#054 Vitamin C: Oral vs. Intravenous, Immune Effects, Cancer, Exercise Adaptation & More
FoundMyFitness
Rhonda Patrick, Ph.D.
4.8 • 5.5K Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2020
⏱️ 79 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, Dr. Rhonda Patrick discusses all things vitamin C. This episode covers oral bioavailability, intravenous vitamin C bioavailability, immune cell function, common cold and other viral infections, lung function, sepsis, pneumonia, inflammation, intravenous vitamin C and cancer, role in exercise, safety concerns, and so, so much more!
In this episode, you'll discover:
- 00:00:00 - Introduction
- 00:07:33 - Background on vitamin C, an antioxidant and immune booster
- 00:17:09 - Bioavailability of vitamin C and dose frequency
- 00:22:53 - Vitamin C in the context of the common cold
- 00:28:09 - Vitamin C improves lung function and immunity
- 00:35:54 - Vitamin C and exercise - does it blunt exercise adaptation?
- 00:45:51 - Vitamin C and fatty acid oxidation, including relevance in obesity
- 00:48:44 - Vitamin C and the brain - memory, learning, and executive function
- 00:51:15 - Intravenous Vitamin C and its use for the treatment of certain kinds of infection
- 00:55:33 - Intravenous Vitamin C as an adjunct cancer therapy
- 00:57:40 - Effect of Vitamin C on fertility and reproduction
- 00:58:36 - Intravenous vitamin C and cardiovascular health
- 01:00:42 - Vitamin C and inflammation
- 01:02:38 - Vitamin C’s mechanisms of action
- 01:08:34 - Intravenous and Oral vitamin C safety
- 01:10:20 - Vitamin C intake and kidney stone risk
- 01:13:57 - Conclusions
If you’re interested in learning more, you can read the full show notes here: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/vitamin-c
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone. Today I'm going to talk to you about vitamin C, a vitamin that |
| 0:05.4 | nearly everyone has heard about for its potent immunity boosting qualities. |
| 0:09.0 | Although I've been wanting to talk to you in a comprehensive way about vitamin |
| 0:12.8 | C for a long time, the timing of this podcast release in the midst of a global |
| 0:18.1 | pandemic might be just a little bit serendipitous. Despite the serendipity, |
| 0:23.5 | it's really important that we emphasize that this conversation, even though it |
| 0:27.8 | brushes up against topics like improved viral immunity, is not meant to |
| 0:32.6 | suggest in any way that vitamin C is somehow an outright cure for COVID-19. |
| 0:37.9 | There's just no evidence of that yet. It's really important to say that in the |
| 0:43.5 | background of everything going on in the world right now. Trials are ongoing to |
| 0:48.9 | see if there's a role, particularly for intravenous administration, but the |
| 0:53.5 | data isn't there yet. The entire research community is scrambling, looking for |
| 0:57.5 | serious treatments for people often in life-threatening conditions. Let's |
| 1:01.3 | support them as a community by taking that search seriously and soberly |
| 1:05.1 | approaching the evidence as it exists rather than as we'd like it to be. |
| 1:09.6 | Having said that, my hope is to at least overturn some of the contention that |
| 1:14.8 | Dr. Linus Pauling, a brilliant figure well-known in the vitamin C world, was |
| 1:19.7 | somehow a little bit off his rocker in old age. For those of you who don't know, |
| 1:24.3 | Dr. Pauling was the Nobel Prize-winning chemist who found clinical evidence |
| 1:28.4 | suggesting that high-dose, intravenous administration of vitamin C is useful as |
| 1:33.3 | a supportive treatment for cancer as well as a method for mitigating the |
| 1:37.3 | side effects of chemotherapy. In other words, Pauling was the vitamin C guy. While |
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