Posted by Marielle Alix in , In my nutrition practice, many clients are very surprised to come up vitamin C deficient in their bio resonance test. They are not smokers (we all know this alone uses up a lot of our reserves) but with stress and pollution being part of our daily lives, vitamin C gets used up pretty fast. It’s also a great antioxidant that protect our skin from free radical damage and reduce signs of ageing. According to Dr Thomas Levy who wrote the book “Primal Panacea” on the subject of vitamin C “Although our bodies, in contrast to most other animals, have lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C in the liver, it still remains clear that vitamin C is nature’s choice for restoring and maintaining health. Vitamin C does cure, or help to cure, a wide array of infections for which modern medicine offers little to nothing of substance in the treatment of those conditions.” Read the full article here. In a word, yes! Especially when life puts more demand on you, vitamin C is essential to keep your energy-giving adrenals functioning properly.
Whether you are feeling stressed or are under the weather, the body rapidly uses up available vitamin C. While plants are generally a good source of vitamin C, the amount in foods of plant origin depends on the variety of the plant, the soil condition, the climate in which it grew, the length of time since it was picked, the storage conditions, and the method of preparation so your market or supermarket bought vegetables may be lower in vitamin C than you think. Cooking foods decreases the content of vitamin C by around 60% so make sure you incorporate raw foods in your daily diet. Vitamin C protects your skin from sun damage, by fighting off free radicals that are developed due to excess sun exposure (as well as environmental pollution and smoking). Also, vitamin C helps reduce the effects of sunburn. Your skin needs collagen in order to produce hydroxylysine and hydroxyproline, which are both necessary for binding the molecules that create collagen. This is the substance that gives your skin firmness and helps it to have a toned look.
Improving your collagen production from inside out helps reduce wrinkles and fight against the signs of ageing. Your body uses vitamin C to replace damaged tissue, so that it can heal wounds faster. If you find that generally your wounds heal very slowly, this can be a sign that you are deficient in vitamin C – so make sure that you increase your intake! By taking in more vitamin C, you help protect your DNA from all types of photochemical reactions that lead to skin discolouration – as well as skin cancer and tumours. This is because vitamin C works to inhibit the production of Pyrimidine dimers, which are what primarily causes melanoma in humans. Also, vitamin C can potentially improve the look of age spots making your skin appear smoother and younger. Improving Your Skin’s Texture Collagen also makes up the structure of your blood vessels, so a greater intake of vitamin C helps you have a healthier vascular system. This means that your blood vessels are better able to carry oxygen and nutrients deep in the skin to keep it healthy, plump and better able to retain moisture.
Read more on the anti-ageing properties of vitamin C here. Vitamin C is found in abundance in most fruit and vegetables. Here are the top ones: chilli, red pepper, kale, broccoli, blackcurrant, parsley, kiwi and most berries. Whilst 1 kiwi can give you up to 273% of RDA and 1 pomegranate up to 40% VT C RDA, long transport and unnatural ripening may substantially reduce the amount of this precious vitamin available to you. So, don’t forget cultured cabbage, one of the most incredible superfood. Cabbage just out of the ground contains about 30mg of vitamin C per cup but when fermented, Cornell University found that sauerkraut can have as much as 600 or 700mg of vitamin C per cup! Do as I do and add one or two tablespoons to your salad or as a condiment once or twice a day. I did a lot of research having heard that regular vitamin C or ascorbic acid supplements just don’t tend to go where they are needed to produce healing and potentially just give you “expensive pee”.
Taken orally many also give you loose bowels. Besides eating fruit and vegetables every day, I like to keep baobab powder handy when I feel my immune system needs an extra boost. Baobab contains two times more vitamin C than orange and is easy to add to juices or smoothies. Laura Bond in her fantastic book “Mum’s not doing chemo” (an amazing mine of information I recommend everyone – not just cancer-sufferers) describes the healing effect of vitamin C therapy. Not many doctors in London offer vitamin C IV (infusion) and of course it tends to be on the pricier side so I checked if vitamin C expert Dr Thomas Levy could compare this to another type of vitamin C supplement called “liposomal”. Dr Levy says that “6 grams of liposomal vitamin C is equivalent to 50 grams of intravenous vitamin C”. Intravenous vitamin C elevates blood levels of vitamin C significantly higher, however, without the liposomal membrane this water soluble vitamin C is unable to efficiently penetrate the cell membrane.
Oral vitamin C acts as an antioxidant to reduce oxidative stress in the body. Intravenous vitamin C is a pro-oxidant drug that helps produce hydrogen peroxide which targets cancer cells while leaving normal cells unharmed. So it does have great benefits in advanced cancer patients. The cell membrane blocks much of the vitamin C that is in the bloodstream from getting into the cell. The liposomal membrane is able to fuse with the same material and configuration that resides on cell walls. This results in a lower minimal necessary dosage and saves us a huge amount of money and stress. This is the brand he recommends and I’ve been using. Here are Dr Levy’s recommendations. If you are generally healthy and want to keep general good health, 1-2 grams is optimal, so you could take 1000 mg 1-2 x daily. If you are an extreme athlete or suffer from a major health challenge, 4-6 grams is optimal so take 2,000 mg, 2-3x daily. If you suffer from some “extreme disease” –late stage infection, cancer, heart disease, etc., 8-12 grams is optimal so take 4,000 mg 2-3 x daily.