Aidan:
Hello and welcome back to the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. This is episode 29 and it will be the final week that I’m with my co-host Tyler Brooks before Leah returns next week. And today we’re going to be talking about vitamin C. So we’re going be doing a bit of a deep dive on everything vitamin C related and how can be beneficial and everything like that. I wouldn’t say I really know more about vitamin C than the average dietitian, but I would say Tyler knows more about vitamin C than the average dietitian. So it’s going to be mostly me just asking questions and following my interests basically and Tyler talking. So what did you want to start off with? Like what’s an interesting thing about vitamin C? Where are we starting with?
Tyler:
Ooh first of all, I’d say just a random interesting fact first up. Humans and some primates are one of the only animals that can’t make their own vitamin C. Most animals can make their own vitamin C, like your dog can make its own vitamin C. Humans can’t do that. We have to get it from diet.
Aidan:
Do you know why that’s the thing?
Tyler:
I did a little bit of reading to it. I think it was just some random branch of evolution way back in the day. There’s a few other random species that can’t make their own vitamin C, but most can. Humans are one of the few that can’t and whatever branch of evolution it was back in the day. We’ve evolved past that I think. Well, I would assume mostly because we do get it through diet pretty easily or pretty comfortably in most circumstances. So probably has something to do with it.
Aidan:
Yeah. So we get through diet pretty easily. As you said, we don’t make it. How long does it stay in our system after we eat it?
Tyler:
Sure. So vitamin C usually sticks around in the system for about 24 hours. It’s something we kind of need a relatively consistent intake of. So for example, if you were to supplement a dose or consume a dose through food, it will elevate the amount of vitamin C in your blood for, yeah, about 24 hours before we see it return back to baseline levels.
Aidan:
Yeah, for sure. So like then looking at in terms of like any applications, I suppose we need to keep that in mind, in terms of, this is jumping straight into the weeds, but like something that I find interesting is like the whole topic of vitamin C and exercise and stuff like that.
Tyler:
Sure.
Aidan:
Do we want to go there first or do we want to go? Let’s go background stuff first. Let’s come back to that. Like, let’s go through background stuff. Like what is important background stuff we need to know?
Tyler:
I think there’s a bit of important context before we jump straight to that. Largely around things like dosing and all those sorts of things. I guess so backing up a little bit, first of all, you’d probably think of vitamin C most commonly as something you’d use if you get sick to help with immune function and those sorts of things. That comes from this idea that some of the immune cells, neutrophils for example, that help fight bacteria and virus and infection and that sort of stuff, use a higher percentage of vitamin C compared to a lot of other cells in the body. These immune cells have even more vitamin C to work with. So if you have more of those resources to help fight the, you know, whatever pathogen or bacteria you’re fighting off, you’re potentially going to be able to do it more effectively.
Aidan:
So I’ve heard a common line, like so most people take it, I’d assume to prevent an aid recovery from sickness. I’ve heard a common line from lot of people in the nutrition world saying stuff like, it doesn’t seem to prevent the frequency of getting sick, but it does seem to help speed up recovery and a common line that’s chucked out there is by about half a day on average. Reading through a lot of stuff you’ve kind of written down in the notes and prep for this podcast, it’s obviously a lot more complex than that, but like expanding on that kind of topic.
Tyler:
So in terms of reducing, potentially reducing the duration of cold symptoms, the research is pretty mixed on this if you look at the overall amount of research. Some find a meaningful benefit, some don’t, some are kind of inconsistent. And we’ll get into a few problems with why this might be in a minute. But overall, if you do dose to the right amount, there’s some pretty good results with, you know, up to a 25% reduction potentially in cold and flu duration. Now, lot of that research comes from people who were taking it in advance, so prophylactically, so taking vitamin C daily, and then taking more vitamin C at the onset of cold and flu symptoms and they had a pretty good benefit or they showed potential benefit beyond just regular vitamin C supplementation when the cold starts.
So there might be additional benefit in making sure you have a good amount leading up to that. Then when you do get those cold and flu symptoms taking more again, and this could come back to, you know, just strengthening those immune cells and some of those active processes that are using up vitamin C in fighting off the cold and flu. And I think like if you’re looking at anywhere from, geez, even a 10% reduction in cold and flu or duration, that’s pretty meaningful. Like all you wanna do when you’re sick is get better. Like when you have a cold or a flu, man flu even in extreme cases, all you wanna do is get better. So if you can say your cold goes for four days and you get a 25% reduction, you know, you’re potentially sick for significantly less time than you would be otherwise. I’d say that’s probably worthwhile.
