 Ascorbic
acid is called a "vitamin" C because it
is the only component of the citric acid (TCA) cycle that your body
cannot manufacture by itself and you must get from your food. All
the TCA components, however, are important for health and may
need to be
supplemented if you are not getting or making enough. Citric acid is
almost identical to ascorbic acid, and fulfills many of the same
functions in the body. When taking citric, ascorbic or any acid as a
supplement, always be sure to take enough minerals with it so the acid
does not leach minerals away from any part of the body. When the
ascorbic acid is sold with minerals already attached to it, it is
called "ascorbate".
Making A Vitamin C
Supplement
Ingredients
1/4 cup of ascorbic acid
1/4 tablespoons of
citric
acid
1/2 cup of ground or
powdered
bioflavonoid sources (plant material)
1/4 cup of
dried, powdered
pine
needles
1 tablespoon of ground
cinnamon
1/2 cup of powdered
minerals such as dolomite, clay or dry earth.
Directions:
Mix together and pack
into empty
gelatin
capsules (UK)
Dosage
Three "00" capsules, three times a day to start, and then use
your own body biofeedback
to determine or increase dosage.
Why Those
Ingredients?
Ascorbic acid
-- vital, prevents scurvy, cannot be synthesized in human body except
in small amounts when gulonolactone from other sources is
present.
Citric acid
-- Does most of the same things as ascorbic acid except prevent scurvy.
As vital as ascorbic acid, maybe more so, but is synthesized
in
the human body and has no known deficiency diseases so it does not have
a "Vitamin" name.
Bioflavonoids
-- These are plants' version of "Vitamin C". Some people claim they are
the real vitamin C. Like roses that by any other name will smell the
same, plant bioflavonoids do many
wonderful things in the human body, often in concert with ascorbic and
citric acid, and you can take them and get the full benefit from them
regardless of whether or not they are called vitamin C, or components
of the vitamin C complex.
Cinnamon
--
Contains an enzyme called gulonolactone that is needed
to
convert glucose (sugar) to ascorbic acid.
The
reason that humans cannot produce our own ascorbic acid is because the
human body cannot manufacture gulonolactone. It is theorized that you
can make some of your own internally manufactured ascorbic acid, as
long as, and for as long as, there is gulonolactone present along with
all the other necessary substances. You could substitute dessicated
liver for the cinnamon, as that is another source of gulonolactone.
Dolomite, clay or earth
--
Any acid, even vitamins, will deplete
the body of minerals if there are not enough minerals in the body.
"Buffering" (adding minerals) these acids will make them easier to
assimilate and prevent them from leaching minerals from the body.
Powdered
dolomite is one of the easiest to get and use, but many other sources
of powdered minerals can be used such as clay or earth. See my page on Minerals.
Technically,
you
could
use baking soda, which is a mineral, as your
chelate but, as long as you're going to all the
trouble of making this supplement, I recommend you take
minerals your body needs and is more likely to be short of like
magnesium rather than carbon
and sodium, which are the minerals in baking soda (bicarbonate of
soda). If you use dry earth or clay that is palatable to eat from a
spoon, you can reduce the minerals in the capsules by half as long as
you take the extra minerals on the side. Almost all negative
reactions
to large doses vitamin Care caused by depletion of minerals.
Pine needles -- When
the first
Europeans arrived in America sick with scurvy, the Indians gave them
pine needle tea. Pine
needles are a good source
of terpenes. Terpenes
are what makes pine needles smell like medicine and are closely related to bioflavonoids.
Sources and
Substitutes
Ascorbic
acid
-- can be bought online and available in some health food stores.
Citric
acid
-- can be ordered online but will not be sold as a food or medical
product. It is usually sold as lime de-scaler.
Cinnamon
--
can be found in any spice section. It is better if you can buy it in
stick form and grind your own, but already-ground will work. It doesn't
matter if it's really cassia.
Substitutes: dessicated liver, red chili pepper.
Bioflavonoids
-- can be found as acai
powder, acerola
powder, camu-camu powder,
ground, dehydrated citrus
peel (lemon,
orange, grapefruit), cayenne
powder, powdered ginger, mango powder (amchoor), red chili pepper, powdered rose hips, paprika
and turmeric. You can use any
of those, or any
mixture of those.
