Dr. Paul Anderson explains that vitamin C functions as an antioxidant, neutralizing free radicals through redox cycles with glutathione and vitamin E. Humans can't synthesize it, so we need food sources like citrus and cabbage or supplements. Stress and illness deplete stores quickly, and split dosing of 500 mg per meal works better than single large doses.
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Good day. Welcome to Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me, I'm Dr. Paul, and today we're doing a series on vitamin C, something I get asked an awful lot of questions about. So I thought I'd go through 4 different areas. So the first one I want to do is generally some information about vitamin C. What is it? What does it do for you? Why do humans need it? Where do we get it from? all of that sort of interesting information. So the first thing is that vitamin C, also known as ascorbic acid, is a part of a larger complex that includes ascorbic acid and usually some other chemistry around it to stabilize it. So for example, if you eat a vegetable or fruit with vitamin C in it, normally it comes with the ascorbic acid plus some other chemicals there. So sometimes you'll see discussions about, well, you know, ascorbic acid is not really vitamin C. Vitamin C is the whole complex. And indeed, that's sort of true from a biological point of view for the food. But generally speaking, when our body takes in food-form vitamin C, we break it down and the other chemistry goes one direction, the ascorbate goes another direction. The next thing is, what does vitamin C do? Well, vitamin C is very important for your oxidative reductive reactions. And what that means is that vitamin C normally acts as an antioxidant. And so when you have oxidation, you have, say, a free radical, it has to go and then interact with these molecules in your body that are antioxidant. And so what they do is they normally take away the radical part of the molecule, the part that's potentially damaging, and they take it on themselves. And so if vitamin C is reduced, that is the ready-to-go form, it's the active form, et cetera, then you will cycle that when it encounters the— and the free radical, and the reduced vitamin C will become oxidized. Now, an oxidized molecule of vitamin C goes from ascorbate or ascorbic acid to dehydroascorbate. Now, it's not done there because it can be recycled, and it is recycled normally by its cousin in the redox world, glutathione. So glutathione and vitamin C help each other out in recycling between their reduced or active forms and then their oxidized forms, which are the used-up forms, but they can keep going. Now there's a 3rd member of this group called vitamin E, like Edward, which is in fatty membranes such as your cell membranes, etc. And vitamin E helps to recycle glutathione primarily, But they all sort of back each other up. Now, why is this so important? It's because these oxidation reduction reactions are not only there to take dangerous free radicals and take them on, and so go from a reduced form of, say, glutathione or vitamin C and take that onto itself and become an oxidized form, so it takes it away from danger. But the other thing is, is that they back each other up in cycling. And so beyond the free radicals and the damaging potential for free radicals, what you also have is a regulatory mechanism in your body where vitamin C is sort of a core component to that regulatory mechanism. And inasmuch as it's a core component there, that regulatory mechanism doesn't just do, uh, the safety part of free radical biology, but it also helps with modulating your immune responses. It helps with a lot of other cellular processes that are, you know, will engender or throw off some oxidation that might need to be taken care of, etc. It's very core and very important. So one of the ways you can think of vitamin C is it has global cell protection throughout your body. Now, it doesn't work alone, as I said, but it is very important because it's, it's very central to that process I was just describing. Now, what else does vitamin C do beyond that? Well, vitamin C is involved in other types of reactions in the body, and those reactions include A lot of immune reactions. I was mentioning that, you know, if your immune system upregulates, it's going to need some pro-inflammatory, some oxidative type activity to go on. But then what we want to do is after the upswing in the immune system goes along, we kind of bring it back to normal, and the oxidative reductive action of vitamin C and its partners is a big part of what it does there. Vitamin C is also used in certain organs and glands in your body for different types of purposes. Your adrenal glands actually store a tiny bit of vitamin C, not a lot, but a tiny bit. And generally the rest of the vitamin C that you take in today is used today or it leaves your body. So vitamin C is water soluble, so pretty much what comes in today goes out by tomorrow, with the exception of the little bits that are stored maybe in the adrenal glands. The other thing that vitamin C does is it's critical to a lot of the immune cells. And we hear a lot about immunity and immune support and all of that. And the immune cells are very dependent on vitamin C. So if vitamin C is so wonderful and so important, Why do humans seem to need more at certain times? And, uh, can't we just, you know, like some molecules in our body, just make it? Well, many, many animals have the ability to make ascorbic acid, ascorbate, and humans don't. And so we have to either get it through our diet or supplements or a little bit of both. And one of the problems that occurs is because we can't make it, if we are under especially an immune stress or any other stressor, but immune stress is an easy one to sort of think about, then we start to run this oxidative reductive machinery very, very quickly. And when we do that, we wind up sucking away the vitamin C. Now, our body can make the glutathione that it needs. It can synthesize that. Our body has fat-soluble stores of vitamin E, so we're a little more resilient with the vitamin E end. But vitamin C, we don't really store. So let's say you're getting stressed or you're having an immune reaction to, you know, a virus or something like that. Your body is going to increase its requirements for vitamin C. because it just can't make any. In other animals that can make their own vitamin C, you will see that when they get stressed or they get sick, etc., that they upregulate their production of vitamin C, which is critically important. So part of what we need to think about vitamin C is, yes, we need to get some in our food every day and/or supplements, etc., but food should be your base. But when I'm getting challenged, when I'm getting sick, when I'm under a lot of stress, I'm gonna burn through a lot. If I'm on medications or, or other treatments that create more oxidation in my body, I'm gonna burn through a lot more. So what we find in humans is as we get sicker, our vitamin C levels go down. Well, that's not very good if you're sick and you need the vitamin C to help back up your immune system and do this other of regulatory business that vitamin C does. So there's a couple of things about vitamin C and eating it and supplementing it. The first thing is, you know, we all, we think about like, you know, oranges and citrus fruits for vitamin C, which certainly there's some vitamin C in there. There's also vitamin C in, you know, cabbage and sauerkraut and a large number of other vegetables. And if you go now, now that we have the internet, If you just go online and do a search for food sources of vitamin C, what you'll find is there's a lot of foods that have vitamin C that you may not have thought about, and they can be, you know, quite easily incorporated into your diet. Now, when might somebody need to supplement, so add on to what they're getting dietarily? Well, in the world of supplementation, oral vitamin C It kind of has a spectrum, okay? And there used to be this thought that, well, you're going to urinate it all out today anyway, and your body only needs a couple hundred milligrams, so anything beyond that is a waste. Well, that might be true if you're perfectly healthy that day, right? But what we see is that our demand and our— even to some degree, our absorption of vitamin C by taking it by mouth or eating it goes up when we're sick. And so our need goes up when we're sick, certainly, and our ability to absorb goes up. So many people have tried to take vitamin C, maybe you took too much and you got loose bowels, diarrhea. Well, that happens because of an osmotic effect. There's too much vitamin C in the GI tract at one time, draws water in, and then you get loose bowels or diarrhea. What you'll find often during illness is you can take it, especially if you divide the dose up, and a dose that might have given you diarrhea before will now be tolerated while you're sick. And then you back off when you're not sick anymore, and your bowels will tell you how that is. Generally speaking, vitamin C is very safe, especially orally. If you are prone to kidney stones, especially calcium oxalate kidney stones, you should probably talk to your doctor. about how to manage the dosing of vitamin C, etc. And as always, this is not medical advice, this is just background information about how science affects your health. So in order to safely supplement during especially cold and flu season or increased demand time, high stress times, what I generally tell people is go ahead and take it, take it with food, and if you're going to take a lot, take it with the 3 meals during the day, and that way it'll split the dose up. And you can start with, say, 500 milligrams at each meal, maybe 1,000 at each meal, and increase and see what your tolerance is. Start getting loose bowels, just back off a little bit. You'll be fine. What you'll find is healthier times, less is required. More stress, more exposure to illness, maybe you're frankly ill, more oral dosing will be— absorbed by your body, and you will not get loose bowels from that. So vitamin C, very critical. We don't make it in our body like a lot of the other things that we use. It's very basic to the oxidative reductive capacity of our body and to stabilize things in our body as we go through our, our time. And when we're sick and under stress, our, our vitamin C levels drop. So we have to get extra in from our diet. and often from supplementation. I'm Dr. Paul Anderson. That's the first installment. Please like, share, subscribe, and do hit the notification bell because sometimes we get shoved over in the algorithm and nobody knows what's going on on the channel. Uh, dranow.com. Otherwise, I will be right back and we will do the next module on vitamin C.