And there’s slightly higher magnitude of effect in children as well. So this could come down to parents. Like if you want your kid to get better faster pump some vitamin C into them potentially. And it could have that positive benefit of those, like your kids getting better quicker.
Aidan:
Yeah, and like out of interest, are there any other groups? Like I think I saw somewhere in there about athletes and stuff like that. Does it have more of a role in terms of athletes from that perspective?
Tyler:
Yeah, so in terms of like preventing the cold and flu, in general population, it doesn’t seem to prevent it. It doesn’t seem to prevent you getting sick much. In athlete population, it does. So there was a 50% roughly a 50% reduction of incidents of cold and flu in endurance athletes, for example, who were supplementing with vitamin C. We’ll touch on a little bit of how it kind of affects exercise a little bit later on. But yeah, there’s potentially more of a role that it plays with those higher level athletes or people exercising at a higher level than say the average person.
Aidan:
Yeah, super interesting for sure. Like, even something that like, we’ve kind of spoken a little bit like probiotics and stuff like that, that same kind of thinking like when they’re in overreaching phases, particularly endurance athletes as well, like, they’re so much more likely to get sick. And that seems to affect long term progress over long phases. Like there are some statistics out there, things from like the Olympics, like their data just tracking and being like, how much is this affecting people’s training blocks? How much is this affecting performance and actual events and stuff like that? And it’s like, if you get sick less frequently, your performance will actually be better eventually because of it.
Tyler:
Yeah, for sure. So you miss a week of training through being sick.
Aidan:
Yeah.
Tyler:
And then you’re training at 60, 70% capacity the next week because you’re still recovering a little bit, not 100%. You know that’s two weeks out of your calendar year if that happens, you know five times that year. You’re losing ten weeks a year of training like that’s a whole training block in some yeah, that’s gonna potentially have an effect if you’re looking at a long term phase like a yearly competition or a four yearly competition. Four years ten weeks a year you’re missing 40 weeks of training potentially through being sick if you reduce or prevent that that’s gonna be meaningful.
Aidan:
Yeah, and even just the random sports like it just breaks the rhythm like when training is going well and then you just break that rhythm like yeah, it’s a big difference friends what I guess I really want to talk about is I guess dosing so like let’s start with gold standard what is the typical dosage is let’s start there and that’s like then go a little bit more advanced from there so like recommended daily intakes those kind of things.
Tyler:
Sure. So the recommended daily intake in Australia is about 45 milligrams per day of vitamin C for men or women that’s for adults so inside of that individual needs are going to vary pretty significantly. So one of vitamin C’s main, I guess, roles in the body is to help prevent oxidation or help, you know, reduce inflammation. So we have these compounds in the body called reactive oxygen species. These are things that are basically unstable molecules. Vitamin C can help stabilise them by donating one of its chemical groups. Vitamin C basically helps reduce how much of these inflammatory compounds are floating around the body, essentially.
So based on your lifestyle, you will have more or less inflammation compared to somebody else. So for example, smoking increases the amount of inflammation you have in your body. Alcohol intake will increase that. Exercise will even increase that to some degree. So there are various natural and unnatural sources of inflammation. So vitamin C has a role in combatting these and the effects they have on overall inflammation in the body. So if you have more inflammation, potentially need more vitamin C.
The RDI is set at 45 milligrams per kilogram, sorry, 45 milligrams per day to prevent deficiency. So that’s what the RDIs are there for. So recommended daily intakes are done to prevent deficiency at a population level. They’re not there to optimise health and performance. So is it optimal to just be getting in the RDI, which you can probably do through fruits and vegetables? Probably not if you have enhanced needs or exercising high level or various lifestyle factors that are contributing.
Aidan:
Let’s add some context. There’s two things I want to consider. So one of them is like easy to get through fruits and vegetables. Like let’s put context right now. Like how easy is it? let’s go through some, Like how much in an orange like? I think it’s about 80. I don’t want to get this wrong. Maybe I’ll Google it. It’s like 80 milligrams or something like that.
Tyler:
I know that you can get typically the average sort of millimolar level of vitamin C in the blood is somewhere between 70 to 85 I think on average if you’ve got a diet rich in vegetables and fruits and those sorts of things so that will sit your plasma level at around 70 to 85 millimoles. And we’ll add some more context to that in a little bit when it comes to supplementation.
