therapeutic instances can be used instead of as an antioxidant at its regular doses. If you give an intravenous dose of vitamin C at a high dose, it might become a pro-oxidant. And so you might think, well, how would that be with one thing going on both sides of the oxidative reductive balance? Well, in low normal doses like we would eat or take in supplements orally, it's going to just supply these antioxidant and collagen formation, all those other sort of needs. When we put it around your digestive tract into the venous system, so in intravenous therapy, and you put a high dose in, it stays in the blood longer. And instead of just being an antioxidant, as it stays in the blood in high concentrations, it can become a pro-oxidant. So actually can create oxidative burst. This is why sometimes high doses of vitamin C intravenously are used during infectious processes to help again prime the immune system, but also to give a pro-oxidant burst. And also sometimes in the support of certain cancer therapies as well as a pro-oxidative therapy. Well, I hope that answers some of the questions that we got around the uses of vitamin C beyond sort of the common ones that we know. And we love all of you who have subscribed and liked and shared. 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