What Happens with Taking Vitamin C Orally

4 Jan 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:39

In this short informational segment, the speaker addresses the primary side effects of oral vitamin C supplementation, explaining that excessive single‑dose intake can cause digestive upset and osmotic diarrhea due to fluid being drawn into the gastrointestinal tract. The speaker then offers practical dosing guidance to avoid these issues, recommending that large daily amounts be split across meals (e.g., 1,500 mg divided into ~500 mg doses with each meal) or, for very high intakes such as 5,000 mg, distributed across meals and bedtime. The overall message is that dividing the dose mitigates gastrointestinal side effects.

Chapters

Are there any side effects to oral supplementation of vitamin C? Well, primarily it's going to be digestive upset or diarrhea. And why would that be? If I take too much vitamin C by mouth all at once, I'm going to have an osmotic diarrhea where I'm drawing fluid into my GI tract. And so it's going to loosen up my stools or make runny, you know, watery stools. That's too much. How can we use that information to adjust dosing? First thing is we can divide the dose and decrease that. So if I'm going to take 1,500 milligrams, I might do 500 100 milligrams at each meal. If I'm going to take 5,000 milligrams, let me divide it up, you know, each meal and bedtime.