Important facts about Vitamin C (ascorbic acid)

This vitamin participates in many vital functions of human body. It makes active various enzymes and hormones, improves immunity, promotes regeneration of tissues, maintains resistance of nervous system to stresses, and provides normal process of blood formation.

Insufficiency of vitamin C can provoke many disorders in the body. Hypovitaminosis C results in derangement of collagen synthesis that is necessary for the building of the connective tissue of the blood vessels. This derangement increases the permeability of blood vessel walls that is characterized by multiple hemorrhages in the skin, joints, and internal organs. The ascorbic acid deficiency leads to such symptoms as the increased weakness and irritability, fatigue, gingival hemorrhages, loss of teeth, and hypochromic anemia. At the same time the immunity becomes considerably low; it makes the body vulnerable and particularly prone to infectious diseases. Human capacity for work becomes significantly reduced.

The daily norm of vitamin C consumption for the adult person is 75.0 mg. Very frequently the deficiency of vitamin C develops as a result of excluding from the diet those products, which contain much of this vitamin. There are considerable amounts of ascorbic acid in fruit and vegetables such as hips and sea-buckthorn berries, a mountain ash, a black currant, sweet pepper, a green onion, white cabbage and cauliflower, garden radish, green peas, fennel, parsley, spinach, tomatoes and a horse-radish. Concentration of vitamin C is high in citruses such as lemon, orange, and grapefruit. In potatoes this vitamin is not represented in such large amounts; however, potatoes are included in many dishes and therefore their daily consumption can fully compensate the absence of the other products containing vitamin C in the diet. It is extremely important to maintain the normal level of vitamin C in the body during the period of winter and spring when the consumption of vegetables and fruit is reduced; the organism is exhausted and experience acute deficiency of all vitamins in general. Potatoes, sauerkraut, and the infusion dry hips help make up for the deficiency in the ascorbic acid at this time.

During thermal food preparation and at long storage of vegetables and fruit vitamin C is in part destroyed. The frozen vegetables and fruit should be better plunged into the boiled water because at slow thawing vitamin C also becomes destroyed.

In viral and bacterial diseases, alongside with the basic medicinal therapy, doctors also prescribe without fail the preparations of vitamin C. Such an approach is conditioned by the fact that ascorbic acid increases the synthesis and activity of interferon with an antioxidant action. Vitamin C is in a way a physiological hyaluronidase inhibitor.

Hypervitaminosis C develops in the intensified consumption of the vitamin exceeding any norms. The overabundance of vitamin in the organism produces suppressing influence on insular apparatus of the pancreas and results in the damage to glomerular structures of kidneys that further leads to hypertonic reaction. In this connection any additional use of vitamin C as tablets of pharmaceutical manufacture should be carried out only after the doctor’s prescription in strictly designated doses.