Top 5 Misconceptions About Vitamin C You Must Know - Doctor Reviews The TRUTH

hello health champions today I want to talk about vitamin C because there's so

many misconceptions about vitamin C and vitamins in general and I know that when

you go out and spend your money on supplements at least you want them not

to harm you so I want to go over the five most common big misconceptions

about vitamin C coming right up hey I'm doctor Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and

a former Olympic decathlete and if you want to truly master health by

understanding how the body really works make sure you subscribe and hit that

notification bell so you don't miss anything

vitamin C is often known as ascorbic acid and that comes from the word

scorbutus which means scurvy which is a terrible disease where your gums bleed

and your teeth fall out and your skin turns black and you basically die a

score b'keen not scurvy and something against scurvy so that's how it's got

its name ascorbic acid the scurvy was a disease that claimed about two million

lives between years 1500 1800 when people started traveling the world on

boats on sailing ships and they would spend months or even years on board

these and if they didn't get proper food then they would get scurvy this was

really brought home in 1740 when Great Britain sent out a ship to the Pacific

and they had 2,000 sailors when they left and less than 700 of those sailors

returned home so he was like a death sentence just to get on a ship and in

1753 a physician called James Lind figured out that the reason was these

people did not get a great variety in their diet they had a very limited food

supply so they started looking for foods that would reverse this scurvy they had

no idea what vitamin C was or any vitamin for that matter that was still

about 200 years into the future to be discovered and they found at first that

one of the best anti score Beauty foods was citrus and that was very

effective that in a few weeks or a couple months they could completely

reverse scurvy with some citrus but the problem was that they couldn't bring

fruit on board because it only kept for a week or so and one of the solutions

was sauerkraut because when you ferment cabbage it preserves the cabbage and it

keeps for months or even years so let's dive in to misconception number one and

that is that vitamin C deficiencies are rare and the reason they think that is

because scurvy is rare and that is true full-blown scurvy is extremely rare it's

unheard of and it's very easy to fix so we don't have that anymore however

connective tissue problems are not rare and this is an example of a connective

tissue problem because vitamin C is involved in making protein and putting

fibers together so connective tissue is anything that holds the body together

things like bone or skin or gums for your teeth or blood vessels to contain

your blood so when blood vessels get brittle then you can get things like

this and vitamin C is at the root of all of those misconception number two is

that the best or some people think the only source of vitamin C is oranges and

the orange juice industry has certainly made a point of that but a matter of

fact kale or bell peppers the red and the yellow and the green have much more

vitamin C than the orange juice and without all that sugar broccoli and

Brussels sprouts also have a lot more vitamin C than orange juice and

cauliflower is pretty close it's on par basically with with orange and then

oranges are still a great source it's just not the best especially in my

opinion because it has a lot of sugar but another problem with the orange is

that they make juice and they pasteurize it so

everything you buy in the store is going to be pasteurized and the pasteurization

of course kills off all that good normal natural vitamin C so then they fortified

