Vitamin C & COVID-19
Vitamin C Basics
Water soluble vitamin meaning any extra vitamin C you have floating around that your body doesn’t use gets excreted in the urine
Substance important for healing processes
Antioxidant, which means it helps fight free radial build up in your body. Free radicals form due to exposure environmentally toxic substances as well as part of the aging process.
Helps our bodies white blood cells in protecting us from infection, but again the exact mechanism by which this occurs is not fully understood
Helps in iron absorption, and being iron deficient can make you more susceptible to infections in general
We get our vitamin C through our dietary intake. Anyone who eats any amount of fruits and vegetables during the week is unlikely to be vitamin C deficient!
Vitamin C and COVID
Most of what we know about vitamin C comes from data studied with other common cold viruses. These studies studies have shown the possibility of decreasing your overall susceptibility to respiratory viral infections, but no conclusive evidence has been made
One study taking daily Vitamin C before the onset of a cold appears to shorten colds by 8% in adults and 14% in kids. Taking vitamin C after symptoms already appear will not help you AND taking vitamin C will NOT prevent you from getting a cold
Again taking Vitamin C prophylactically MAY reduce the duration of a cold once you get it, but it will NOT prevent you from getting a cold and there are not results in terms of severity
COVID A to Z study mild to moderate symptoms (non hospitalized patients). Patients allocated in 1:1:1:1 ration - zinc, vitamin c, both, or none. 8,000 mg vitamin C. 50 mg zinc gluconate. These are HUGE doses...The end goal of the trial was to track the amount of time it took each individual to reach a 50% reduction in symptom severity score and the number of days required to reach a total sx severity score of 0. At the end of this study a bunch of fancy calculations were performed and found that there was no difference in all 4 groups for number of days to reach 50% reduction in symptom severity. The study was subsequently stopped early because the first end goal didn't see promising results with vitamin c and zinc. There were a lot of problems with this study, but again it is one of the newest available. There are current studies being done to look at the efficacy of the role of IV vitamin C in severe, hospitalized patients. We hope to get this data in the future.
No evidence that taking high doses of Vitamin C can protect people from corona virus
Recommended intake is 75-120 mg daily either from supplementation or dietary intake
2 things are important here: most people especially in the united states get enough vitamin C through dietary intake alone. Anything extra that the body is unable to use (like taking 1000 mg everyday), your body simply excretes through the urine. So more is not better
Again highly unlikely that you are vitamin C deficient if you eat food on a daily basis
If you want to try supplementation for COVID or colds in general, I would recommend 1,000 mg once daily