Aidan:
So an orange just cutting in so an orange is 70 milligrams on average obviously depends on the size so close enough and like people whenever I say that fact they’re like well capsicum’s got more than an orange. It’s got double the amount of something like it is like if the RDI is 45 milligrams and one orange has 70, like it is pretty comfortable to get through foods basically.
Tyler:
You’d think that, but I know you’re a fan of this, how many people get their recommended servings of fruits and vegetables per day.
Aidan:
Like the combination is like less than 6%, right?
Tyler:
Yeah. You know, even if you are getting that from one source, there is probably a fair few people that aren’t even getting to that. So again, the RDI is just to prevent deficiency. So again, you can have an orange and it’s going to prevent you getting scurvy or getting deficiency of vitamin C. But again, that’s potentially a fair margin away from what might be the optimal amount of vitamin C.
Aidan:
Yeah, I’ve got another just thought that I’ve always considered and I think we’re talking about it like the whole like scurvy thing. Say somebody goes carnivore. Why don’t they get scurvy?
Tyler:
There are very small amounts in certain meats of vitamin C. So you will get some in tissues. There’s not a lot because vitamin C is a water soluble vitamin. So it’s not really stored that much.
Aidan:
It won’t get anywhere near the 45 milligram mark though.
Tyler:
It won’t. I don’t know why.
Aidan:
So my understanding is is something to do with like with the amount of carbohydrates like something along like if you have a higher carbohydrate diet it seems like you need more vitamin C is the kind of thing that a lot of people talk about or maybe to get scurvy you’ve just got to go pretty pretty low like the difference between 45 milligrams and scurvy is quite significant. Yeah, it’s it’s a very hard rabbit hole because it’s kind of like the people in the carnival crew. They’re not exactly the most reliable source of information as well.
Tyler:
Yeah, no, I do. Yeah, I do know that’s the thing and I do know they say there are some traces in the foods they’re eating and eating meat and like liver, think, and things like that are more likely to be consumed on the carnivore diet as opposed to the regular diet.
Aidan:
Yeah, that addresses it.
Tyler:
But yeah, I didn’t know about carbohydrate increasing.
Aidan:
Yeah, it’s something I’ve seen a lot of people in that crowd kind of. There you go. Even that’s an interesting one though, because as we spoke about in the last one protein can be converted to glucose. So it’s not like you’ve got no glucose coming in, like you’re still getting glucose.
Tyler:
Yeah, for sure. Okay, so going back to what might be a more optimal amount of intake for vitamin C, we touched on RDI being 45 milligrams, the upper limit, which is set, you know, along with the RDI, as in upper limits, kind of like how much would be the most that is recommended to take or the, you know, a safe amount. Now the upper limit in Australia is set to 1000 milligrams per day. Keeping in mind the RDI is 45 milligrams per day. That’s already a big gap between the RDI.
Now, if we look at what vitamin C supplementation or intake does to those plasma levels, we touched on it before plasma levels, as in how much is sitting in your blood is somewhere between 70 to 85 millimoles. Now 200 milligrams of vitamin C is going to take your plasma levels up to 90 millimoles. So 1.25 grams as in a little bit more than the upper limit of intake will take your plasma levels from 90 up to 180 millimoles. So that’s a two-fold increase but you have to take more than two-fold the amount of vitamin C. Taking three grams of vitamin C orally will take your plasma levels up to 220 millimoles and that’s about the highest we see your blood levels of vitamin C get to from oral supplementation.
Now that’s 66 times the RDI that’s a huge huge increase in what is recommended to take daily and still a magnitude of three times the upper limit of intake. But that’s where we see a lot of the research show benefit in vitamin C supplementation is that these higher intakes and the intakes above the upper limit. So, you know the supplementation and how much you’re getting through diet is a completely different thing.
I’d say that’s important to consider when we look at the research because a lot of the research as I mentioned earlier shows mixed benefits. So that could come from how much did they use in the research? Did they use what would be the safe upper limit? Because we see benefits far beyond that. When we go above the upper limit, it could be, you know, did you only use X amount as opposed to a huge amount? You know, there’s various things that go along with vitamin C timing as we talked about earlier. You return to baseline levels after 24 hours. That means that 12 hours, you’ve got half the amount. So some studies will dose multiple times. Some will dose every four hours. So there is so much mixed methodology in the way these studies are done that probably is why you see such mixed results in whether it’s effective or not.
Aidan:
Yeah. So I’m curious because I know you take high dose vitamin C. Do you take it multiple times a day for this reason?
