A Man Ate 100 Zinc Vitamin C Gummies Everyday.
This Is What Happened To His Spinal Cord.
GC is a 55 year old man, presenting to the emergency room with a broken hip.
His daughter Kaycee tells the admitting nurse that GC had been moving kind of funny over
the last few months.
She heard a loud thud in the stairwell, as her dad cried out “Help!!
I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”
Earlier in his life, GC didn’t pay attention to his health.
When he was younger, he had some problems.
His classmates made fun of him because he was bigger than everyone else, and so he withdrew
in to his food.
He developed in to an adult who couldn’t control himself, as his family found him hoarding
excess food, and secretly eating every last bit.
In his 30s, GC had health problems.
He had diabetes and gout.
His big toe would hurt all the time.
As the years passed, GC started losing feeling in his hands and feet because of his
diabetes.
One day he stepped on something sharp.
It cut his foot, and he didn’t realize anything had happened until he saw red puddles in the
shower.
He realized he couldn’t keep living like this.
One doctor he saw wanted to start him on a variety of medicines.
He refused after looking online and found a doctor who recommended and would do gastric
bypass surgery.
This doctor would cut in to his abdomen.
They’d create a small pocket of his stomach.
Then, they would reroute his GI tract in to the end of his small intestines.
The small stomach pouch limited the amount he’d eat, so that he’d feel full while
eating less food.
And the reroute would limit the amount of calories he’d absorb.
After surgery, doctors warned GC that he would need to control his nutrients, because the
bypass can cause some deficiencies in vitamins and minerals.
GC’s diabetes cleared up, but he started redirecting his excess habits.
GC started getting cocky with his health.
Fixing his diet, made his blood sugar control better.
Those doctors, were trying to pump me full of meds for my diabetes, but I fixed it myself,
he thought.
2 years ago, GC caught the flu.
This was the sickest he had been since changing his life.
He vowed to never get ill again, and started reading online forums about boosting immunity.
He remembered doctors telling him he might eventually have vitamin and mineral deficiency
because of his gastric bypass.
He came across some online videos that told him zinc and vitamin C were absolutely the
best ways to keep the immune system strong.
Everyone in this internet group made it clear— this was undoubtedly the best way to prevent
any illness.
And it’s simply impossible to take too much Vitamin C and Zinc because they’re water
soluble, meaning that any extras will dissolve in the urine and be excreted from the body.
And that’s a great guarantee that the kidneys will always catch any extras that the body
doesn’t use.
He went to the pharmacy and started buying as many bottles of zinc and Vitamin C as possible.
He joked that he was reliving his past life, but this time was different.
Instead of collecting high blood sugar, he was going to collect the strongest immune
system ever made by humans.
GC started with the combination Zinc / Vitamin C gummies.
These were delicious, just like candy, without the calories and with only all of the health
benefits.
If there’s no limits here, might as well eat the whole bottle, he thought.
Anytime GC felt a runny nose or sore throat, he’d eat an extra handful of Zinc Vitamin
C gummies.
Sometimes the pharmacy would be sold out of his favorite brand of supplement.
He read online that denture adhesive cream contained zinc.
And, if it was good enough for grandma to put in her mouth, then it was good enough
for him to eat as a zinc immune booster.
Anytime he was out of his preferred vitamin brand, he’d eat a tube of denture cream
instead.
4 Months ago, GC started feeling a numbness in his hands and feet.
But it wasn’t that he couldn’t feel anything anymore, it was that all he could feel were
pins and needles, like his hands had fallen asleep, but the pricks were 100 times more
intense, all the time.
He had experienced this earlier in his life and thought it was familiar, but it wasn’t.
This was on top of him losing his sense of taste.
His sides would start hurting.
Sometimes it’d pulse, and he’d feel like throwing up.
But he was usually able to keep it all down.
One day, Kaycee noticed her dad was walking kind of funny.
She asked him about it but he didn’t know what she was talking about.
Everything seemed to be ok, and he told her, don’t worry, everything’s fine, as he
chewed on more Zinc Vitamin C gummies.
As the days passed, the pin pricks and the pain in his sides started intensifying.
He had trouble not only walking, but also standing.
And finally when one day he struggled to walk down a flight of stairs, he fell.
Instantly, he knew something was wrong with his hip as he cried out for help, and he’s
brought to the emergency room where we are now.
