Three Important Biochemical Functions Of Vitamin C In The Human Body

And why people tend to flock towards it for "immunity" purposes.

When it comes to flu season or COVID season, people tend to flock to Vitamin C as this sort of a miracle drug that apparently boosts their immunity. All in the hopes that their susceptibility to an infection would miraculously be reduced to zero after they consume that 1000 mg pill (or more) for the day.

Now, there’s no patent untruth in that. Vitamin C does support a healthy functioning immune system.

Firstly, redox balancing.

Many biochemical processes in our body rely on the transfer of electrons to function. The energy generation process in our body, for instance, requires the transfer of electrons into molecular oxygen, which converts it into water.

We can never expect processes to operate at 100% perfection, though.

As such, electrons may leak out from the mitochondria in our cells and cause damage to the cell or even to the cellular DNA.

Oxidative Stress Is An Electrochemical Concept That Focuses On An Inappropriate Rate Of Electron Transfer.

While our cells do contain endogenous (within the cell) antioxidants such as glutathione, having exogenous (outside of the cell) antioxidants such as Vitamin C may be beneficial in protecting the body from further oxidative damage that loose electrons can cause.

As such, Vitamin C is a good defensive agent for protecting against oxidative damage (coming from varied sources such as air pollution, smoking, or even ultraviolet irradiation).

Simply because oxidative damage comes from loose or unpaired electrons that we can see in the reactive oxygen species (ROS) that are formed from an incomplete electron transfer, which are also termed as “free radicals” in commonspeak.

What else can cause oxidative damage, though?

We can see that a viral infection brings about with it a spike in ROS release. Calming that ROS release rate down is necessary because we don’t want overshoots. Overshoots that can turn on the pro-inflammatory nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB) signalling pathway are of extreme concern.

Because when the overshoot in ROS triggers the NF-κB in the cell to produce more pro-inflammatory cytokines, then we’re at risk of seeing a cytokine storm developing, no?

As such, we shouldn’t be relying on Vitamin C as a “miracle saviour”. We ought to have enough of it in our daily diets.

The problem is, of course… when we’re doing things right, then how sure are we that we’re actually doing anything at all?

We humans tend to be reactionary in nature, and only start to implement rectification measures when things start to go wrong.

Providing sufficient proactive maintenance to prevent things from going wrong is ho-hum because we don’t feel like we’re doing anything at all, and that’s the danger.

We can’t rely on any singular vitamin to be a miracle cure — we need to be consistently taking in enough of a varied range of vitamins in our daily diet!

Secondly, collagen synthesis.

Collagen is a structural protein that is found in many areas of our body, such as our bones, our joints and our skin. As it is said in this article:

Vitamin C has an essential role in connective tissue healing, being a cofactor for prolyl hydroxylase and lysyl hydroxylase. These enzymes catalyze the hydroxylation of proline and lysine residues of procollagen, promoting the proper folding of the stable collagen triple-helix conformation.

Vitamin C is a necessary cofactor that signals enzymes to perform hydroxylation reactions on the proline and lysine amino acid residues in a collagen protein structure, such that the collagen protein can fold into a stable conformation that provides the necessary structural support for our joints, bones or skin.

The Biochemistry Behind Collagen Synthesis In The Human Body

We can therefore see that Vitamin C plays multiple roles with regards to skin health. It provides antioxidant capabilities to reduce the activity of wayward electrons triggered by ultraviolet light exposure, and it also regulates the synthesis of collagen proteins that are necessary for supporting skin structure. Because if we have good collagen support for our skin, it’s less likely that we’ll see wrinkles appearing on our face.

The Biochemistry Behind The Aging Process

Thirdly, fat burning.