Minerals
-- are all around you. It's the main ingredient in rocks and dirt. See Minerals for all the sources of minerals available, or you
can order
powdered dolomite, powdered bone meal, French green clay, red desert
clay or powdered kelp online, or can be found in some health food
stores. Substitute:
take
powdered dolomite tablets and bonemeal tablets when you take the
vitamin C capsules.
Pine
needles
-- Collect in the woods, dry and grind in blender. Substitutes:
eucalyptus,
terebintha, tea tree, sweetgum tree, gingko biloba.. Any plant that has
that similar "medicine-y" smell (and is safe to eat) contains various
and a different number of terpenes. Substitutes
from the spice section (grind in the blender): sage,
oregano,
bay leaves, star anise..
Theory
Our
soil, food and waters are being depleted of minerals because of acid
rain and pollution. You can re-mineralize them by getting
alkalizers and ionizers to put the minerals back into your drinking
water,
but the easiest way is to eat naturally
sourced, full-array mineral salts dug from the ground, blended into
powders which can be done with a home blender, amd then pack it into
gelatin capsules. You can't get any
closer to the dirt than that.
-however-
Mineral
salts can be harsh or unusable as is, so it is best to chelate them
with a weak food acid.There are many such acids, but you may as well
use ascorbic acid and citric acid. They're inexpensive and after they
chelate your mineral salts to the ascorbate or citrate form you'll have
extra vitamin C. (You may have to buy citric acid online. It is
sometimes sold as lime de-scaler but I don't know of any way to insure
that there are no chemical additives.)
-however-
Ascorbic
and/or citric acid may be
fractionates of the full-array vitamin C complex, according to some
people. If you're taking them, you should add
other of their companion products to try to balance the ascorbate and
citrate. These companion products are the bioflavonoids that are made
by plants and that some people say are part of what constitutes
"Vitamin C", while others say they are "Vitamin P" and not necessary to
get the full value of ascorbic acid vitamin C. I
recommend taking minerals, ascorbic acid and plant
bioflavonoids
together. Ascorbic acid makes the minerals more usable, the minerals
prevent the ascorbic acid from depleting the body's mineral supply and
the plant bioflavonoids are good for you whether they are part of the
vitamin C complex or not.
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Issues
Ascorbic acid has been linked to heart attacks
All acids will deplete the body of
minerals if
you take them
without additional mineral supplements. Mega-doses of ascorbic acid
without the necessary extra minerals could lead to magnesium deficiency
which could lead to heart attacks. You could solve this problem by
purchasing expensive Vitamin C in the ascorbate form or taking cheap
ascorbic acid and eating approximately 3 times its volume in dirt along
with it. If eating dirt doesn't appeal to you, see Minerals
for other suitable sources.
Ascorbic acid causes mineral deficiency.
Answer: Yes, so take minerals if you take ascorbic acid.
Any acid will deplete the body of minerals. If you take ascorbic acid,
always take a good source of minerals along with it. If you read
anywhere that ascorbic acid is bad for you for some reason (such as it causes copper deficiency or erodes
tooth enamel),
you can ignore such warning that are about loss of minerals as long as
you take a good, natural supply of minerals with the ascorbic acid. It
does not have to be the specific mineral that ascorbic acid is blamed
for depleting -- any natural source of mixed minerals will bond with
the acid and keep it from depleting other scarce minerals. Good sources
of minerals are garden fertilizers, dirt, clay and sea salt.
Cinnamon
and terpenes
Cinnamon is said to supply the missing
enzyme that allows us to process ascorbic acid in our
bodies. The
enzyme, gulonolactone, is a terpene, one of the many
compounds
found in evergreen and other trees that have a "medicine-y" smell to
them and from which the word "turpentine" is derived.
How much cinnamon
would it take to replace the missing gulonolactone so we could make all
the ascorbic aicd we need?
They say, anecdotally, about 8 teaspoons a day, but that's an awful lot
of cinnamon and at those levels there may be some toxic reaction.
Still, there are people who take that amount and think it's great. They
can't all be cinnamon growers.
How do
I know it's
cinnamon and not cassia?
Cinnamon is sweeter than cassia but for vitamin C purposes it doesn't
matter.
Is ascorbic acid the same as
citric
acid?
Citric
acid and ascorbic are not exactly the same, but they are very similar.
