Don’t ignore Vitamin C

Low-carbers argue that eating less carbohydrate results in needing less vitamin C. This is because glucose competes with Vitamin C for access to the same metabolic pathways in the body, which is true.

So if your carbohydrate intake is high, you will have to increase your intake of vitamin C containing foods or natural supplements to get enough vitamin C to overcome the high blood sugar. It’s only when eating the so called standard American diet which is high in carbohydrates and grain consumption that vitamin C needs are higher. Lowering your carb intake lowers the need to supplement with Vitamin C.

Where history comes into play is that animals are able to make vitamin C. In fact, we’re one of the only mammals that can’t. Unfortunately, we lost that ability a few million years ago.  This means that we need to get 100% of the Vitamin C our bodies need from our diets. 

Most animals are able to synthesize a significant amount of the vitamin on their own, while humans are deprived of this capability due to a series of mutations of the key gene in the vitamin C biosynthesis.  Probably from one of natures few mistakes. This actually led to issues as we will see further down as lack of vitamin-c leads to issues of the artery wall integrity. As a result of lack of vitamin-c during certain periods of the year there was a mutation created which led to apo(a) and lp(a) to protect us from excess bleeding by forming clots.

Animals synthesize it from glucose, in four steps. Humans have retained the first three steps but lack the fourth. We lost this fourth step about forty million years ago. Perhaps because we learned to re-cycle vitamin C within our red blood cells, so we need far less of it. This is called ‘electron transfer hypothesis.’ If making Vitamin C uses up resources that we need for other thing, just eat it, there is plenty about.