Tyler:
I do, especially when I’m sick. If I feel like I’ve got a cold or a flu coming on, I’m doing three grams every four hours. And I know that’s maintaining my absolute maximal plasma concentration of vitamin C. And anecdotally for me, it’s fine. It works great. Like I tend to be pretty resilient. I rarely get, I supplement vitamin C daily, but I really get sick when I absolutely stacked vitamin C in there. I figure if I’m gonna increase my plasma levels of vitamin C and I’m trying to fight off an illness or a sickness, I can increase it to the maximal level. I don’t intend to go to half measures, but that’s just me. It’s something I really ever recommend to my clients in terms of that amount, but personally I find it works well for me.
Aidan:
Yeah, for sure. Really pushing that threshold there. And I guess that begs the question, if you’re comfortable doing that, why would any thoughts on why the upper limit would be set at one gram?
Tyler:
Yeah, I think what you see is like potential GI upset and things like that. You do see potential like diarrhoea, those sorts of things if you do do a very high dose, supposedly. I’ve never experienced it. But like I say, I’m going from when I get sick and I dose a high amount, I’m going from like a normal daily dose anyway. If you were to not have any in the diet and you’ve got a very low level and you’re not used to consuming it and all of a sudden you dump three grams in there, you may have an issue but realistically, I think that’s where it comes from.
And again, it says in those upper limits, if you have a look on the government websites that sort of thing. It says it’s not possible to establish an upper limit for vitamin C, but 1000 milligrams per day is a prudent limit. That doesn’t really mean anything. There’s no research showing like don’t take more than that. It’s dangerous to take more. Yeah, so I think it just comes from the GI upset potentially.
Aidan:
For sure. So the next two things that I want to talk through is sport and exercise and maybe even cancer out of those two, which would you start off with?
Tyler:
Maybe just cancer because, we’ll just talk briefly on it. Like I haven’t gone a huge fire down that rapidly. But the research in cancer comes, well, is largely done at any extremely high dose, much more than you can achieve orally. So orally, like I mentioned, the maximum amount you can take is about three grams. Any more than that doesn’t do anything in terms of further increasing your plasma levels. There is cases out there where people have been given 40 grams through intravenous vitamins. That’s a huge amount. So we’re talking about three grams being 66 times the RDI. There’s 40 grams doses being pumped into people intravenously.
I believe mechanistically when vitamin C is reduced or when it donates its hydroxyl groups, it has a structure somewhat similar to glucose and it starts to interrupt glucose uptake into cancer cells. The cancer cells need obviously the glucose to replicate and survive and I believe it has some sort of, well that’s a proposed mechanism with it helping it with the management of cancer and chemotherapy and things like that. As well as those sort of anti-inflammatory roles that vitamin C has. So I think that’s the mechanism. Do you have much more to add to that?
Aidan:
Yeah, it’s an interesting one. Like one caveat that I’m going to give onto this is that it is a very mixed area in the actual research in terms of outcomes and stuff like that. Even like I was looking at stuff before that, like obviously like I’ve looked at this for years as well. It’s an obvious, it’s an interesting topic. But like I haven’t gone super, super deep down the rabbit hole because most people seem to be at one extreme or the other. Like there’s a lot of people at one extreme who’s like quite literally vitamin C, very significant thing that’s really gonna help with cancer management in high doses, IV, all these kind of things.
At the other end of the spectrum, there is also smart people who are like, no, we think vitamin C is actually detrimental to cancer. There are people who are saying lines like, seems to protect all the cells in the body from chemotherapy, including cancer cells, which therefore means chemotherapy suddenly becomes less effective and so on and so forth. And you have to go on for longer, et cetera, to get the same results Maybe the answer is in the middle. Maybe there’s a bit of both being true or whatever. I just want to add that caveat being like I’m not out here telling people, do this.
Basically, like I think you if you’re going through that process, you want to have people around you who you definitely trust to it is their job to know the answer to that question basically.
Tyler:
For sure. that and else we just like to look at the research a little bit and talk through some of these things. Yeah, out of professional curiosity.
Aidan:
Yeah, because that is mostly what it is for me. Like I haven’t had a cancer patient and I don’t even know how long it’s been. It’s been a long time since I’ve had one. So I haven’t had to go deep down that rubber hole. But it is an interesting thing. And I think it’s something that should be on people’s radar and be aware of for sure.
