Vitamin C - an essential nutrient for collagen production and maintained immunity function.
Vitamin C is an essential nutrient that offers multiple health benefits, such as helps improve memory, boost immunity, and maintains bone, skin, and blood vessel health.
What’s more? Vitamin C is also responsible for the growth, development, and repairing of tissues.
The deficiency of Vitamin C can cause many diseases such as Scurvy, anemia, debility, limb pain, exhaustion, bleeding, swelling, ulceration of gums, and tooth loss.
Knowing these problems, you shouldn’t disregard the importance of Vitamin C intake and should maintain its adequate level in the body.
Fun Fact: Vitamin C is also known as Ascorbic acid.
Let’s dive deep into some of the many reasons that prove vitamin C is an essential nutrient for a healthy body.
Top 14 Reasons Vitamin C is Good for Your Health
- Stimulates Collagen Production
- Manages High Blood Pressure
- Lowers the risk of heart disease
- Helps Treat Cancer
- Boosts Brain Function
- Reduces Blood Uric Acid Levels and Gout Attacks
- Prevents Iron Deficiency
- Boosts Immunity
- Nurtures Memory and Thinking
- Lowers the Risk of Chronic Disease
- Maintains Cardiovascular Health
- Cures Common Cold
- Protect Eyes
- Stimulates Collagen Production
Vitamin C is responsible for the production of collagen in the body. Collagen plays an important role in connective tissues around the body, such as tissues found in hair, nails, skin, and other body organs.
National Institutes of Health (NIH) emphasizes that having adequate levels of vitamin C in the body is crucial for the production of collagen.
Health and skincare experts also call collagen a skin’s anti-aging fighter. And since vitamin C helps boost collagen production, it promotes fresh and younger-looking skin.
So, if you want to achieve healthy and young-looking skin, make sure to consume an adequate amount of vitamin C.
- Manages High Blood Pressure
High blood pressure is a leading spur of fatality worldwide (1). It's a threat to cause heart disease. Almost ⅓ of American adults have a high blood pressure problem (2).
However, vitamin C helps lower blood pressure in both types of people - those with a hypertension problem and those with normal blood pressure.
A study on animals revealed that the intake of Vitamin C helps to relax the blood vessels that carry blood to the heart. This relaxation helps to maintain blood pressure levels (3).
Another study on 29 humans revealed that intake of Vitamin C supplement reduces systolic pressure by 3.8 mmHg and diastolic pressure by 1.5 mmHg at average (4).
Disclaimer: People with high blood pressure should not merely depend on Vitamin C.
- Lowers the Risk of Heart Disease
Heart disease is another main reason for deaths happening globally (5).
There are several factors that increase the risk of heart disease including:
- High blood pressure
- High cholesterol levels
- Low cholesterol levels
Vitamin C is the antidote that helps reduce heart disease risk. The evidence to this statement is the analysis that was made of 9 studies, constituting 293,172 participants. In this analysis, it was found that after 10 years, the majority of the people who used to take Vitamin C daily had a lower risk of heart disease by up to 25% (6).
Guess what? You can easily take 500 mg of Vitamin C daily and it helps significantly reduce bad cholesterol levels by 7.9 mg/dL and blood triglycerides by 20.1 mg/dL (7).
Precisely, Vitamin C reduces the risk of heart disease.
- Helps Treats Cancer
Vitamin C is also an antidote to cancer though specialists haven’t verified it yet.
Nevertheless, being an antioxidant, it protects the oxidative stress. This issue can cause damage to cells and cancer in certain cases.
Taking high doses of Vitamin C can slow down the growth of multiple cells. It is also observed by the National Cancer Institute that some therapists utilize Vitamin C to treat cancer, fatigue, and infections.
- Boosts Brain Function
Vitamin C is responsible for the synthesis of neurotransmitters and cognitive (brain) functions.
Neurotransmitters send impulses from the brain to the body and the body to the brain. Vitamin C is an element that improves their function.
