Bleeding gums, bruising when you
shouldn't, getting sick more often than
you think you should, even feeling
fatigued. All these things can mean you
need more vitamin C. So, this is how to
manage your vitamin C status and make
sure you're getting enough.
Hi. I'm Dr. Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com.
And this is Chris Masterjohn Lite,
where the name of the game is
"Details? Shmeetails. Just tell me what works!"
And in this episode, we're going to talk
about how to manage your vitamin C status.
So, the classical vitamin C
deficiency syndrome is scurvy. And in
this disease, the most widespread visible
signs that you get are things like
bleeding gums or otherwise bleeding
underneath the surface of the skin,
especially in the oral cavity, so seeing
a lot of red underneath the
lining of your of your mouth.
The skin may appear to bruise, but the
difference between that and an actual
bruise is that in vitamin C deficiency,
scurvy, it could bruise when there's no
physical trauma that you would expect to
have to cause that bruise. So if the
bruises just come out of nowhere, that
could be an indication of scurvy.
You also get defects in the hair. They're
kind of hard to spot if you normally
have kinky or curly hair, but basically
your hairs can lose their natural shape
and start getting super kinky, like they
are shaped like a corkscrew. Fatigue and
shortness of breath can also be signs of
scurvy. Now, outside of classical scurvy,
what might vitamin C do? Well, as many of
you already know, it's long been thought
that not getting enough vitamin C could
contribute to getting the common cold
and that taking vitamin C might protect
against the common cold. There's a lot of
research out there with very mixed
results, but I would regard getting sick
more often than you think you should as
a possible sign that you need more
vitamin C. And low bone mineral density,
osteopenia, osteoporosis are other signs
that you might not be getting enough vitamin C.
In fact, vitamin C is an antioxidant,
which means that it just generally
protects your tissues against wear and
tear that occurs naturally with age and
gets worse when you're exposed to things
like cigarette smoke, and alcohol, and
environmental toxins. And so all of the
degenerative diseases like cancer, and
heart disease, and insulin resistance, and
type 2 diabetes, all these things have a
component of oxidative stress that wear
and tear on our tissues, and so all of
them might conceivably be improved by
making sure you have adequate amounts
of vitamin C. We could also theorize that
based on how vitamin C impacts our
hormones, not having enough vitamin C
might contribute to lethargy, lack of
focus, and even compromise the sense of
affection and bonding that we get in
response to physical intimacy because
vitamin C is needed to produce oxytocin,
the so-called love hormone. On the other
side of the coin, there really is no
vitamin C toxicity syndrome. High doses
of vitamin C ranging from 4 grams per day
to maybe even 10 grams per day, depending
on your own bowel tolerance, may cause
diarrhea, but if you just take out the
vitamin C, the diarrhea goes away, so it's
not really dangerous to consume
vitamin C at those doses. There are certain
vulnerable populations who should be
very careful with vitamin C. That
includes people with hemochromatosis,
where vitamin C could—which is iron
overload—vitamin C can exaggerate the
iron overload and worsen that
condition. People with—about 8% of the
world has glucose 6-phosphate
dehydrogenase deficiency that's an
enzyme deficiency that can cause a
particular type of anemia, and vitamin C
supplementation can aggravate that type
of anemia. And then in people who are at
high risk of oxalate-based kidney stones,
vitamin C supplementation may be able to
worsen the risk of kidney stones. But on
the whole in the general population,
supplementation with vitamin C, even over
and above what you need, seems to be very safe.
So why might you not be getting
enough vitamin C? Well, if you look at the
diet, the overwhelming sources of vitamin C
are fresh fruits and vegetables, so a
diet that's high in these foods,
especially a lot of raw and gently
cooked versions of these foods, is likely
to provide enough vitamin C. For people
who do not have access to plant foods,
for example, if you look at
our Native American ancestors
from the Arctic region, where plant foods
were very limited, they got their vitamin C
from adrenal glands and smaller
amounts from liver. So consuming organ
meats on a carnivore diet would be an
excellent way to protect against vitamin C
deficiency. Some people claim that you
need to consume enough carbohydrate to
properly absorb and utilize vitamin C,
and other people claim that consuming
carbohydrate impairs your ability to
absorb and utilize vitamin C. I don't
think the evidence is clear on this
either way, and I don't currently regard
carbohydrate intake as a major
determinant of getting enough vitamin C.
High levels of physical activity, illness,
and exposure to toxins, including ethanol,
the type of alcohol that you drink to
get drunk, and cigarette smoke all
increase the need for vitamin C, and so
you probably want to supplement your
diet if you are highly physically active,
get sick often, or drink and smoke a lot.
And conversely, if you want to eat a
relatively low-vitamin C diet and not be
subject to deficiency, then the cleaner
your lifestyle is in these respects, the
less likely you are to run into problems
from consuming lower amounts of
vitamin C. To test your vitamin C status, the
best test is fasting plasma vitamin C,
or fasting plasma ascorbate or ascorbic acid,
it might be called. These are all the
same test. It's important that it be fasting,
and it's important that you avoid
vitamin C supplementation the evening
before the test because when you take
vitamin C, your vitamin C levels spike
before they decline down to a stable level.
So if you want to recognize a deficiency, and if
you want to watch your progress
fixing a deficiency, you want to see the
fasting unsupplemented level in the
morning after an evening with no
supplementation, and you want to watch that
go from low and rise to high as you're
fixing the deficiency. If you get an
organic acids test, such as Great Plains,
you might see urinary vitamin C on that
test. If that's low, maybe it's an
indicator of low vitamin C status, but I
would always follow up the urinary
measurement with a plasma
measurement, and you don't need to get
the urinary measurement. If you're not getting the
organic acids test, just get the plasma
vitamin C to measure your vitamin C
status. If the problem is poor diet or
excessive exposure to toxins, it's best
to fix either of those before moving on
to supplementation, but supplementation
is certainly an adequate way to deal
with difficulties getting enough in the
diet or just higher needs. Because
remember, physical activity increases the
need for vitamin C, and it may be the
case that if you exercise a lot and you
find yourself getting sick more often,
maybe you're overtraining and you should
reduce the amount of exercise, but you
also may need a little bit extra
supplementation just to match your
lifestyle. Overall, 200 milligrams
of vitamin C per day is enough for most
people. If you find yourself getting sick
frequently and it responds well to
higher amounts, you could go up to
2 grams per day. But when you're dealing
with high doses, remember that this can
cause copper deficiency, so if you
supplement with vitamin C and you
develop copper deficiency,
you need to either cut back on the C, get
more copper in your diet, or see if you
can separate your copper
and your vitamin C. In other words, if you
have liver or other really high-copper
foods in your diet, and you have vitamin
C supplements, try to get the liver in
one meal and get the vitamin C at a
different meal so that you can avoid the
negative interactions between copper and vitamin C.
This episode is brought to you
by Ancestral Supplements. Our Native
American ancestors believed that eating
the organs from a healthy animal would
support the health of the corresponding
organ of the individual. Ancestral Supplements
is a nose-to-tail product line of grass-fed
liver, organs, bone marrow, and more.
All in the convenience of a capsule.
For more information or to buy any of
their products, go to ancestralsupplements.com.
This episode is brought to you by
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The audio of this episode was
enhanced and post-processed by
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All right, I hope you found this useful.
Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com. And this has
been Chris Masterjohn Lite.
And I will see you in the next episode.