Tyler:
And yeah, that mechanism of taking it intravenously is like so next level. And I do like the idea of like, the science behind that’s kind of cool. It’s like, how much nutrients can we pump into the body and is it gonna do anything? Like I don’t mind taking things to extremes. I think it’s kind of cool.
Aidan:
Yeah, I think it’s fascinating. And like, I think people need to be looking at those areas as well. Very Joe Rogan-esque as well. like, pretty sure when he got coveted, he IV vitamin C, I’m pretty sure. Yeah. So in terms of exercise, I’m gonna put some background on this before we go deeper in this. So basically up until about two or three years ago in the evidence-based lifting community, there’s a big thing where everyone was like, don’t take high dose vitamin C around the time of lifting because it’s going to blunt your hypertrophy for the adaptations. And the logic basically came from thinking it through in terms of when we lift, we’re doing muscle damage and we’re causing some inflammation and all of these things that we often think of as negatives. But arguably that’s part of what stimulates the adaptation which then leads to muscle growth.
That is what prompts your body to try and recover and grow stronger. And the argument was if we blunt some of these things, it blunts the adaptation. And a lot of people were then also looking at the information or the studies that have been done on endurance athletes and it seemed to be like it was leaning in favour of if you have high dose antioxidants around the time of endurance training, you get less sore because there’s less oxidative damage, but those adaptations didn’t seem to be as strong. In the lifting world, because somebody, Eric Trexler, did a systematic review on this topic and meta analysis and came to the conclusion that there’s like almost no research on lifters on this and like his stance after doing a systematic review is it doesn’t seem to matter. But his other sense was he’s like, I just don’t see much benefit in it either. So it’s like, if you want to be cautious, have it separate from that. But there’s a few things to cover in that because it’s like, what are your thoughts on that in terms of one, because as you said, how long it’s in the system for is there some dosing protocols if you were concerned about that? But then two, should you be concerned about it at all? And if you’re not concerned about it, we don’t know it seems to decrease delayed onset muscle soreness, which is an advantage as well.
Tyler:
Yeah, for sure. That’s really good. I don’t know, really cool path to walk down and I like this one. So, yes, as Aidan mentioned, yeah, as you mentioned, you do produce some of these reactive oxygen species or these inflammatory compounds when you exercise. Now, the body uses those for signalling. It’s almost like, hey, we’ve done this to the body. This is a signalling thing that tells the body address this, get better at it or improve so that next time we do this, you know, we can handle it better. So I think a lot of the research in endurance athletes shows like a potentially reduced VO2 max or at least less of an increase or an improvement in VO2 max with training. So it can potentially blunt some of those, you know, those mitochondrial adaptations you do to be able to produce energy like through oxidative metabolism and things like that. So,
I guess what I’m getting at there is it might potentially reduce some of those training benefits. From my understanding of the research, it was from high dose antioxidants, not just vitamin C. There was vitamin E, I believe, used in conjunction with vitamin C. So I don’t think the research is as strong if it’s just vitamin C. So that’s one consideration.
The other thing like you mentioned is it does reduce doms So that might be worth it like if you can find a good balance between reducing doms training more. You’re potentially gonna get some other training adaptations outside of just vo2 max when we look at lifters who cares about VO2 max for lifters. Yeah, we don’t need cardio. So I don’t personally see it as being a problem, but it is something we’re thinking about in terms of timing so why take the risk? Why would you take it just before exercise if it is potentially gonna blunt your adaptations to those? So let’s take it in the morning if we’re training in the afternoon. If we’re training in the evening, take it, I don’t know, a couple of hours later before bed or something along those lines.
So apart from that though, there is one good reason to take it just before training and that’s to promote collagen synthesis if we are using a collagen loading protocol. So you know, got to weigh all these benefits. It’s like one, do I want to reduce doms? Cool, that could be worthwhile to me. Like two, do I care about VO2 max or if that’s affected, which is mainly what the research shows it you know, affecting, not really for us. So, you know, it might not really be a concern. And then I guess the third is, do we want to try and prioritise things like your tendon and ligament repair through a collagen priming protocol? Because if we do, we know that we need to time collagen and vitamin C appropriately. And that’s within a pretty close timeframe of when you’re going out to exercise.
Aidan:
Yeah, I completely agree with that. And that’s also my stance on it. take the collagen stuff out of it, start off with if I have a lifter who wants to take it, I’ll usually just put it separately in the day, like a separate thing, not close to the time of lifting. Obviously, as you mentioned, they have a high dose that’s in their system for 24 hours or whatever. They’ll still have some in their system, but it is a bit of damage mitigation if there is any at all. It’s going to sound real bro sciency, but like there’s a lot of high level bodybuilders who have high dose vitamin C around the time of lifting and they still make gains. So like, it’s not a powerful effect.