At examination, doctors find that GC is alert, and oriented.
He was clearly in pain, but he was coherent.
His brain’s in tact, so maybe he really did just slip.
Doctors’ main focus was to fix his broken hip.
And surgery appears to go smoothly.
GC is going to need physical therapy, but something’s wrong.
A blood test finds that GC’s red blood cells are larger than normal, called macrocytosis.
They cant ask him to stand because he just had hip surgery.
But they find that the reflexes in his arms are more responsive than normal.
His arms were also weaker than normal.
His feet had some trouble sensing vibrations.
And his daughter confirmed that this had been happening for at least a few weeks.
Since he was alert and oriented when he presented to the emergency room, then it means that
his brain is fine.
But reflexes in the arms go through the spinal cord.
Feeling certain things in the feet also happen in the brain, but those impulses have to go
through the spinal cord.
All of this indicating that maybe he didn’t just slip by accident, but that something
is actually wrong with GC’s spinal cord.
And because he has a history of gastric bypass, then that problem could be caused by a vitamin
deficiency.
Another blood test finds that GC’s Vitamin B12 levels are on the lower end of normal.
B12 is needed by the body to help the mitochondria in the cells make energy.
It’s also needed to make DNA, explaining his big red blood cells.
Without enough Vitamin B12, the nerves start to get damaged.
And cells don’t form properly because DNA parts aren’t being made.
Nerve damage explains why he fell while his brain’s mostly in tact, because his gastric
bypass surgery didn’t allow him to properly absorb nutrients, the doctors thought.
They gave him some vitamin B12 injections to fix this, even though it seemed to be borderline.
He got better, and he was discharged as his condition started to improve.
When he heard about having B12 deficiency in the hospital, GC took this as instructions
to double down on all vitamins and minerals.
He needed another boost to his immune system anyways, because hospitals are dirty places,
so might as well eat even more Zinc Vitamin C gummies to prevent any infections that could
be from the hospital.
As the days passed with after several hundred Zinc Vitamin C gummies, GC’s side started
hurting again.
His sense of taste started fading, again.
And then Kaycee started to notice he wasn’t making as much urine as before.
GC started acting funny while stammering about not being able to feel his hands and feet.
And as Kaycee walks in on her dad in his room, she finds him rolling around on the floor,
confused, and he’s brought to the emergency room again.
At examination this time, doctors find that GC’s kidneys are shutting down.
Quickly, they find out that he has calcium oxalate crystals in the little bit of urine
he’s able to make.
These crystals don’t dissolve in water, and they can build up and stick in to the
kidneys, blocking flow, not only causing them to fail, but also causing the tubules in the
kidneys to necrose.
Asking his daughter, what GC’s been eating, she was hesitant to say, because she knew
that her dad didn’t trust doctors.
She downplayed the Zinc Vitamin C gummies and made it seem like he took the daily recommended
amount.
Peanuts and spinach too have a lot of oxalate too, and maybe that could be the cause if
he ate a lot of it.
Maybe he drank antifreeze, or a lava lamp— those get broken down to oxalate too.
But this wasn’t his only problem.
The nurse noticed that GC’s movements were spastic.
Neurology consult finds that his reflexes in his arms were more exaggerated than normal,
and his feeling in his feet was diminished again.
All of this looking like Vitamin B12 deficiency again, but something’s wrong.
He doesn’t have low B12 levels in his blood, and all chemicals associated with vitamin
B12 were normal.
And while his levels were low when he got his hip surgery last time, they really weren’t
low enough to be causing his problems.
An MRI of his head was normal, but imaging of his spine suggested some kind of neurodegeneration.
Specifically, the kind that happens during a long term Vitamin B12 deficiency.
Nitrous oxide if GC had been doing balloons recently could cause inactivation of vitamin
B12 causing deficiency.
But this isn’t what happened.
He doesnt have a Vitamin B12 problem, and he never did.
This same degeneration happens when someone has certain STD’s, but he didn’t seem
to have those either.
Doctors order another blood test and find that GC has low copper presence in blood.
They ask him again about what he eats, and they especially want to know what kind of
supplements he takes.
And when his daughter hears the question, she finally blurts out about her dad’s excessive
Zinc Vitamin C habits, eating hundreds of gummies daily and even going so far as to
eat Denture Paste to get additional zinc, and this tells doctors what they need to know.
