Front-Line Antioxidant
It’s this simple: Vitamin C is the most important antioxidant in your body. You need Vitamin C as your front-line defense against free radicals. Job one for Vitamin C is to capture free radicals and neutralize them before they can do any damage to your cells.
Dealing with free radicals is the main job of lots of other vitamins and minerals in your body. What makes Vitamin C so important? First, because it’s water-soluble, it’s everywhere in your body—inside all your cells and in the spaces in between. Because free radicals are also everywhere, Vitamin C is always on the spot to track them down. Second, and just as important, other powerful antioxidants such as Vitamin E and antioxidant enzymes such as superoxide dismutase (SOD) and glutathione need Vitamin C to work properly.
Vitamin C is also needed to make other enzymes that round up and remove toxins such as lead and environmental pollutants in your body. In today’s society, environmental pollutants of all sorts are almost impossible to avoid. The faster the toxins are booted out, the less damage they can do. Your best protection is a high level of Vitamin C.
Preventing Cardiovascular Disease
According to some pretty careful studies of data from the National Center for Health Statistics, if every adult in the United States took an extra 500 mg of Vitamin C a day, about 100,000 of them wouldn’t die of heart disease every year. Not only would all those people still be alive and kicking, they wouldn’t be costing billions of dollars in health care costs every year. Here’s where Vitamin C pays dividends in both better health and in real dollars and cents. A year’s supply of Vitamin C costs under $45; a coronary bypass operation costs about $45,000. Let’s look a little closer at how Vitamin C helps your heart.
Curing the Common Cold
Does Vitamin C keep you from catching a cold, flu, bronchitis, or pneumonia? No. Does it help you get better faster if you do? Yes. If you’re basically healthy and take 1,000 to 2,000 mg of extra Vitamin C, your cold symptoms will probably be less severe and you’ll get better a little faster. The older you are, the more the extra Vitamin C seems to help.
If you’re one of those people who seems to get one soggy cold after another all winter long, or maybe just one bad cold that you can’t seem to shake off, low Vitamin C could be causing the problem. Which comes first, the cold or the deficiency? It doesn’t really matter—each problem is making the other worse. Low Vitamin C makes you more susceptible to illness, and fighting off an illness uses up a lot of Vitamin C. To break the cycle and give your immune system a much-needed boost, try supplementing with 1,000 mg of Vitamin C a day.
Lowering Cholesterol Levels
Studies show that people with high levels of Vitamin C have lower total cholesterol levels. (We went into the details of cholesterol in Chapter 1—if you skipped it, go back and read it now.) They also have lower LDL cholesterol (that’s the bad stuff) and higher HDL cholesterol (that’s good). So if your total cholesterol is high, can you lower it by taking Vitamin C? It depends. If your C level is low to begin with, raising it will probably help your total cholesterol level by raising your HDL level. If your C level is already high because you’re taking 2,000 mg a day, it’s not certain that taking more will help—although it definitely won’t hurt.
If your total cholesterol is borderline high (above 220 mg/Dl but below 240 mg/Dl), Vitamin C supplements, along with a low-fat diet, exercise, and weight loss, could bring it down. If your cholesterol is above 240 mg/Dl, or if you’re already taking a drug such as Mevacor®, Pravachol®, or Zocor® to lower your cholesterol, talk to your doctor about taking extra Vitamin C before you try it.
Lowering Blood Pressure
High blood pressure (above 140/90) is a big risk factor for heart disease—and also for stroke and kidney disease. Numerous studies show that people with high levels of Vitamin C have blood pressure readings that are slightly lower than people with low C levels. The difference is about four points in the diastolic (when your heart is relaxed between beats) reading. That may not sound like much, but lowering your diastolic blood pressure by just two points reduces your chance of heart disease by eight percent. It’s the main reason people with high Vitamin C levels live longer—they have fewer heart attacks and strokes.
If you have borderline high blood pressure, Vitamin C, along with exercising, losing weight, and quitting smoking could help bring it down. If you have high blood pressure or if you’re already taking a drug such as Corgard®, Inderal®, or Lopressor® to lower your blood pressure, talk to your doctor about Vitamin C before you try it.
Enhancing Your Immune System
Your immune system protects you against infection. To do that, it makes several different kinds of white blood cells and a whole lot of complicated chemical messengers that tell the white blood cells where to go and what to do. When you’re healthy, you have about a trillion white blood cells in your body. When you’re sick, you make millions more every hour to fight off the illness.
All those cells, and all the chemical messengers they rely on, need plenty of vitamin C to work right. We still don’t know for sure if Vitamin C can keep you from getting sick in the first place, but we do know that it can help you get better faster. If you’re sick or have an infection, taking extra Vitamin C will help your immune system fight back efficiently.
Healing Wounds and Recovering from Surgery
One sign of scurvy is wounds that won’t heal or old wounds that reopen. That’s because you need Vitamin C to make collagen, which is what makes scar tissue and heals wounds. Extra Vitamin C will help you heal faster if you have a cut, scrape, broken bone, burn, or any other sort of wound.
If you have an operation, your Vitamin C levels will probably be low right after the surgery. We don’t know exactly why that happens, but it’s just the opposite of what you want. To help you heal and fight off infections, your Vitamin C level needs to be high. We strongly suggest taking 1,000 mg a day for at least two weeks before the operation and four weeks after it. Not only will you heal faster from the operation, you’ll be less likely to get bed sores because the collagen under your skin will be stronger.
Fighting Allergies and Asthma
Does summer mean carefree days in the sun to you? Or does it mean days of sneezing and sniffling from pollen allergies? If you’re in the sneezing group, it’s because your body thinks the pollen is an invading germ that has to be attacked. To do that, your immune system releases chemicals called histamines into your blood. The major casualty of the battle against the “invaders” is you. Your own histamines make you sneeze, wheeze, sniffle, cough, itch, and be generally miserable. Don’t you wish you could explain the difference between pollen and germs to your inner self?
Drugs that counteract your natural histamines are called, not surprisingly, antihistamines. There’s a lot of different kinds, including many you can buy over the counter in any drugstore. The long lists of cautions and side effects on these drug labels are more than a little scary. Most antihistamines can make you dangerously drowsy. If you have a health problem such as high blood pressure, heart disease, kidney problems, prostate disease, or lung disease, you shouldn’t take them. Recently Seldane® (terfenadine) has been taken off the market because it caused heart problems for some people.
There’s an easier, more natural—and cheaper—way to cope with respiratory allergies: Vitamin C. Try taking 1,000 to 2,000 mg a day for several weeks. Your allergies should calm down noticeably and stay that way as long as you keep taking extra C’s. Why? Because Vitamin C keeps your immune system from making as many histamines to begin with and helps you get them out of your bloodstream faster.
Fighting Asthma Attacks
Some people react to pollen and irritants such as air pollution or chalk dust by having an asthma attack. The airways in their lungs swell up, making them wheeze and have trouble breathing. The airways clog up with extra mucus and the muscles that surround them go into spasms, which makes breathing even harder. If you have asthma, you’re not alone. Nearly ten million Americans have it—and the numbers are on the rise, especially among children.
