Vitamin C -- The Most Famous of Vitamins!
By David Leonhardt
We call Vitamin C also known as ascorbic acid "the most famous of vitamins" because it really is the best known. It is the first one schoolchildren learn. It is the most cited cure for the common cold. Most people can rhyme off at least a few foods that contain vitamin C. And vitamin C is the single most searched nutrient on the Internet.
HISTORY: Nobel Prize winning biochemist Dr. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi first isolated vitamin C in 1928. (As someone of Hungarian descent I find this a touch exciting.)
Vitamin C first got its reputation for beating the common cold in 1970 when fellow Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling published his bestselling book "Vitamin C and the Common Cold". In it he suggested that taking vitamin C at levels well above the USA RDA (now 60 milligrams per day) could strengthen the immune system and help ward off the common cold.
BENEFITS: Vitamin C helps form collagen a glue-like fibrous protein in bone cartilage tendons and other connective tissue. Vitamin C helps give structure and maintain such body parts as bones cartilage muscle veins capillaries and teeth.
But recent studies have also linked "adequate dosages" of vitamin C to preventing a number of common cancers of helping boost the nervous system of prolonging life of reducing the risk of heart disease of softening the symptoms of respiratory diseases such as asthma and cystic fibrosis and of keeping skin and glands healthy.
SOURCES: Most animals manufacture their own vitamin C. Primates such as humans gorillas and monkeys have somehow lost this ability.
Which is why we need to get our vitamin C from our ...
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