3 ms·

>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 t

>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.

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.