Matt Kelly explains how vitamin C manages your immune response during infection by supporting oxidative-reductive mechanisms and preventing excessive inflammation from damaging healthy cells. Glutathione and vitamin E play important roles in that regulatory system.
If I'm going into the upswing of an infection, I'm going to have a big inflammatory cytokine response to try and tell my immune system, let's go kill this stuff, and that's great. On the other side though, I don't want to have this giant inflammatory effect forever and ever, and so what vitamin C does on the back end is it supports that oxidative reductive mechanism so that we have the proper amount of oxidative inflammatory effect, but we're not spreading that effect to normal cells and damaging them. So vitamin C is literally helpful in the maintenance of a proper immune response. We don't want to quell the immune response, that creates immune suppression, we want to manage it, and the way our body manages it is with a number of things, but vitamin C, glutathione, and vitamin E are a big, big part of it.
