Dr. Paul Anderson explains how vitamin C supports immune function during infections. Oral supplements have absorption limits, but high-dose IV vitamin C (25-75 grams) can damage infected cells when given early in illness. Low vitamin C levels blunt immune response, so dietary intake plus modest supplements help, though vitamin C alone won't prevent infection.
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Good day. Welcome to Medicine Health. Dr. Paul Anderson, that's me. I'm Dr. Paul. Uh, please like, share, subscribe, and hit the notifications. By the way, we, uh, we love all the new viewers we're getting. Really appreciate it. Vitamin C and infections, generally speaking. So we've done some little mini, uh, recordings on vitamin C, generally speaking, what's it do in our body. We did one on vitamin C and cancer. Now I wanna talk about, we're in 2 subsections on vitamin C and infections. So the first thing to keep in mind is with infections, there's a whole lot of ways that vitamin C gets in, in the act or gets in the game of the infection. So the first thing, if you go back to our original where we just talked about the biology of vitamin C normally, we use vitamin C, we can't make it in our own bodies, so we have to consume it by our food and maybe supplements. And we use it up very quickly when we are getting sick or under stress. It is responsible for operating the oxidative reductive mechanisms, the antioxidant redox sort of mechanisms in the body, so that when we have a response, it's inflammatory or an oxidative response, etc., the vitamin C can kind of level that out and quell it. This becomes very important because there's certain immune cells that use vitamin C to help them do what they need to do. And so if our blood levels keep going down, we're sick, they're going to slow down. But also it becomes important because the biology, the, the chemistry of you having an immune response when you're sick is that you have immune chemistry that starts the immune triggering response, then that marches forward and triggers a body-wide immune response, and the initial triggering is very pro-inflammatory. We actually want that. So we think inflammation is bad, it's not always bad, we need inflammation and we need anti-inflammation, but when it comes to triggering a response in an infection, the immune response has to have that upswing in inflammatory activity. And then it has to be modulated so that the inflammatory activity tails off and goes down. We don't have damage. Well, vitamin C has a good way of having the ability to support your immune system so that it is permissive of this upswing in immune activity, but it helps along with a number of other factors, some of which are hormonal. some are nutritional, some are other things. It helps with all those other factors to kind of calm down the overexuberant immune response, so you get enough immune response but not too much. And the reason we don't want too much immune response is that can have other consequences that we are not going to be in favor of downstream. That could be lingering inflammatory problems, could be triggering autoimmunity, a number of things. can go on there. So vitamin C is really important in that respect. The next thing is, as I mentioned, anytime we're sick and under stress, our vitamin C levels go down. And because our body cannot make its own vitamin C, we have to increase the amount that is coming in or our vitamin C levels will stay very low. So the thing to keep in mind there is if you or me are getting sick, or you are sick and you are unable to consume enough vitamin C to kind of keep the tank full because you can't make any on your own, your vitamin C levels keep going down, and these important things like supporting the immune cells and supporting the oxidative reductive mechanisms, etc., start to tail off. They get weaker and slower. Another thing that is important is vitamin C is very critical to local cell regulation, local cell activation, activation of internal enzymes, internal oxidation reduction inside the cell, protection of the mitochondria. So again, when we're sick and we're inflamed, there's a lot of that that's getting really beat on all the time. And it's important to not have that beating go on there, not have that excessive amount of damage going on. So another way to consider this is if you recall that the immune system and many of the immune cells do— they're very favorable to vitamin C. If the levels drop and the immune cells slow down, you could imagine that then if I have this infectious process moving through my body, the infectious process is going to have a better chance of speeding up and being stronger if I don't have my immune cells working as fast and as spunky as they ought to. It's going to slow down, it's going to do more damage if I don't have this other immune regulatory benefit of the redox mechanism of vitamin C. So we're going to have an imbalance between the incoming infection and then the activity of the vitamin C in our immune system, which is deficient, and then everything slows down. And so the immune activation isn't full, it's not full force because vitamin C and other things are starting to be absent. Now what about treatment in infections? First thing is, like we talked about with vitamin C and cancer, you have these variable absorption limits to vitamin C. So if you're eating a food or you're taking a pill with vitamin C or some combination of both, you're gonna be limited in the amount that you're gonna absorb. And there's some forms that are a little more absorbable than others, but still by mouth you're gonna be limited. So for normal daily requirements, probably your diet should be really the cornerstone of where you get vitamin C. If you're under constant stress, et cetera, as we, most of us are, you should probably take a little bit of extra in a supplemental form just to supplement your diet. And a lot of people will think, well, you know, I don't really like citrus fruit, so where am I gonna get vitamin C? Well, you go online and just look at food sources for vitamin C, you'll find there's a whole bunch of other things. beyond citrus fruit that you can eat and get vitamin C from. Now, another thing is if I give you intravenous vitamin C, so in the vein, intravenous vitamin C is going to, um, go around the digestive tract, and so it can go into your body at higher doses. It's not going to give you digestive upset, et cetera. So when we think of intravenous vitamin C, we also have a low dose and a high dose strategy. And normally with infections, if somebody comes in and let's say their labs are appropriate to do vitamin C at high dose, what we prefer with acute infections is do higher dose vitamin C on the front end of the infection and then back the dose down. Reason being that we put more vitamin C in the system, we get more of an oxidant activity. So you say, well, vitamin C is an antioxidant. At high doses, it can be a pro-oxidant and trigger peroxide surges in abnormal tissues. A lot of virally infected cells are affected, some bacteria, some other infections, and then the rest of your immune system sort of will benefit from it as well. But as we're moving forward here and we're thinking about this, okay, so will vitamin C make it so I don't get an infection? Is it preventive in that respect? Well, it's very hard to prove prevention. You know, you need kind of long-term trials and you need a whole lot of people and all this stuff. But what I always tell people is it's not necessarily— it's certainly not a guarantee that something like vitamin C, or we talk about vitamin D or other stuff, if I take that during cold and flu season, I won't get sick. The reason that you're taking it is, yes, if you had a low-level attack of something and your immune system was right there and it pushed it away, as your immune system does every day, we just don't know it's doing that. then having the vitamin C coming in could be supportive enough to help you in that respect. If you don't have the vitamin C, remember that as you keep getting assaulted during cold and flu season, etc., your vitamin C levels will drop and then you're a better target. So is it guaranteed preventive? No, but it's helpful on the preventive front. Then while you're sick, what you want to remember is your requirements and your absorption usually will rise So if you're eating it and taking it as a pill, you might notice when you're healthy you only need 500 milligrams or 1,000 milligrams, and then you start to get loose bowels, right? Because it's, it's an osmotic agent. What you'll often find when you're sick is if you divide the dose up and you take some with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and you're taking in the vitamin C at higher doses, you'll find your bowels do not get loose because your body is sort of sucking up all of that vitamin C because it needs more because you're sick. If you're doing IV vitamin C, generally speaking, if you can get early to somebody who has, you know, cold, flu, something like that, we'll— and again, if the labs are appropriate for safety— we'll give higher doses like 50 grams maybe, or 75 grams sometimes, or more. And the reason for giving those higher doses again is to be a little bit more of not only an immune support but also to trigger some immune chemistry that would bother especially virally infected cells, other things like that. Now, as we'll talk about in another section, if you're in the hospital and you're getting vitamin C, which does happen now and then, and there is an approved FDA-approved intravenous vitamin C product. I had somebody try to point out one day that vitamin C is not FDA-approved, etc. No, it's actually an approved drug for uses in hospitals and out of the hospitals, same as any other drug. Often if you're in the hospital and you're not going anywhere, rather than giving you a big bolus, a large dose of vitamin C IV, they would give you maybe a continuous drip of vitamin C so it's going into your system constantly, and that can be very protective and very helpful. Now we're going to do a section, uh, subsection on COVID and vitamin C, and I'll explain a little bit more about how that might work. But if you're outpatient, you know, and you're certainly not going to go into your doctor's office, get vitamin C, and stay there for, you know, 2 or 3 days and not leave like you would at a hospital, that's why the doctor may give you a higher dose— 25 grams, 50 grams, 75 grams, maybe more. Uh, and that is why that would be done, because then your body has it. It will take hours and hours for that to leave your body. Well, this has been Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Anderson, our subsection on vitamin C and infections, generally speaking. And, uh, thank you for subscribing. Please like, share, subscribe, do the notifications. We're on all the pod burners. We're on YouTube. Uh, please check out the YouTube channel. Which is just Dr. A Online, and I will see you all for the next installment.
