Vitamin C

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Vitamin C

Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) is one of the most utilized vitamins worldwide. This popularity comes from its implication in the human body's health maintaining capability.

Vitamin C is an antioxidizer which is part of the free radicals fight and actively fights against braking the degenerative processes from our organism.

The Hungarian scientist Szent Gyorgyi Albert was the first one who managed to extract vitamin C from the green pepper and he got a Nobel prize for his achievement.
In the meantime other vitamin C sources have emerged: lemons, oranges, spinach, mango, tomatoes and others. The human body cannot synthesize its own vitamin C and that's why it must procure it from aliments and other sources.

More than that, vitamin C is eliminated from the human body within 2-3 hours and that is why it's important to have a constant level of vitamin C. Of course, we can ask ourselves: why is vitamin C so important?

As an answer, here are some important properties of vitamin C:

it is an important antioxidizer, taking part in the fight against free radicals
it helps the immune system, assuring the body's resistance against infections
it has a strong anti-cancer role
it helps increasing the articular liquid fluidity, making the organism more mobile
it helps slowing the aging process
it detoxifies the liver
it takes part of hormones synthesis

The lack of vitamin C

The symptoms of lack of vitamin C are:

fatigue
asthenia
weakness
depression
lack of apetite

An important vitamin C enemy is the tobacco, each cigarette smoked destroying 25-100 mg of vitamin C. There are also a lot of drugs that negatively influence the quantity of vitamin C from the organism.
Some of these are: the cough syrup, oral contraceptives, etc. Even the aspirin, when it is often used, triples the speed of vitamin C elimination. On the other hand, a vitamin A deficit can cause loss of vitamin C.

These are the reasons why a constant level of vitamin C is required. For achieving this, an additional quantity is necessary. The daily dose of vitamin C for an adult is 60mg.
There are some categories of persons that need a higher daily rate of vitamin C: