There are good reasons why vitamin C is added to many products and why that’s often a selling point: a powerful and efficient antioxidant, vitamin C kills every virus it has come up against.
Water-soluble, the body doesn’t produce vitamin C but must extract it from food.
It isn’t stored in the body and so maintaining a constant supply is important for maintaining good health.
A deficiency of C can manifest in aches and pain, bleeding gums, fatigue, skin rash, and colds and flu.
How Vitamin C Protects You
The way in which vitamin C fights infection is fairly simple: infections and toxins cause oxidative stress in the body.
Vitamin C is attracted to the cells that have lost their electrons due to the oxidation process and easily gives up its own, which then neutralizes the potentially harmful cells.[1]
With a consistent and healthy antioxidant level, dangerous cells are not allowed to proliferate and we don’t get sick.
Not enough and the result is cell inflammation—rampant inflammation is at the root of almost every serious disease humans experience, affecting every part of the body.
Vitamin C is so good at what it does that studies have found high doses to arrest cancers[2] and heart disease in humans:
“Individuals reporting high intakes of vitamin C exhibited significantly lower risk of death from all causes, particularly from coronary heart disease, over a 10-year follow-up period.”[3]