Vitamin C…the important and valuable vitamin for our health! This is something that even people who have never pondered and wondered about nutrition know about. So, very recently I have come across this fascinating information:

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and Vitamin C

In the 1970s, Dr. Archie Kalokerinos served the Aboriginal people in the mining region of Australia. During his time there he found that 50% of the infants were dying, and the majority of the deaths were the result of SIDS. He discovered that the people and their infants were almost completely deficient of vitamin C. After his findings he began a vitamin C supplement program, and shortly after the infant rate dropped to near zero. Subsequently, no child died of SIDS.  Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine. [Wysong newsletter.]

An interesting thing is that…

If you think you are not getting enough of vitamin C, a pill from the chemist or health store is certainly not the most natural or effective way to replenish your reserves! An orange juice carton may be more effective, however remember that vitamin C with its many important co-factors is destroyed when heated, so every juice from a carton is either pasteurised (heated to 80 Degrees Celsius) or is made from concentrate – which means it is heavily processed, denatured, dehydrated and then simply diluted-rehydrated with tap water to make up that juice you buy off a shelf! Not the easiest way for the body to get that vitamin C into you!

So, what’s the answer? I suggest two most logical and efficient ways (and I will explain why not the pills just after that):

(1) Good raw crunchy (like kale, broccoli and apples) or soft (like avocados and raspberries), shredded, blended and juiced food! Only humans, higher primates, guinea pigs and fruit bats do not make vitamin C in the body, and hence – naturally enough – have to replenish it from food. If you eat plenty of raw fruit and vegetables (think salads, green smoothies and juices) or even if your diet is mostly vegetables (slightly cooked) – then you will be getting your vitamin C – as Nature intended.

is (considered by some accounts to be) the richest source of vitamin C on Earth. It is a berry from the Amazon and can be bought as freeze-dried powder either from health stores, raw nutrition stores or over the internet.

(3) If you feel you must supplement (or you were advised to do so by your practitioner) – there are some Truly Natural Vitamin C you can get in powder or capsules. Lifestream Natural Vitmain C and Health Force Nutritionals Truly Natural Vitamin C  – these are WHOLE-FOOD Genuine, full complex, working Vitamin C products, which actually do what Vitamin C is supposed to do in the body. [Click on product names or search google for local suppliers and check health stores in your country.]

So, why not “regular” vitamin C tablets? Why “natural”? Whole Vitamin C + some history.

If you flip your bottle over and read the ingredients, you will see it says Ascorbic Acid. However, is ascorbic acid the same as Vitamin C? Well, as the discoverer of the Vitamin C himself – Nobel Prize laureate, Dr. Albert Szent-Georgi – found: no, in fact isolated Ascorbic Acid cannot even properly cure Scurvy (the disease sailors used to get from not consuming vitamin C whilst on long journeys at sea)! He found that an “Impurer” Natural form of vitamin C found in food – in tiniest doses – was always effective at curing scurvy, whereas he could not cure scurvy with an isolated Ascorbic Acid (which is what we learned to know as vitamin C)! So, he went back to the lab and discovered another part of C – rutin. He quickly realised that all of the different component within the Vitamin C worked together to produce the results that we need. Vitamins are living complexes, they consist of many active synergistic (helping each other) components. Ascorbic acid is not a living complex. It is a synthetic (man-made) copy of a part of a WHOLE Complex known vitamin C. Ascorbic acid is a broken-off, isolate derived and manufactured from corn starch and volatile acids. It cannot perform all of the functions of naturally occurring, whole Vitamin C does!

We find that there is less than 20 mg of ascorbic acid in a potato. Yet this small amount, since it is complexed in a food source, is all the body needs not only to prevent scurvy, but also to cure it, even in its advanced state. Such a remedy is described in detail in Richard Dana’s amazing journal Two Years Before the Mast, written in 1840.

Whole food vitamin C as found in potatoes, onions, and citrus fruits is able to quickly cure any case of scurvy. By contrast, the fractionated chemical ascorbic acid has been shown to be insufficient in resolving a scurvy condition, simply because it does not act as a nutrient. (Lancet 1842)

So, the WHOLE Vitamin C as discovered by science (with all its health properties):

The other discovered parts of vitamin C are (and not limited to): ascorbic acid, rutin, bioflavonoids, Factor K, Factor J, Factor P, Tyrosinase, Ascorbinogen and other components! When we take Ascorbic acid alone, or even with bioflavanoids (as some companies started to artificially “add back” the missing parts of a whole vitamin C, the body must use up its own reserves of the missing co-factors to fully utilise and make up something that resembles whole vitamin C! Ascorbic acid is just the antioxidant outer shell – the protector of all these other synergists so that they will be able to perform their individual functions, such as P factors improve blood vessel strength, J factors oxygen-carrying capacity of red cells, tyrosinase as an essential enzyme for enhancing white blood cells. Ascorbic Acid on its own does not perform these functions!

So, in short, when you tale an isolate man-made, not-found-in-nature in isolation part of a Vitamin C – which the manufacturer claims IS the Vitamin C, you are not taking Vitamin C at all – just a small part, which cannot do everything you would expect vitamin C to do, and which isn’t even taken out of its “whole” natural state, but is synthetically manufactured. Ascorbic Acid and other synthetic isolates of vitamins CAN be toxic in higher doses as the body, essentially, cannot utilise them and “convert them” into something natural, whole and complex that is needed in order to become a vitamin! Hence it must filter it out through the organs of elimination: kidneys, liver, intestines! Remember how your urine goes yellow when you take those synthetic parts of whole vitamins? Think about that… And remember that properly, slowly, naturally grown food provides us with all we need – especially when it is minimally processed, i.e. raw or cooked just a little!

All the very best to you all in finding your perfect nutrition, so it may give you the best Radiant Health nature has to give you! :)