If it is a real effect, it’s probably not a big deal. And then based on that kind of stance of like, maybe it’s a concern, maybe it’s not, but even if it is, it’s not a big deal. That’s where I come into the collagen where it’s like, well, if I’ve got conviction about this whole collagen thing, where like taking collagen pre-workout alongside vitamin C and then having that help with collagen in our body, for example, tendons, ligaments, et cetera.
If that is a thing that is going to work, the effect of that is gonna be relatively significant versus the potential small detrimental effects of this. So it’s kinda like it outweighs that basically.
Tyler:
Sure, magnitude of effect.
Aidan:
Yeah, 100%.
Tyler:
And then we look at, as we did touch on it just before, but 50% reduced incidence of like cold and flu for athletes or exercising populations. So that’s potentially worth taking it for as well. Like what’s gonna be more meaningful? Will you get a very small, if any, reduced training adaptation from any one training session? Or are you gonna get sick for a week and what kind of training adaptation effects is that gonna have? So I think that’s worth taking into consideration as well. Personally, I’m a big believer and I’ll take it every day.
Aidan:
The last thing I want to wrap on is like the whole criticism that a lot of people have of vitamin C. They talk about being a water soluble vitamin when you have too much you just pee it out. What is like you’ve touched on this and if people read between the lines they’ll kind of like understand already but you talked about the whole increasing plasma levels as the vitamin C increases right?
Tyler:
Yeah so I hate this argument like you’re taking multivitamins all you’re doing is making expensive urine. I think that is a fundamental misunderstanding of how a lot of nutrients are used by the body, how many roles that they do have in the body, and how uptake of those nutrients works. So vitamin C, for example, there are transporters in your small intestine, which transport the vitamin C from your intestinal cavities into your bloodstream across the other side of that barrier. They can become saturated, can maximally, you can basically max those out. So you can’t kind of get any more vitamin C in any faster.
So that’s kind of like a, it’s almost like an exponential curve of how much you will absorb based on how much is in there. So if you take a small amount of vitamin C, like we saw 200 milligrams is gonna take your plasma levels up to somewhere around 90. To get double that, you need to take six times the amount of vitamin C. So that means you’re proportionally not absorbing nearly as much as you were at the smaller dose. To then get a maximal plasma of 220, it’s only an extra 40 millimole, but you have to take nearly three times the amount again to get that last 40 millimole in there. So yes, you are peeing more out. You aren’t absorbing that all but you’re still not reaching the maximum amount that you can take up.
So if you do want to reach those maximum amounts, you’ve got to supplement and sure you’re going to pee some out. But that’s the only way you can get up to those higher amounts. The analogy I like to give that’s kind of it kind of fits, but like if you think about protein, when we take in a high amount of protein, we do increase the amount of nitrogen we pee out, which is from metabolising the protein. You never hear anyone saying, all you’re doing by eating more protein is making expensive pee. No, we increase protein above the RDI because we have a specific kind of goal that we want with that protein. We want to build muscle tissue. We want to recover from training.
In the same way that I like to think about taking vitamins, like we’re increasing them with a specific reason and increasing them and that’s to optimise performance. Let’s take more and not just get by on the minimum. That’s kind of my perspective on it. It’s just like a pet hate of mine when people like all you’re doing is creating expensive you’re right. That’s like, okay Well, I don’t think you understand quite how this works.
Aidan:
Yeah, it’s just a bit of nuance like there’s a lot black and white thinkers out there But like it can be both it can be diminishing returns. Without being no this is the line and once you get there once you go above the RDI There’s no additional benefit like it can be both like they can be diminishing returns. Yeah, you still get additional benefit.
Tyler:
For sure It’s like okay. I’m taking my millimolar concentration my blood from 180 to 220. What’s that last 40 giving me? Yeah the first 180 didn’t, is it worth taking 66 times the ideal vitamin C? Might not be for you. So yeah, it’s not a blanket recommendation by any means that everybody needs to max out their vitamin and mineral uptake, but yeah, I do think there is nuances to that for sure.
Aidan:
Well, we’ll wrap things up there. This has been episode 29 of the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. Hopefully you enjoyed this deep dive on vitamin C and hopefully some of you found it interesting.