HARNESSING NATURE’S SHIELD: A HOLISTIC GUIDE TO VITAMIN C AND IMMUNITY
Hello Health Champions today I'm going to talk about how incredibly important it is to have a strong immune system in case you cross paths with the virus and we want to talk about the role of vitamin C in supporting that immune system then we're going to talk about what vitamin C actually is and what the top 10 foods are where you can get it—coming right up.
Hey I'm dr. Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don't miss anything
Immunity
One thing they're noticing is that there seems to be a slow phase lasting about one week, followed by another week where it progresses slowly.
Then either the person gets better and recovers or the patient quickly gets worse and it turns into an emergency or a crisis.
Someone described it as if it takes one week for the body to figure out if it's gonna beat this thing or not—if it wins, you recover; if it fails, then you go to the hospital and become a critical case.
The difference between those two scenarios is how strong your body is—how strong your immune system is.
KEY FACTORS AFFECTING IMMUNITY
let's talk about a few key factors with immunity. One of them is stress because the more stress you have the more your immune system shuts down.
Probably everyone can relate to being more likely to get a cold or flu if they're stressed or in a high state of stress—and the same thing holds true for the coronavirus.
Sugar is one of the worst things that you can eat because it wreaks havoc with virtually every function in your body, including your immune system.
What they're finding now with the corona virus is that people with insulin resistance—a hugely complicating factor (meaning diabetes, high blood pressure, or cardiovascular disease)—have death rates many times higher.
Degeneration is another factor and that's why the elderly are having such a hard time: the longer you live, the more you degenerate, to some degree (there are exceptions).
Then it's your overall nutritional status, which is something you build over time, but you can also have some immediate deficiencies.
Two of the most important ones are vitamin D and vitamin C.
VITAMIN C: FUNCTIONS AND RESEARCH
so in this article we're gonna focus on vitamin C and talk about what it really is, what it does, and where to get it.
The research on vitamin C is a bit conflicting: some people say it does all these wonderful things, but then there are other studies that say,
"Well, we studied the symptoms but we didn't find any benefit whatsoever."
We're not really interested in symptoms—we're interested in the effects on the immune system. Those are pretty well documented: it is an immune activator.
It initiates the activity of antibodies and also the white blood cells—your B lymphocytes, T cells, killer T cells, and your WBC's, which are your immune cells that your body makes so they can go out and gobble up foreign invaders like virus and bacteria.
Vitamin C also improves the function of interferon, which is an incredibly powerful immune chemical, and there is an herb called echinacea that only really works together with vitamin C.
When it does, it has been shown to have pretty strong immune-boosting benefits.
These are just some of the effects but we don't want to get too much into the details—we want to talk more about what vitamin C is and where to get it
VITAMIN C DEFICIENCY AND OPTIMAL INTAKE
it's widely believed that we don't really have vitamin C deficiencies anymore. Most doctors will say that vitamin C deficiency doesn't really exist and that's because scurvy is really rare.
They think a vitamin C deficiency only exists as scurvy; if you don't have scurvy, you're not vitamin C deficient. Well, scurvy is an extreme deficiency—that's when you have so little you can't keep up with even the basic manufacture of collagen, and collagen is a structural protein.
If you don't make enough of it, then you can't create the connective tissue in the body, and one of the first places to suffer is your gums.
So after a few months of scurvy, your teeth start falling out and you begin having internal bleeding and so forth. It's a terrible thing.
There are different degrees of vitamin C deficiency, and in my opinion, when you have lesser degrees of collagen weakness—such as micro vessel disease and spider veins—I believe those are signs of a milder form of vitamin C deficiency.
Severe deficiency, leading to scurvy, is defined as less than 46 milligrams of vitamin C or ascorbic acid per day, and we're going to talk about the difference since they're not really the same thing even though they're defined as the same thing.
