Three Important Biochemical Functions Of Vitamin C In The Human Body

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

When people were afraid of developing a flu or COVID, they tended to flock towards increasing their Vitamin C intake, because they saw Vitamin C as a sort of a miracle drug that apparently should boost their immune system and prevent them from getting infected.

When we go with that strategy, we are essentially placing our hopes on that 1000 mg pill (or more) for the day, where if we do consume it religiously, we can reduce our susceptibility miraculously down to zero.

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

It is not a miracle drug or cure, but it is necessary for us to have sufficient doses of it in our daily diets to ensure that various biochemical processes in our body can proceed smoothly.

There are at least three important areas that Vitamin C supports.

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.

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.

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.

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). It reduces the ROS and itself gets oxidized, hence the term “redox” (reduction-oxidation). It helps to balance out the ROS concentrations in the body, and hence we get the idea of a “redox balance” in the mix.

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.

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, the question that we don’t really ask ourselves - when we’re doing things right, then how sure are we that we’re actually doing anything at all?

Because we humans tend to be reactionary in nature, and only start to implement rectification measures when things start to go wrong. But are those rectification measures relevant for addressing the issues that crop up?

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! But yet Vitamin C is very necessary for supporting redox balances in our bodies.

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.

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.

As collagen does play a significant role in our bones, joints and skin, and our bodies do require Vitamin C as a cofactor for the synthesis of collagen proteins in our bodies, we’d have to come to the eventual conclusion that a lack of Vitamin C in our diets can affect the health of our bones, joints and skin significantly.

Thirdly, fat burning.

It is said in this article that:

Vitamin C is a cofactor in the biosynthesis of carnitine, a molecule required for the oxidation of fatty acids.

We need carnitine for the oxidation of fatty acids in our body, and low Vitamin C levels in the body may provide a hindrance to fat burning. Which could partially explain why some people find it that difficult to shed excess fats.

It could be a carnitine issue, or it could just be a lack in dietary Vitamin C.

Who knew?

However, given that approximately 15% of US adults are vitamin C deficient, could this deficiency be involved in the obesity issue (beyond all the ultra-processed foods that are found in the typical Western diet) too?

It’s complex, for sure!

We would also have to add to the mix the idea that our cells do have to generate more energy when we’re working out in the aim to burn fats, and in doing so are also able to generate more ROS that we’d have to neutralize in the process as well. It’s an interconnected complexity right here, and it’s just so much easier to throw in a simplistic blanket statement that Vitamin C can help burn fat and/or maintain the redox balance.

One thing we do know, however, is that we do need to have sufficient quantities of Vitamin C in our diets.

As I have been consistently emphasising here, holistic nutrition is never about what a single vitamin can do. The biochemistry in the body is simply too complex to think of isolating each organ or system within the body, even though many people attempt to do that for simplicity’s sake. It doesn’t work that way.

You’d see that my recommendations for supporting

Go way beyond just a single specific nutrient. Because of all that complexity, there are that many different areas to cover!

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