Their molecular structure is only different by one oxygen molecule.
They do
many of the same tasks in the body. The only thing abscorbic acid can
do that citric acid can't do is prevent scurvy, and for that, the
amount of absorbic acid needed is very little. Unlike ascorbic acid,
citric acid can be created in the human body. Knowing this, however,
won't help your health much, but it can help your pocketbook, as citric
acid is much cheaper than ascorbic acid, often sold in industrial-sized
containers for industrial purposes. If you're cool with
off-label
uses, you can buy a large box of lime descaler which is citric acid,
mix 9 parts of citric acid with 1 part of ascorbic acid and you 're
good to go with whatever purpose you had in mind for ascorbic acid.
Is ascorbic acid a "nourishing
tradition"?
There
are no easy answers with vitamin C ascorbic acid. Generally,
something is considered a "nourishing tradition" if it has been used
over centuries, passed on from generation to generation and continues
to support health. Ascorbic acid as a supplement has only been
available since the 1930's, however in that time it has been taken by
many
people who praise and recommend it and have passed it from
generation
to generation. The theory is that ascorbic acid is synthesized in a
lab[*] and therefore isn't natural, however "nourishing traditions"
are not strictly defined by theory but by practice, based as it is on
the work of W. Price. Price went out in the field and looked at what
people actually ate that was healthy, rather than devise some theory
about what ought to be healthy. I would say that if vitamin C ascorbic
acid hasn't proved itself to be a nourishing tradtion yet, that it only
has
to continue for the next 20 years as it has for the last 80, with more
and more people attributing their good health to it and passing this
knowledge down to their children, for it to become a
nourishing tradition.
[*] Actually, most
vitamin C ascorbic
acid is made in China by
fermenting potatoes, so it is not far removed from "food-based" and
while it is "synthesized", it isn't "artificially".synthesized. The
ascorbic acid made in the liver of many animals (but not us) can be
said to be "synthesized". That's how ascorbic acid is made, by
synthesis.
Why is it so
controversial?
What
you
call "Vitamin C" may depend more on your politics than on the actual
characteristics of the substances involved. People who took mega-doses
of ascorbic acid at the recommendation of Linus Pauling without taking
extra minerals as a supplement, and who ended up with a mineral
deficiency as a result, are more likely to say that "Vitamin C" is a
complex including bioflavonoids. Ascorbic acid is made in the livers of
most animals but not us because our livers lack the enzyme
gulonolactone needed to synthesize it. This enzyme is found in the
livers of other animals, so we can, in fact, synthesize ascorbic acid
in our bodies -- we just have to eat the liver of some other animal
first. For this reason, vegetarians also balk at considering ascorbic
acid to be "Vitamin C" because it lends credence to the idea that
humans are, and by rights ought to be, carnivores. Conversely, militant
carnivores and Atkins or lo-carb dieters are more likely to embrace the
idea that only ascorbic acid is "Vitamin C" because it justifies eating
meat, especially liver. And scientists like to call ascorbic acid
"Vitamin C" because it has its own disease -- scurvy -- and is easy to
test for in the lab. Since we are more concerned with being healthy
than the scientific definition of a substance, I suggest taking
everything and let the body use what it can and discard the rest.
Make Your Own
Bioflavonoids
Peel lemon
or other citrus
fruit(s). (Use
lemon pulp to make lemon pudding)
Cut peel into small pieces and set in a cool, dark place to dry.
When it has dried sufficiently to grind, put it in a blender and grind
on high until it becomes a fine powder.
Penicillium
and Vitamin C
Penicillium
mold (the blue-green mold found on citrus fruit and bread, and used to
make bleu cheese -- see Mold ) will
eat glucose (sugar) and excrete citric and ascorbic acid. Does this
mean we could mix sugar and penicillium in a gelatin capsule, swallow
it and it will make vitamin C as it transits through our digestive
system? In theory, it seems possible. We eat yogurt to to replenish our
gut with probiotic bacteria. Why wouldn't the penicillium pass through
the stomach and do what it always does -- make vitamin C -- before it
is eliminated from the body? Unfortunately, there is no way to find
out, except anecdotally. Sick people spend money, and the large
companies who sell them medicine are not inclined to support research
to determine if people would be healthier eating mold from lemon peels.
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Vitamin C
by Dr.Edward
Howell
