I Want You To "C" The Difference

I Want You To C The Difference

Doc Rick says, "If you read my last newsletter related to Calcium Supplements, I mentioned Vitamin C. Well, as promised, this information goes right along with it and is Important for you to know when building strong immunity for the Winter. Don't be fooled by the Synthetic Vitamin C on the market."

How many of you take a vitamin C supplement?  Good for you and BAD for you.  I say good for you because vitamin C, along with calcium, is the most important and vital nutrient you can take on a daily basis.  I say BAD for you, because I can just about guarantee that the vitamin C supplement you take isn't worth a thing.  In fact I can just about guarantee that it hurts you more then it helps you.  Let me explain. 

Vitamin C, as it is found in nature, exists as all things of nature do...as a complex.  "A complex of what?", you might ask.  A complex of various components designed to fulfill a vital function within the body.  The major one being it enables the body to fight off the effects of stress by supporting the initial Immune Response to foreign invasion from bacteria, viruses, virons, and parasites etc. 

Vitamin C is a very misunderstood vitamin.  The government is responsible for this because they have decided that you have to rate any vitamin C product according to the amount of ascorbic acid it contains.  Ascorbic acid is an antioxidant.  It is the preservative portion of the C complex.  To refine out or to synthesize the preservative, in my opinion, is a mistake. 

The Whole Truth About Vitamin C Complex

The whole vitamin C complex contains several components.  There are the vitamin P factors (bioflavinoids, rutin) which help to maintain vascular integrity.  These are deficient in people who bruise easily or have "pink toothbrushes."  Their blood vessels break or rupture too easily and bleed.  The vitamin P factors strengthen the vascular system.  They make the vessels tougher and more durable.  Vitamin K is another part of the C Complex.  It promotes prothrombin.  That means it helps in coagulation.  Bleeders do not have enough vitamin K.  If you have plenty of vitamin K, it's used in the formation of a protein which is then transported to the injured tissue.  Another factor in the C complex is vitamin J.  The J factor is part of the vitamin C complex which increases the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood.  If you have a cold, you want to get oxygen to your tissues where it oxidizes the toxins and carries them off with carbon dioxide.  In addition to these, the C complex contains enzymes, the outstanding one being Tyrosinase.  That's organic copper, an Adrenal activator.  If you want to rate vitamin C according to one factor, it would be logical to rate the Tyrosinase.  I have found that products containing the most Tyrosinase produce the best results.  But all of these other factors are important for results.  In addition to all these factors, the vitamin C complex also contains ascorbic acid.  To say that ascorbic acid is vitamin C is like looking at a wheel and saying that it is an automobile, while it is just a small part of the automobile.  The vitamin C we use in the office is made by removing the water and fiber from whole foods -- alfalfa, camu camu, acerola, manoic, mushroom, bone marrow and buckwheat leaf.  This leaves a powder containing the nutrients from these foods.  The powder is put into tablets.  In analyzing this nutrient powder, we find it is approximately point zero one (0.01) ascorbic acid by weight.  In fact, it contains about as much natural ascorbic acid as you will find in any of the vitamin C-rich foods, rosehips included.  So the vitamin C tablet we use in the office, which is about a 500 mg tablet, is 0.01 % ascorbic acid, or about 5 milligrams.  This is why the Cataplex C we use has a label that says "5 milligrams."  But in addition to the 5 milligrams of ascorbic acid, each tablet contains 495 milligrams of all the other C complex factors - the P factors, vitamin K, vitamin J, enzymes, and more unknown organic factors.  It is the presence of all of these synergistic factors which gives our product its functional potency. 

What about the high-potency vitamin C products you can buy at the healthfood store, or through the mail?  Most, if not all of these are made by the addition of synthetic (fake) ascorbic acid to a food base, usually rose hips or acerola berries.  Manufacturers of these products know that the public demand is for so-called natural or organic products, so food is used as a base.  But they also know that people feel that if a little is good for you, more is better.  So synthetic ascorbic acid is added to the food base in order to increase the label data potency.  In such a product, you might have 500 milligrams of synthetic (fake) ascorbic acid - the preservative - and only 25  milligrams or so of the food base, which may or may not contain the other C complex factors.  Unfortunately, this is hard to tell just by looking at the label unless you know what to look for.  These high potency mega-products usually have labels that say "natural" or "organic."   This is because the synthetic ascorbic acid, a derivative of petroleum, contains carbon and is therefore chemically organic, although it is hardly a food.  It is, in fact, a drug.  In order to put 500 milligrams of naturally occurring ascorbic acid into a tablet, the tablet would have to be as big as a ping-pong ball!  In order to determine if a vitamin C product really is natural as the label claims, just look at the potency.  If the tablet is similar in size as the one we use in the office, (aspirin size) it's synthetic to whatever extent it contains more than 5 milligrams of ascorbic acid. 

What This Means To You

So what happens when you take high levels of ascorbic acid?  Some doctors have gone on record for recommending 2 - 3 (sometimes as high as 5) thousand mgs. of vitamin C as ascorbic acid.  What this creates is an over-abundance of the ascorbic acid and a deficiency in the other components.  This leads to a deficiency in those other components.  See the body needs all the components to process the whole complex and create the natural response.  If you consume a deficient or an imbalanced amount, the body will pull the necessary missing ingredients of the complex from its own tissues.  This leads to deficiencies and the many conditions associated with these deficiencies.  Conditions such as Lowered Immune Response, Delayed Immune Response, easy bruising, inflammation, poor oxygen utilization, poor healing time and potential blood pressure problems through the Adrenal mechanism can occur.

What Should You Do? 

If your vitamin C supplement shows on the label that vitamin C (as ascorbic acid) or any of the other "ascorbate" derivatives, you are not taking vitamin C and will cause your health to have problems.  If that is the case, bring your vitamin C supplement into the office and I will test you to see if it is working.  We will "C" if it is.  If it isn't, and you feel it is important to take vitamin C (the most important vitamin needed for the body) then we can offer you the whole vitamin C Complex from Standard Process, Cataplex C. 

My Offer To You

For All Current Practice Members, bring in your vitamin C on your next regularly scheduled visit, and let us "C" if it works for you.  If it does, we will check to see what your proper dosage should be.  If it doesn't work for you, we can test you for Cataplex C and see what that does, along with the proper dosage.  Since vitamin C is important for Immune Response, I want to be sure this is functioning properly for the Spring Allergy Season.  So call the Office at (845)561-2225 and tell us to put you in for the "I want to C the difference Check."  This is a $75.00 value, but through December 12th, I will give it to you for FREE.  So call the Office TODAY and tell us to schedule you.  Don't wait, as the Winter weather is fast approaching and then making time always seems to be a problem.