A mild deficiency would be somewhere between 46 and 60 milligrams because the previous recommendation for vitamin C daily intake was set at 60 milligrams. Recently they've raised it to about 75 milligrams for women and 90 milligrams for men, which is what we today consider a sufficiency.
But we're not really only interested in sufficiency—we want to look at what might be optimal because during times of stress and infection your body requires more.
So let's just kind of double it and say that optimal is probably somewhere between 150 to 200, especially when your body has an increased need.
VITAMIN C COMPLEX VS. ASCORBIC ACID
but when they make those recommendations for vitamin C—the RDA, the recommended daily allowance—and they say it should be 75 to 90 milligrams, what exactly are they recommending? Is it 90 milligrams of vitamin C or 90 milligrams of ascorbic acid? I know that you did your research, you looked it up, and the dictionary says they're the same thing.
Well, we're going to take it a little bit further and show you that they're not the same thing, and this is a huge part of the problem and the confusion.
Vitamin C does have ascorbic acid, but it is not just ascorbic acid. Vitamin C is a complex—it's a functional unit that consists of several different components. It has something called a score Bachan and bioflavonoid complexes, and they have multiple coordinating roles in the overall function and coordination of the vitamin C complex.
Then we have something called tyrosinase, which is an enzyme and a form of organic copper.
It has the role of trace mineral activator and is the thing that actually stimulates and makes the white blood cells get going—that is the immune system portion of this.
Then we have something called p factors, k factors, and j factors. The p factors (also known as Rutten) are responsible for vessel strength and collagen formation; the k factors are involved in the clotting mechanism of the blood; and the j factors enhance the ability of the red blood cells to carry oxygen.
All of these are vitally important, and they all have different roles—they are what gives vitamin C the ability to promote, enhance, and support the immune system.
THE ROLE OF ASCORBIC ACID
so what about ascorbic acid? Ascorbic acid is sort of like the packaging—it is an antioxidant and antioxidants are preservatives.
That's why ascorbic acid is often added to food as a safe preservative; it keeps vegetables from turning brown, for example, and it's the wrapper that packages and protects the vitamin C complex.
It's a good thing and it needs to be there and it plays a part in the overall function of the complex, but ascorbic acid is not vitamin C and ascorbic acid by itself does not provide these functions that we talked about.
So a vitamin complex is a functional machine—if you want to call it that, we can think of it as a biochemical machine, much like a clock is a mechanical machine.
If you open up an old clock and you look in the back and see that it has all these different moving parts, it doesn't take a genius to understand that all those parts work together.
It would make absolutely no sense to open up that clock and look and ask yourself, "I wonder which part tells time?" It's not one part that provides the function—it's the pieces together.
So just like one part can't tell time, one piece of the vitamin C complex can't do all the things that vitamin C is supposed to do.
They're all important, including the ascorbic acid, but it's the biochemical machine—the complex—that does the work together.
MEGA DOSES OF ASCORBIC ACID AND THEIR EFFECTS
so oftentimes when we hear about the therapeutic benefits of vitamin C or ascorbic acid, they're talking about mega doses—five, ten, or twenty thousand milligrams of ascorbic acid—and what does that do? Well, it is an antioxidant, so it's kind of like a safe drug.
In large doses, it's potent enough to have drug-like effects; it can come in like a bulldozer and shift physiology, squashing some of the body's own functions. In that sense, it's a short-term drug and it's safer than most drugs because it doesn't have a lot of toxic effects short-term. However, long-term it creates more imbalance—it creates more problems than it helps with.
The reason is that ascorbic acid is a synthetic isolate; it's made primarily from corn starch or sugar, and it doesn't have all these different pieces.
So when you put a lot of ascorbic acid in, it's going to go into the body and start combining with the amount of the other components that your body already has.
What that does is if you have a little bit of something and then you add a ton of something, the ton of something is going to start pulling the smaller resources from the body and you're creating a bigger imbalance.
VITAMIN C FROM WHOLE FOODS
now when you get it from food, that's a different story because now you're always getting the whole complex—the natural packaging that always comes with it.