- Reduces Blood Uric Acid Levels and Gout Attacks
Almost 4% of American grown-ups are affected by Gout, which is a type of arthritis (8).
Gout is extremely painful and causes inflammation of joints, especially big toes. People suffering from Gout face swelling and sudden attacks of pain (9).
An excessive amount of Uric acid in the blood causes Gout. This is the waste product produced by the body and at high levels, it crystallizes in the joints.
To help reduce the levels of uric acid in the blood, Vitamin C is consumed.
A study made on 1387 men found that those who consumed most Vitamin C had lower levels of Uric acid (10).
Another analysis of 13 studies found that consuming Vitamin C for 30 days helps reduce uric acid (11).
- Prevents Iron Deficiency
Iron being a vital nutrient has numerous functions in the human body such as making red blood cells and transporting oxygen.
Vitamin C supplements can help to boost the absorption of iron from the diet. Moreover, they also help in converting the poorly absorbed iron into an easy-to-absorb form (12).
Quick Prompt: Simple consumption of 100 mg of Vitamin C improves iron absorption by 67% (13).
Consequently, Vitamin C helps to reduce the risk of Anemia in people who have iron deficiency.
In an experiment, 65 children having mild anemia were given Vitamin C supplements and it was found that the intake improved their condition and controlled anemia (14).
Are you suffering from anemia? Consume Vitamin C rich foods or supplements.
Side Note: Hydrient is a multi-nutritional supplement that contains 1000mg of vitamin C.
- Boosts Immunity
Vitamin C boosts immunity and this is one of the major causes people consume this nutrient.
The very first function of Vitamin C is to produce white blood cells called lymphocytes and phagocytes. They help to prevent infection (15).
Secondly, Vitamin C protects white blood cells from damage by free radicals.
And lastly, this nutrient is an important ingredient of the skin’s defense system where it works as an antioxidant and helps to enhance skin barriers. Vitamin C also helps in healing wounds by shortening the healing time (16).
On the other hand, if there’s a low level of Vitamin C in the human body, it results in poor health consequences. For instance, people with low Vitamin C may have pneumonia. However, supplements of Vitamin C can help shorten the recovery period of pneumonia (17).
- Nurtures Memory and Thinking
You must be aware of this disease “dementia” which shows the symptoms of poor thinking and memory. This disease has affected about 35 million people around the globe and commonly occurs in adults (18).
Studies have revealed that oxidative stress and inflammation near the brain, spine, and nerves boost the risk of dementia (19). Some studies have also found that people having dementia have lower blood levels of Vitamin C (20).
However, if you take enough Vitamin C, it can help improve memory.
- Lowers the Risk of Chronic Diseases
As told earlier, Vitamin C is an antioxidant that strengthens the defense system of your body and boosts immunity. The immune system is enhanced when vitamin C protects against harmful molecules called free radicals.
Then accumulated, these free radicals promote oxidative stress which is linked to chronic diseases (21).
Vitamin C is a cure to this problem as well. Consuming this nutrient can increase antioxidant levels in the body by 30%. Plus, the nutrient also helps in fighting inflammation (22).
- Maintains Cardiovascular Health
Vitamin C is also responsible for maintaining cardiovascular health. The reasons for being a cure to this problem are that Vitamin C:
- Has antioxidant properties
- Assists in widening blood vessels
- Enhance nitric oxide production
- Reduce plaque fluctuation in atherosclerosis
This protects against heart disease, hypertension, and high blood pressure.
However, it's not enough to take supplements alone if you are suffering from a heart health condition.
- Cures Common Cold
It is seen that many people cure a common cold using Vitamin C. However, research hasn't confirmed this yet.
Regardless, people can consume 200 mg of Vitamin C who:
- Carry out extreme physical activity
- Are exposed to cold temperatures
- Smoke and have low Vitamin C levels
- Protect Eyes and Skin
It is observed that Vitamin C protects the eyes from forming cataracts and also slows the aging process, ceasing the wrinkles formation. Hence, you can consume it to protect your eyes and skin as well.