okay they squeeze the juice they kill the vitamin C and then they add back

synthetic vitamin C so now they can tell you on the label that it has so many

milligrams of ascorbic acid again but it's not the same thing

misconception number three is that vitamin C and ascorbic acid is the same

thing and here's one of the big problems because the official definition if you

look it up in a dictionary if you look it up on google if you look any medical

definition they're gonna tell you that this is how it is vitamin C is ascorbic

acid and yet in nature that's just not how it works

nature never makes isolated ascorbic acid in nature it puts together the

vitamin C complex and think of that as a functional complex think of it as a

machine with pieces that work together so if you look if you open up an old

watch and you look at all these different pieces and you look at all the

cogwheels you would never go and say that oh I think that is the piece that

tells the time because it's together we all understand that one if you take one

piece out then the rest of the pieces don't work they all work together

this however is an isolated unit it's an isolated component which ascorbic acid

is it's an isolated it's a synthetic crystalline purified synthetic compound

that does not perform a function like a complex machine does and furthermore it

is made from glucose which is typically derived from corn syrup it's a

mass-produced industrialized product it's not a nutrients it's an antioxidant

so let's just dive a little more into what the vitamin C complex really is you

understand the difference so it has a score Bachan bio flavonoid complexes

they play multiple roles in the overall function of the complex to coordinate

function there's an enzyme called tyrosinase which activates trace

minerals and therefore activates your white blood cells and your immune system

so the immune benefits are not from the ascorbic acid it's from the tyrosinase

primarily you have P factors which provide vessel strength they start up

this collagen formation we have K factors which help the blood clotting we

have j factors which improve oxygen carrying capacity of the blood so these

are all the central components of the vitamin c complex then where does

ascorbic acid come in well ascorbic acid is the package

it's the protective coating if you will so think of it it is an antioxidant that

is true it is an antioxidant and that's not a bad thing in small amounts which

acts as a preservative or a wrapper but the antioxidant is not there for us it's

there to protect the complex misconception number four is that more

is always better and this is we get this mindset from the medical model that we

take drugs we take medication that's supposed to do something and a small

dose does a little bit and a bigger dose does more until we have a toxic dose

well that's not how it works with nutrients if you're missing a nutrient

then you get better off if you take it but once you have enough more isn't

better because it's not supposed to do anything it's just supposed to be there

enough for the body to use once the body has

enough to use more isn't going to improve anything it's not going to drive

anything it's just gonna start interfering if we take mega doses of

ascorbic acid because we typically are never going to get mega doses of real

vitamin C then it really acts as a short-term safe drug it is like a drug

it it's potent very large doses has the power to go in and sort of interfere

with body function and shut things down and that could be beneficial in a crisis

in a strong infection and acute infection think of it as a short-term

safe drug and if you use it and use it accordingly if you use mega doses

long-term then they will create imbalance because nature put things

together in complexes all of these components are perfectly balanced if

your body needs all of them together then you get them together but if you

take mega doses of the rapper of the antioxidant now that component is going

to be out of proportion with all the other components and over time you will

develop imbalances misconception number five is that vitamin C is good for you

because it's an antioxidant and that is not how it works what is an antioxidant

what is oxygen what is oxidation well if you have fatigue it's because you don't

have enough energy that energy comes from oxygen the way your body makes

energy is through oxygen we oxidize food stuff to make energy if you hold your

breath for a minute or two then you'll realize how important that oxygen is

that's why we breathe to get oxygen and antioxidants interfere with that

function now don't worry it doesn't make berries bad it doesn't make

food fruits and vegetables with antioxidants bad but they're not good

for you because they have antioxidants they're good for you despite that it's

all the other stuff in the food that's actually good so all your energy comes

from oxygen and excess synthetic mega doses of antioxidants will interfere

with that energy production another thing that antioxidants do is

they combat free radicals and that's sort of assuming that free radicals are

always bad but there's a balance of things in the body there's always a

balance of antioxidant activity and of free radical activity and the main

antioxidant that we need as humans is manufactured inside the body is called

glutathione so whole fresh food is great for you but it's not good for you

because it has antioxidants it's good for you despite the antioxidants in

there and the reason they're still good for us is that they don't have a lot of

antioxidants they don't come close to the amounts that we get when we start

adding synthetic antioxidants so before you get too upset about having your

worldview of antioxidants shattered let's look at some evidence the JAMA the

Journal of the American Medical Association did a huge meta study

published in February 2007 they looked at 68 different randomized trials 385

different publications involving over 230,000 people so this was basically

including every paper ever studied ever published on antioxidants and here was

their conclusion they did not find any convincing evidence that antioxidant

supplements have beneficial effects on mortality they however found that

beta-carotene vitamin A and vitamin e increase the risk of death

by five percent not only did it not do any good but it actually kills you and I

believe a lot of that has to do with the fact that it excess interferes with

oxygenation and oxygen is one of the most precious substances to your body

but it also interferes with some of the cleanup we'll talk a little more about

that when it came to vitamin C they said that further trials were needed to

establish the effects of vitamin C and selenium so basically even though they

had over 200,000 people most of these people were on a multivitamin they were

on a combination of different supplements and they didn't have enough

people who were only on vitamin C to draw any conclusion so they couldn't say

for sure if it was a benefit or detriment and then they went on to say

that the 5% increased death rate was probably very conservative and why is

that because most research doesn't get published they say a large number of

unpublished trials may exist and they're more likely to be neutral or negative

because if people do a research study it's just human nature we are excited

about what we're going to find and if we don't find it then we're more likely to

just put the papers away than to send them in and fight to get them published

so it has been known that 90% of neutral or unfavorable results don't get

published so the studies that they found were probably just the the 10% that got

published anyway in the discussion of the paper they try to come up with some

reasoning some rationale for how is it possible that people spend billions of

dollars on something that's supposedly good and then it turns out it kills them

so one thing they said was that although oxidative stress has a hypothesized role

hypothesized meaning it's it's a theory it's an idea they think that free

radicals cause these diseases but it's never been proven it's never been a

single case where they've shown that that is the causative mechanism and then

they said that by eliminating free radicals which antioxidants do

antioxidants fight off free radicals when we reduce free radicals we also

interfere with some essential defensive mechanism in the body such as apoptosis

phagocytosis and detoxification and these things are also known as otology

and notify is a life-saving age-reversing fantastic mechanism that

when we fast or when we starve the body up regulates its clean up process and

it's free radicals in this form that manages the clean up and if you take

excess antioxidants at the same time now you interfere with that mechanism you

shut down those free radicals that are gonna go around and clean up so there's

a problem that there's so much conflicting information about nutrition

and nutritional supplements I have a practice that's based on teaching people

to eat whole foods and take a significant amount of good supplements

because we know that works but most of the research very conflicting research

has been done on terrible supplements it has been done on synthetic supplements

which are at best ineffective at worst their antioxidants and their synthetic

and they unbalance the body that's why the research is so conflicting because

all the research is done on poor quality stuff here's what you want to do to get

your vitamin C first of all you eat real food eat as much as you can try to get

everything from real food if you feel like you can't quite get there

and try a whole food product like acerola cherry powder for example

organic whole concentrated acerola powder in my office we also use products

like cataplexy from standard process that works great now if you're one of

those people who swear by vitamin C powders ascorbic acid powders cold and

flu remedies and you swear that every time you feel a little tickle you take

it it goes away great don't worry about it but don't use

those every day don't think that you have to have one of those vitamin C

ascorbic acid powders and they sprinkle little acerola on it and it has a

thousand or 2,000 milligrams that is not a nutrient it's an antioxidant and it's

not going to help you in the long run use it when you have a crisis use it

when you feel like you need a little boost but don't do it all the time if

you enjoyed this video make sure you also check out that one thank you so

much for watching I'll see you in the next video