That's the beauty of it. But we want to keep in mind that when they measure it, they give us the number based on how much ascorbic acid is in that food.
In reality, the vitamin C activity—the amount of vitamin C complex activity that you're getting—may be ten times as much as what it looks like on paper based on how much ascorbic acid it contains.
I don't know the exact number, but based on my experience, whole food complex vitamin C goes a lot further and we probably don't even need as much as the recommended daily allowance if you get the real thing.
However, in times of infection and stress, it never hurts to have a little extra.
DISQUALIFIED VITAMIN C SOURCES AND FOCUS ON STAPLES
the top five sources of whole food vitamin C are actually disqualified—and why do you ask? Because these foods, the Kakadu plums, acerola cherries, rose hips, chili peppers, and parsley, are either not available in a lot of places or you're kind of limited in how much you can eat.
I've never seen Kakadu plums, acerola cherries, or rose hips in my local grocery store or farmers market, and you can't eat a whole lot of chili peppers.
I love parsley, but even if I make some tabbouleh, I'll end up eating only about half an ounce (15–20 grams) of parsley, so it doesn't go very far; it's not a bulk food. So if you have access to Kakadu plums or these things, then by all means eat them, but we're gonna focus on the staple foods that most people have access to every day.
TOP 10 WHOLE FOOD VITAMIN C SOURCES
here's our top 10 list: top of the list is bell pepper, red and yellow—it has 128 milligrams of whole food vitamin C per 100 grams of food. We're going to go through the whole list, but we're not just gonna talk about the top 10—we're going to talk about why I ranked them this way and we're also going to talk about the sugar content because we don't want to eat vitamin C—which is a good thing—and then load up on a bunch of sugar, which is a bad thing.
QUANTIFYING VITAMIN C INTAKE FROM TOP 10 SOURCES
guava—it's a tropical fruit, and it is very high: it's 228 milligrams of vitamin C per 100 grams of fruit.
broccoli has 89; Brussels sprouts have 85; cauliflower has 46; kale has 120 (and I'll talk about why they're not in order in a moment); cabbage has 37; strawberries have 59; then we have kiwi with 93 and orange with 53. These are absolutely awesome foods—at the top you can eat basically unlimited amounts and toward the bottom you want to limit it a little bit.
I know this is not a fair comparison because this is not how we eat in real life, but we're going to look at how much it would take to eat from each of these foods to get a very high 200 milligrams of vitamin C per day. For example, if you wanted to get your entire 200 milligrams from bell pepper (either red or yellow), you would have to eat 156 grams—that's about five to six ounces.
Can you do that? Absolutely—that's less than one bell pepper And by the way, green bell pepper would have been number two, but I didn't want to make a separate item because green bell pepper has a little less vitamin C and a little less sugar, so just eat a little bit of both.
For guava, you would have to eat only 88 grams—about three ounces. For broccoli, you would have to eat half a pound (224 grams); for Brussels sprouts, another half a pound; for cauliflower, you'd have to eat almost a pound (430 grams)—can it be done? Yeah, I mean it's pretty easy to eat cauliflower.
For kale, 167 grams is needed—not a big number, but 167 grams of kale is like probably four, five, or six salads' worth of kale. For cabbage, 540 grams—that's over a pound—that might be a little hard; for strawberries, 339 grams—that could be done; for kiwi, 216 grams; and for orange, 376 grams.
So at the top of the list, you could easily get all of your 200 milligrams from one food, and obviously you're not just gonna eat one food—you're gonna eat several different ones.
It just shows you that it wouldn't be too hard to get 200 milligrams or even more.
CARBOHYDRATE AND SUGAR CONSIDERATIONS
but now let's look at the downside, because if it has a lot of sugar then we don't want to eat too much of that food—first if you're insulin resistant and you're trying to reverse that, and also because sugar dampens your immune system and creates all kinds of problems in the body.
