What Vitamin C Can and Cannot Do
Vitamin C has long been heralded as one of the best go-to vitamins a person can count on to cure everything, from a cough to a bad bout with the flu. After all, studies have shown that vitamin C helps the body to battle free radicals, thereby reducing incidents of oxidative stress and damage. But is this miracle vitamin all that people make it out to be?
Vitamin C has plenty of important roles to play in maintaining healthy human function. It acts as a vitamin that absorbs free radicals, which are metabolic byproducts that can damage body tissue. By absorbing these free radicals, vitamin C effectively helps to reduce the harm that the free radicals could have caused. In addition, the vitamin works with several enzymatic reactions. Without the vitamin, these reactions go awry, leading to the development of scurvy in human beings. Scurvy, which causes sufferers to develop recessed gums, bleeding from the mucous membranes, and open wounds, is prevented and cured with vitamin C, which can be found in both supplement form and in foods like bell peppers and rose hips.
However, despite all of the good things that it provides, vitamin C is far from the miracle vitamin that many people believe it to be. There is little evidence that vitamin C can actually cure colds, or even shorten the duration of colds or lessen the symptoms. In fact, increasing a vitamin C dosage for illness prevention or treatment can be relatively useless. The human body can only process about 200 milligrams of the vitamin each day, meaning that a mega dose of 1,000 milligram does not do much good, especially considering that about 800 milligrams of that supplement ends up going to waste. Most people are able to receive their full daily allotment of vitamin C in their everyday meals without the aid of a supplement due to the amount of vitamin C-fortified foods out on the market today.
The good news is that while taking a mega dose of the vitamin may be useless, it is at least not dangerous. Vitamin C is water soluble, so all of the excess, unabsorbed vitamin just becomes excreted through human urine. So while some vitamins like vitamin A are dangerous in excess, vitamin C is still relatively safe in comparison. Remember, the best way to prevent an illness is to stay healthy in the first place. When you follow a healthy diet and participate in a regular exercise routine, you will not need to reach for the vitamin C anymore.
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