Landmark paper triggers launch of international vitamin C campaign.
Website: Alliance for Natural Health International.
By Rob Verkerk PhD, founder, executive and scientific director
If you’re a human, gorilla, chimp, fruit bat or guinea pig (among the few species that have lost the ability to make vitamin C within the body), you live in the northern hemisphere, and you’re not taking vitamin C more than once a day, you’re likely to be putting yourself at unnecessary risk from respiratory infections.
If you’re older, or you suffer from underlying conditions such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes or obesity, these could be life threatening. Covid-19 is but one virus, of over 200, known to infect the human airway and cause respiratory diseases.
Not only can we not make our own vitamin C, we also don’t get anything like enough from our diet. More than that, our vitamin C requirement increases 10 times or more when our immune system is challenged by infection.
But there’s more still. There’s mounting research on the importance of high dose vitamin C as an adjunct therapy for those seriously ill with covid disease – and, those who suffer the worse impacts from the disease, have very low vitamin C status. Their circulating levels of vitamin C are so low – they’re likely to be firmly within the levels that cause the vitamin C deficiency disease, scurvy. Yes, scurvy may be a historic disease, but it’s very much with us in this modern world in which the vitamin C content of our industrialised food supply is so low that, for most of us, our only option is now to take vitamin C as a supplement. Or if we get really sick, have it administered intravenously by forward-thinking medics.