And these foods being non-starchy means that virtually all the carbs are in the form of sugar—meaning not necessarily sucrose by itself, but it's going to be pretty much even between glucose and fructose in the end. So you can get your whole daily 200 milligrams from bell peppers and only eat 6 grams of carbs, which would easily fit into even a ketogenic diet.
With guava, it's a sweet fruit but you only eat a little bit—so 7.8 grams of carbs. Broccoli would give you 9 grams; Brussels sprouts 12.2 grams; cauliflower 12.9 grams; kale 8.7 grams. So again, in my opinion, kale isn't in third or fourth place simply because it's tough to eat that much kale. Number seven, cabbage would give you 18 grams; strawberries 16.9 grams; kiwi 25.9 grams; and if you eat about four oranges, it gives you 33.8 grams of sugar.
Most of these are going to be okay even on a low-carb diet, but once you get into the fruits, that sugar is going to spike much faster—because in vegetables there's a lot of fiber to buffer the blood sugar uptake, but with fruits, the sugar goes into the bloodstream quickly.
So even though all of these foods would be okay, in my opinion I would focus on the top half and try to get most of the bulk from there, and then have the bottom half as snacks to be eaten more sparingly.
VITAMIN C TO CARB RATIO INDEX
so just for fun I created a little index—basically this divided how many milligrams of vitamin C you get per gram of carbs, so how much good you get with a bad. And the bad isn't too terribly bad unless you're insulin resistant.
So if you're insulin sensitive and healthy, then you don't have to worry about eating a couple of fruits every day.
Based on that index, the top food would be red or yellow bell peppers with 32 milligrams of vitamin C per gram of carbs (or sugar in that food), closely followed by guava at 25.7, broccoli at 22.3, Brussels sprouts at 16.3, cauliflower at 15.5, and kale at 23.1. So if you really, really love kale—if you're able to eat half of one of those huge packages every day—then you can move it up to third place on your list. This is just my opinion. Next comes cabbage at 11.1, strawberries at 11.8, kiwi at 7.7, and an orange at 5.9.
GENERAL PUBLIC HEALTH RECOMMENDATIONS
so when it comes to coronavirus it is a nasty critter. I'm not trying to say that there's a quick fix where you can just eat a bunch of vitamin C and you'll be okay, but it's one component that can support your body.
You still want to do all of the usual things that they tell you—these are super, super important.
Follow all of the guidelines from the CDC and the World Health Organization and the authorities because we have to contain this thing, and the key is to not spread it. So make sure you wash your hands and don't touch your face.
Start putting some ink on your hands maybe and see where it ends up on your face.
Do as best you can to stay at home unless you just have to go out, and make a habit of social distancing: avoid big crowds, avoid social gatherings, and don't meet more people than you have to.
ADDITIONAL LIFESTYLE RECOMMENDATIONS
so those are all the things that are part of the general recommendations—and absolutely do those—but then do a few more things that no one talks about.
Cut the sugar; that's the number one thing. If you have ever thought about cutting sugar and needed a reason, then this is the reason: do it now.
And if you have some extra time on your hands, pick up an uplifting book, find an uplifting tape, or a message or a program of some sort, because feeling worried or bad diminishes your immune system—it weakens your body's ability to defend itself.
When you start feeling a little better, your immune system strengthens. Also, go for a walk both to get some fresh air and some circulation and to get your mind off of things.
Just don't walk where there's a lot of crowds; go for a walk in the woods or on a trail somewhere, practice some relaxation, do some meditation and some yoga and some breathing exercises.
Finally, realize that the best thing that you can do—apart from not getting it and not spreading it—is to build your immunity over time, and that's what every video on this channel is about.
It's about holistic health, it's about understanding how the body works, it's about building immunity and building stamina and building vitality—and that's what immunity is.
REMARKS
if you enjoyed this article make sure you check out that one. Thank you so much for reading and I'll see you in the next article.