Vitamin C May Be As Helpful To Your Heart As Walking
Vitamin C is a water-soluble vitamin, which means your body does not store it. Unlike most other mammals, humans do not have the ability to make Vitamin C, which means you need to consume it via your diet.
Vitamin C has a number functions in the human body, including acting as an essential co-factor in enzymatic reactions. In this way, it plays a role in your body’s production of collagen, carnitine, which helps your body turn fat into energy, and catecholamines (hormones made by your adrenal glands), for starters.
Vitamin C is also used by your body for wound healing, repairing, and maintaining the health of your bones and teeth, and plays a role in helping your body absorb iron. However, it’s Citamin C’s role as an antioxidant that it is most well known for.
As a powerful antioxidant, Vitamin C is known to block some of the damage caused by DNA-damaging free radicals. Over time, free radical damage may accelerate aging and contribute to the development of heart disease and other health conditions. It is through this antioxidant effect that it’s thought Vitamin C may play a role in protecting heart health, perhaps as much as exercise.
A daily dose of Vitamin C may have a similar effect as walking on a protein called endothelin-1, which promotes the constriction of small blood vessels. The study, which was presented at the American Physiological Society’s 14th International Conference on Endothelin, involved 35 sedentary, overweight, or obese adults.
Those who took a daily time-release dose of Vitamin C (500 milligrams, mg) reduced endothelin-1-mediated vessel constriction as much as those who walked daily. Endothelin-1 activity is known to be higher in those who are overweight and obese.
This makes small blood vessels more prone to constricting, which increases the risk of heart disease.
As noted in the report: “[T]he team concluded that Vitamin C supplementation represents an effective lifestyle strategy to reduce ET-1 mediated vessel constriction in overweight and obese adults,” particularly since many people do not engage in recommended levels of daily physical activity.
Vitamin C is a simple intervention that can have far-reaching effects for heart health, even beyond its affect on endothelin-1, in part because of its role in vasodilation.
As explained by the Linus Pauling Institute: “The ability of blood vessels to relax or dilate (vasodilation) is compromised in individuals with atherosclerosis. Damage to the heart muscle caused by a heart attack and damage to the brain caused by a stroke are related, in part, to the inability of blood vessels to dilate enough to allow blood flow to the affected areas.
The pain of angina pectoris is also related to insufficient dilation of the coronary arteries. Impaired vasodilation has been identified as an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease.
Many randomized, double-blind, and placebo-controlled studies have shown that treatment with Vitamin C consistently results in improved vasodilation in individuals with coronary heart disease.
It also occurred in those with angina pectoris, congestive heart failure, diabetes, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure. Improved vasodilation has been demonstrated at an oral dose of 500 mg of vVtamin C daily.”
Even beyond vasodilation, a study published in the American Heart Journal revealed that each 20 micromole/liter (µmol/L) increase in plasma Vitamin C was associated with a 9 percent reduction in heart failure mortality.
According to Dr. Andrew Saul, editor of the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, if everyone were to take 500 mg of Vitamin C per day, the dose required to reach a healthy level of 80 µmol/L, an estimated 216,000 lives could be spared each year.
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