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