What Makes Vitamin C Antioxidants Important?
Vitamin C is perhaps the best known and most studied of all the antioxidants. Also known as ascorbic acid, it helps combat damage done to our cells by free radicals. Our bodies don’t manufacture their own vitamin C, like most animals. Somewhere along the evolutionary line we (as well as other primates) have lost the ability to do so. This means that we have to get our vitamin C from foods, and we have to do it often as our bodies run out of it. Since the early seventies vitamin C became a household name when Dr. Linnus Pauling, published his ” Vitamin C and the Common Cold” book, where he suggested that taking vitamin C above the Recommended Daily Allowance level would ward off the common cold because of the immune system strengthening that comes from vitamin C. A real life example that clearly illustrates not only the benefits of vitamin C, but also where to find natural vitamin C, and what happens when it is absent, follows. Back in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, travel from
