Vitamin C is probably the most famous of the vitamins. It gets a lot of good press for its role in wound healing, bolstering the immune system and as a powerful antioxidant. Why is it the most popular vitamin? My guess is that when mankind entered its seafaring years, vitamin C was used to stave off scurvy. Sailors would be stuck at sea, subsisting mainly on salted meats and bread. Scurvy is pretty terrifying nutritional deficiency caused by a lack of vitamin C, so ships started carrying stores of fruits and/or vegetables. And although they didn’t know what vitamin C was until the 20th century, many pre-historical cultures figured out that fruits and veggies were the key to ridding the scurvy scourge although they didn’t understand why the plants worked. When they found out that it was vitamin C that was clearing up all that scurvy, the vitamin won the hearts and minds of people everywhere. This is why vitamin C is the golden boy of vitamins. Or at least, that’s my theory.
Today, people are still discovering the full value of vitamin C. This month, a study out of Denmark published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition has linked vitamin C to a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease and a reduced risk of an early death. Researchers looked at the fruit-and-veggie-eating habits and DNA of over 100,000 Danish people and determined that those folks who ate the most fruits and vegetables reduced their risk of cardiovascular disease by fifteen percent and and their risk of an early death by twenty percent. The researchers believe that these health benefits come from the fruit-and-vegetable-sourced vitamin C concentrations they saw in the subjects’ blood.
“We know that fruit and vegetables are healthy, but now our research is pinpointing more precisely why this is so. Eating a lot of fruit and vegetables is a natural way of increasing vitamin C blood levels, which in the long term may contribute to reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease and early death. You can get vitamin C supplements, but it is a good idea to get your vitamin C by eating a healthy diet, which will at the same time help you to develop a healthier lifestyle in the long term, for the general benefit of your health,” says Boerge Nordestgaard, a clinical professor at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen, and a consultant at Herlev and Gentofte Hospital.
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