Vitamin C--Ascorbic acid

I didn't realize just how bad the wrong vit. C is----most health food stores sell this kind of vit. C and according to the following article can cause a multitude of problems.


Many bottles of ascorbic acid are purchased every day under the misguided assumption that ascorbic acid is the same as Vitamin C. In reality, ascorbic acid is an isolated nutrient that is part of Vitamin C but it is not the whole Vitamin C.

So, you are getting cheated if you buy ascorbic acid thinking it is Vitamin C. But that might be the least of the consequences you may suffer. Studies over the last several years have demonstrated that people who take high doses of ascorbic acid actually put themselves at risk for a number of health challenges. One study demonstrated that doses of 500 mg a day or more of ascorbic acid increase the incidence of arterial plaque buildup. Another study indicated that gallstones are more likely to appear in those taking ascorbic acid. Are these backlash studies against the health food industry? No, they are legitimate studies.

Wait a minute, you may be thinking. What about all the studies done by Linus Pauling and a multitude of other reputable researchers who have proven the health promoting benefits of Vitamin C and ascorbic acid? Let us put a little perspective on the subject. Back in the 1930’s ascorbic acid was isolated out of little red peppers. The man who first performed thus experiment was Dr. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi who won a Nobel Prize for his work. What he also found, which has mostly been ignored until recently, was that ascorbic acid was far more biologically available and active while it was still in the red pepper.

Scientists of the era of “Better Living Through Chemistry and Science” (which we have been experiencing for the last fifty years) decided to take the discoveries about Vitamin C and“improve” on Mother Nature. First they found that extracting ascorbic acid from natural foods, such as the red peppers, cabbage, cranberries, gooseberries, or Acerola berries, is relatively expensive. Ascorbic acid can be created in the laboratory much less expensively (and of course much more profitably). Scientists discovered that they could take corn syrup, mix it with hydrochloric acid, and voila: ascorbic acid! (By the way, the corn is more likely than ever to be genetically modified and of course not organically grown.) Years later, scientists discovered what Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi had discovered about ascorbic acid, it is not as effective when detached from the whole food matrix! So they went about trying to determine what other factors there could be in the whole food that would make the ascorbic acid work better. First, they discovered the importance of bioflavonoids, so they figured out how to produce these synthetically in the laboratory, to be added to the ascorbic acid. Then they found that ascorbic acid worked better as a mineral ascorbate and they worked on that! Then they found that fat soluble ascorbic acid was superior, because it went directly to the liver vs. water soluble ascorbic acid. In fact if you put 100 mg of ascorbic acid in the body, within a few hours at least 90% of it will be excreted in the urine. If you put 10 times more into the body to account for a 90% loss it caused diarrhea. So they experimented with various things and concluded that if you attach the ascorbic acid molecule to another molecule, in one case a metabolite, the ascorbic acid will stay in the body longer (they didn’t seem to care why it stayed in the body longer, but it stayed in the body longer and hopefully that was a good thing). Today there is a broad variety of ascorbic acid products with various things attached to them.


So, you do have to be careful with the vitamins that you buy, the oft expression that vitamins don't kill isn't good enough.

Liz

Liz..... And the source of your article is???? Author and credentials? And the research reference links to the claims made?

You can find a lot of stuff on the net about using corn syrup/hydrochloride acid which is used to make ascorbic acid (vit C. However I took my piece from :

[www.radiantlifecatalog.com] written by Michael and Nora Wohlfeld---I would say that Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi. winner of a Nobel Prize, says that the most effective way to get your vit. C is when taken from whole foods.

I was shocked when I learned that ascorbic acid is the by-product of corn syrup and hydrochloride acid.