What Don't You Know About Vitamin C?

I was at work one day, glanced at a Vitamin C bottle I kept on my desk, and realized that I had been taking it, but didn't know much about what it was doing for me.

This bottle wasn't a normal sized bottle, it was one of those huge bottles of Vitamin C that you can find in stores that have to have delivered by a forklift.

I was doing technical support over the phone at the time, and the job provided plenty of freedom to surf the web during slow times.

I found a ton of information at the Vitamin C Foundation website. The Vitamin C Foundation website links to a ton of articles. 

I think it's probably safe to say that it's common knowledge that Vitamin C supports the immune system.

I imagine the anti-oxidant properties of Vitamin C are also widely known.

However,  I started finding things that I hadn't heard before.  I was shocked that nobody told me about this before.

The more I looked into what Vitamin C did, the more interested I became.

It turns out that most animals actually produce their own Vitamin C, and we humans just happen to be one of the few creatures that don't.

What I found tells me that Vitamin C might provide some protection from heart disease because the body uses it to make the collagen it uses to repair arteries.

The article Vitamin C Beats Statins in Cholesterol discusses this little known bit of information. Here's an interesting snippet from the article.

Since we do not produce, by virtue of some genetic change that happened a long time ago, any vitamin C ourselves, our diet is the only way to get the substance. Vitamin C happens to be a vital ingredient for the production of collagen, exactly the material that blood vessels are made of. When blood vessels degenerate, we have a repair mechanism kicking in - cholesterol - which forms plaque in the arteries to stop them from leaking.

I'm not a doctor, but if somebody told you that something as inexpensive as Vitamin C might provide some extra protection from heart disease, you'd at least consider the possibility, wouldn't you?

What if a high LDL cholesterol were a symptom of heart disease rather than a cause of heart disease?

What if you took drugs that covered up this symptom, but didn't take care of the underlying cause?

Wouldn't you at least want to know what that underlying cause might be?

Dr. Matthias Rath, a world renowned doctor and scientist gave a presentation at Standford University in May of 2002 suggesting that heart disease was a form of low grade chronic scurvy.

I don't want you to take my word on this. I suggest reading through the presentation for yourself so you can have a greater understanding of this.

However, I do want to show you some quotes from the presentation that caught my attention.
 

Heart Disease is an early form of the sailor’s disease scurvy.

As opposed to animals, the human body cannot synthesize vitamin C. Ascorbate deficiency results in two distinct morphological changes of the vascular wall: Impaired vascular stability due to decreased collagen synthesis and loss of the endothelial barrier function.

The sailors of earlier centuries died within a few months from hemorrhagic blood loss due to lack of endogenous ascorbate synthesis combined with a vitamin deficient diet aboard. When the Indians gave those sailors tea from tree barks and other vitamin rich nutrition, blood loss was stopped and the vascular wall healed naturally.

Today, everyone gets some vitamin C and open scurvy is rare. But almost everyone suffers from chronic vitamin deficiency. Over decades, micro lesions develop in the vascular wall, especially in areas of high mechanical stress such as the coronary arteries.


Just as in the sailor’s disease scurvy, so does vitamin C induce the natural repair of the blood vessel wall in cardiovascular disease leading to a halt in progression and even to natural regression of vascular lesions.

In contrast to current models of atherogenesis, the Scurvy / Heart Disease Connection can answer all key questions in clinical cardiology today.

I'm not fluent in the language of doctors, but I will do my best to provide an English translation, as I understand it.

When your heart beats, it pushes blood into the arteries coming out of it.

This creates a lot of pressure on the walls of those arteries, and the pressure causes tiny amounts of damage.

If a person is not getting enough Vitamin C, cholesterol will be used as a duct tape and bondo type patch to hold the artery together.

If the person is getting enough Vitamin C, the body will be able to produce the collagen needed to repair the damage properly.

The amount of Vitamin C needed to do this is much higher than what most people consume, and what is currently recommended.

While doing my research, I also found there were several people who seem to think there is some kind of conspiracy against Vitamin C.

It's sounds a little far fetched, but I suppose it is possible.

There's a pretty cool flash video that was put together by a journalist that discusses this possibility.

I don't know how accurate the information he uses is, but it is interesting. The video can be found at www.vitamincproject.com.