3 ms·

Just a few years ago, the buzzwords were "germicidal", "immunity boosting", "anti-bacterial", etc. for every damn thing, especially in India, where marketing ca

by qart 1y ago

Just a few years ago, the buzzwords were "germicidal", "immunity boosting", "anti-bacterial", etc. for every damn thing, especially in India, where marketing can get away with bizarre claims.

GuB-42 1y ago
Is there anything that is proved to be "immunity boosting" apart from vaccines? Well, and germs of course. Germs will cause an immune response, but that's probably not the kind of "boost" you are interested in. As for AI, I guess it is sufficiently vague and also not a medical claim, so you can put it everywhere. But because it is just as vague for consumers, is it even worth something for marketing?
- colechristensen 1y ago
  Depends on your definition of "boosting". Vitamin C is essential for plenty of immune functions and a deficiency has serious effects on immunity. Enormous doses of Vitamin C have been shown to be effective in various scenarios as well. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8239596/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8239596/
  - bluGill 1y ago
    While not wrong, that is very misleading - for the vast majority we already get plenty of vitamin C in our diet and we don't have the specific situations where enormous doses will be effective. At least vitamin C is water soluble: your body will almost always just pee out any extra quick so it is very hard to overdose. Those who have a kidney problem should check with a doctor, for the rest of us massive doses just make our pee more expensive.
    - colechristensen 1y ago
      >for the vast majority we already get plenty of vitamin C This is highly dependent on the population you're talking about. There are plenty of people around the world who don't have great nutrition and don't eat large amounts of fortified industrial food. >for the rest of us massive doses just make our pee more expensive The study I linked reported ridiculous doses of vitamin C "dramatically improved the clinical state and cardiovascular, pulmonary, hepatic and renal function" in ICU spesis patients. Like 200-400 grams of sodium ascorbate administered over 7 hours. The recommended daily nutritional consumption of vitamin C is around 80 milligrams. There are other studies reporting other positive outcomes for large doses of vitamin C. This isn't a recommendation that you should take hundreds of grams every day yourself, but there is ample evidence in a clinical setting for "immune boosting" vitamin C in large doses. (and also criticisms of the daily value for being too low)
      - bluGill 1y ago
        The vast majority of people are not currently in an ICU though. That situation doesn't apply to us.
        colechristensen 1y ago
        If your immune system was "boosted" and worked significantly better tomorrow than it does today, would there be large measurable outcomes? No, probably not. Unless you've got something wrong with you, day to day, it would be hard to detect a distinct improvement in an already working system. Getting a good signal-to-noise ratio for a healthy person getting slightly healthier is hard. The bias for not publishing negative results and various sorts of intentional and unintentional p-hacking means that small-effect-size research that showed say "1 gram of vitamin C per day improved x by 5% in healthy adults" wouldn't be that reliable anyway. "dramatic improvement" of ICU sepsis patients isn't something that suffers from p-hacking. Someone dying of sepsis in an ICU though, there's a whole bunch of very clear signals whether something is meaningfully effective or not. What that result tells you is that megadoses of vitamin C are likely not bullshit and should continued to be studied in more and more difficult to detect cases. What this tells me is that 1) because I know it's likely rather safe for me and 2) there's enough evidence to convince me it might help, I'll keep taking lots of vitamin C if I feel like I'm getting sick.

by qart 1y ago

Just a few years ago, the buzzwords were "germicidal", "immunity boosting", "anti-bacterial", etc. for every damn thing, especially in India, where marketing can get away with bizarre claims.

GuB-42 1y ago

Is there anything that is proved to be "immunity boosting" apart from vaccines? Well, and germs of course. Germs will cause an immune response, but that's probably not the kind of "boost" you are interested in. As for AI, I guess it is sufficiently vague and also not a medical claim, so you can put it everywhere. But because it is just as vague for consumers, is it even worth something for marketing?

colechristensen 1y ago
Depends on your definition of "boosting". Vitamin C is essential for plenty of immune functions and a deficiency has serious effects on immunity. Enormous doses of Vitamin C have been shown to be effective in various scenarios as well. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8239596/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8239596/
- bluGill 1y ago
  While not wrong, that is very misleading - for the vast majority we already get plenty of vitamin C in our diet and we don't have the specific situations where enormous doses will be effective. At least vitamin C is water soluble: your body will almost always just pee out any extra quick so it is very hard to overdose. Those who have a kidney problem should check with a doctor, for the rest of us massive doses just make our pee more expensive.
  - colechristensen 1y ago
    >for the vast majority we already get plenty of vitamin C This is highly dependent on the population you're talking about. There are plenty of people around the world who don't have great nutrition and don't eat large amounts of fortified industrial food. >for the rest of us massive doses just make our pee more expensive The study I linked reported ridiculous doses of vitamin C "dramatically improved the clinical state and cardiovascular, pulmonary, hepatic and renal function" in ICU spesis patients. Like 200-400 grams of sodium ascorbate administered over 7 hours. The recommended daily nutritional consumption of vitamin C is around 80 milligrams. There are other studies reporting other positive outcomes for large doses of vitamin C. This isn't a recommendation that you should take hundreds of grams every day yourself, but there is ample evidence in a clinical setting for "immune boosting" vitamin C in large doses. (and also criticisms of the daily value for being too low)
    - bluGill 1y ago
      The vast majority of people are not currently in an ICU though. That situation doesn't apply to us.
      - colechristensen 1y ago
        If your immune system was "boosted" and worked significantly better tomorrow than it does today, would there be large measurable outcomes? No, probably not. Unless you've got something wrong with you, day to day, it would be hard to detect a distinct improvement in an already working system. Getting a good signal-to-noise ratio for a healthy person getting slightly healthier is hard. The bias for not publishing negative results and various sorts of intentional and unintentional p-hacking means that small-effect-size research that showed say "1 gram of vitamin C per day improved x by 5% in healthy adults" wouldn't be that reliable anyway. "dramatic improvement" of ICU sepsis patients isn't something that suffers from p-hacking. Someone dying of sepsis in an ICU though, there's a whole bunch of very clear signals whether something is meaningfully effective or not. What that result tells you is that megadoses of vitamin C are likely not bullshit and should continued to be studied in more and more difficult to detect cases. What this tells me is that 1) because I know it's likely rather safe for me and 2) there's enough evidence to convince me it might help, I'll keep taking lots of vitamin C if I feel like I'm getting sick.