GC was in kidney failure.
Specifically, kidney failure caused by calcium oxalate.
Vitamin C is broken down to oxalate in the body.
In massive doses, it COULD cause kidney stones, in men.
We say “could” because this comes from a study involving a questionnaire about taking
vitamin C supplements.
And those men who said they did take those supplements, had a higher incidence of kidney
stones.
So is that strong evidence?
Maybe.
But there is some scientific rationale that Vitamin C does get broken down to oxalate
in humans and that could form a solid crystal with the calcium floating around in the blood,
and these crystals can collect in the kidneys.
But based on the data we have now, it’s not entirely clear Vitamin C always does this
to everyone.
There are cases where someone receives a massive megadose of vitamin C in the hospital and
then going in to kidney failure hours later too.
But sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesnt.
The risk, and the variable incidence, is enough to at least say, don’t eat 100 Vitamin C
gummies or tablets everyday, and this could be the cause of GC’s kidney failure..
But kidney failure, wasnt the cause of GC’s pins and needles feeling in his hands and
feet.
His kidneys didn’t cause him to walk funny, to fall down the stairs and shatter his hip.
Kidney failure usually causes build up of things in the blood, because if they were
working properly, the kidneys would be filtering things out, so that wouldn’t cause low copper
presence in blood.
And the kidneys are NOT the reason why part of GC’s spinal cord appears to have degenerated,
bringing us back to zinc and copper.
Both of these are metals.
They’re not heavy like mercury or lead, and that’s a good thing because it means
they’re generally more stable.
More stable means less reactive so Zinc and Copper are less likely to rip, tear apart
and destroy things in the body.
Copper and Zinc’s place on the periodic table of elements indicates that they can
have a positive 2 charge, positive meaning they’re missing 2 electrons, a particle
that creates a negative charge.
The body doesn’t like it when things have charges in the body, because that makes them
unstable and reactive.
And so if copper is plus 2, then it means something with a negative 2 charge would act
on it.
On the periodic table, counting back from right to left, shows elements that have negative
2 charges, so, they have 2 electrons to give.
Oxygen is one of them, and that’s everywhere in the body, but it tends to behave in a way
that doesn’t give out 2 electrons in this case.
Meaning sulfur is the chemical that binds to zinc in the body.
And because sulfur is in proteins, then this starts to explain all of GC’s problems.
Actually, metals reacting with sulfur is a central idea for why things like lead and
mercury are toxic in humans.
In the cells of stomach, and the small intestines, are proteins called metallothioneins.
Metallo referring to metals and thionein deriving from thio- (θείο) Greek meaning sulfur.
These sulfur rich proteins neutralize metal ions that come from our diet.
In normal function, some copper in the stomach and intestines bind metallothionein and get
excreted in the feces.
The remaining copper gets absorbed in to the body and is used for essential processes.
If too much zinc is around, it tells the body to make more metallothionein.
It has a plus 2 charge too and it’s not too different from copper, at least from this
standpoint.
And more metallothionein means that all the copper is inactivated by it and none of it
gets absorbed in to be used in the body.
This is a problem because the brain is the most copper rich organ in humans.
We know the brain needs copper to develop properly, because there’s a disease called
Menkes’ Disease, that prevents copper transport to the brain in young children because of
a genetic mutation.
People who have this disease see their brains deteriorate, atrophy, and never fully develop.
And most of those patients never live past childhood.
All of this explaining GC’s neurologic problems, that he developed since eating excess zinc
everyday, it simply forced his body to deplete all copper stores, and without copper functioning
in the body, the nerves start to degenerate.
The damage could be permanent, but we still don’t know exactly how all of this works.
If GC is a fully developed adult, and hes been eating zinc supplements to the tune of
hundreds of Zinc Vitamin C gummies daily, and going so far as to eat denture paste for
additional zinc, then that excess zinc is causing copper deficiency.
The solution is to give him to copper, and tell him to cut it out with the zinc.
You want to take some supplements to boost your immune system then fine, but dont do
it by eating denture paste out of the tube.
Or by eating whole bottles of gummy vitamins, every day.
As the days pass with copper supplementation, GC’s condition starts to get better.
He’s discharged from the hospital and is able to go to physical therapy for his hip.
And as he finally learned a lesson about his excess, he made a recovery.
Thanks so much for watching.
Take care of yourself.
And be well.