Vitamin C facts for kids

ascorbic acid

Vitamin C, also known as ascorbic acid, is a very important vitamin. You can find it in fresh fruits, berries, and vegetables. It's one of the vitamins that dissolves in water.

Vitamin C helps your body heal wounds. If you don't get enough vitamin C, you can get a sickness called scurvy. Long ago, scurvy was a big problem on long ocean trips because fresh fruits ran out quickly. Many sailors died from it.

Most animals can make their own vitamin C. But some mammals can't. This group includes most primates like tarsiers, monkeys, apes, and humans. Bats, capybaras, and guinea pigs also can't make it.

Scientists first found vitamin C in 1928. By 1932, they proved it could stop scurvy. People knew that fruit could cure scurvy long before they even knew what vitamins were!

How We Discovered Vitamin C

For a long time, some smart people knew that eating fresh plants helped people stay healthy during long sieges or sea trips. But this idea was often forgotten.

The first person to really test this idea was James Lind, a doctor in the British Royal Navy. In May 1747, while at sea, he gave some sailors lemon juice along with their regular food. Other sailors only ate their normal ship food.

The results showed that lemons stopped the disease. Lind wrote about his findings in 1753.

It took a while for Lind's work to be noticed. But in 1795, the British navy started giving lemon or lime juice to all sailors.

Besides lemons, limes, and oranges, people also tried sauerkraut (salted cabbage), malt, and soup. James Cook used sauerkraut to keep his crew healthy on his long voyages around the world.

People used to think only humans got scurvy. But in 1907, two Norwegian chemists, Alex Holst and Theodore Frohlich, found that guinea pigs could also get scurvy if they didn't eat fresh food.

In 1928, an Arctic explorer named Vilhjalmur Stefansson showed that Inuit people could avoid scurvy by eating raw meat, even with almost no plants in their diet.

In 1912, a Polish American scientist named Casimir Funk first used the word vitamin. He used it for tiny amounts of things in food that are vital for health. He called the unknown thing that prevented scurvy Vitamin C.

From 1928 to 1933, a Hungarian research team led by Albert Szent-Györgyi, and also Charles Glen King in the United States, successfully took vitamin C out of food. They showed it was an acid and called it ascorbic acid.

In 1933 and 1934, British chemists Norman Haworth and Edmund Hirst, and separately Tadeus Reichstein from Poland, managed to make vitamin C in a lab. It was the first man-made vitamin! This made it possible to produce lots of vitamin C cheaply in factories. Haworth won the 1937 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this amazing work.

In 1959, an American scientist named J.J. Burns found out why some animals get scurvy. It's because their liver can't make a certain enzyme that other animals have.

Where Does Vitamin C Come From?

Plant Foods Rich in Vitamin C

Citrus fruits like limes, Indian gooseberries, lemons, oranges, and grapefruits are excellent sources of vitamin C.

Other foods with lots of vitamin C include papaya, broccoli, brussels sprouts, blackcurrants, strawberries, cauliflower, spinach, cantaloupe, sweet peppers, and kiwifruit.

The amount of vitamin C in plants can change. It depends on the type of plant, the soil it grew in, how much rain and sun it got, how long ago it was picked, and how it was stored. Cooking food can also destroy vitamin C.

Here's a table to give you an idea of how much vitamin C is in different plant foods:

Animal Foods with Vitamin C

Most animals make their own vitamin C, so it's not a "vitamin" for them. They make it from glucose in steps using enzymes. This happens in their kidneys (for reptiles and birds) or their liver (for mammals and perching birds). Over time, some animals lost the ability to make this enzyme. This includes most fish, many birds, some bats, guinea pigs, and most primates, like humans. This wasn't a problem because vitamin C is common in their food.

In the 1920s, people realized that some types of meat and fish also have vitamin C. However, the muscle and fat we usually eat today don't have much. Just like with fruits and vegetables, cooking meat and fish destroys their vitamin C.

Here's a table showing vitamin C in some animal foods:

Making Vitamin C in Factories

Vitamin C is made from glucose in two main ways. The Reichstein process, from the 1930s, uses one fermentation step followed by chemicals. The newer Two-Step fermentation process, from China in the 1960s, uses more fermentation to replace some chemical steps. Both ways make about 60% vitamin C from the glucose.

In 1934, a Swiss company called Hoffmann-La Roche was the first to make a lot of synthetic vitamin C, called Redoxon. Today, big companies like BASF/ Takeda, Roche, Merck, and China Pharmaceutical Group Ltd make it.

What Does Vitamin C Do in Your Body?

In living things, vitamin C (called ascorbate) is an antioxidant. This means it helps protect your body from damage. It also helps at least eight enzymes work correctly. These enzymes are important for making collagen, which is why not having enough vitamin C causes the serious problems of scurvy. In animals, these reactions are key for healing wounds and stopping small blood vessels from bleeding.

• Vitamin C is needed to make collagen in your connective tissue. These fibers are all over your body, giving it a strong but flexible structure. Tissues like your skin, mucous membranes, teeth, and bones have a lot of collagen.
• Vitamin C is needed to make dopamine, noradrenaline, and adrenaline in your nervous system and adrenal glands.
• It also helps make carnitine, which is important for moving energy to the mitochondria (the powerhouses of your cells).
• It's a strong antioxidant, protecting your cells.
• The parts of your body with the most vitamin C (over 100 times the amount in your blood) are your adrenal glands, pituitary, thymus, and retina.
• Your brain, spleen, lung, testicle, lymph nodes, liver, thyroid, small intestine lining, white blood cells, pancreas, kidney, and salivary glands usually have 10 to 50 times the amount found in your blood.

What Happens if You Don't Get Enough Vitamin C?

Not having enough vitamin C in your daily food leads to a disease called scurvy. This is a type of avitaminosis (vitamin deficiency) and causes problems like:

• Loose teeth
• Easy bleeding under the skin
• Weak blood vessels
• Slow healing of cuts and wounds
• A weaker immune system
• Mild anemia (not enough healthy red blood cells).

How Much Vitamin C Do You Need Daily?

A healthy person eating a balanced diet should get all the vitamin C they need to prevent scurvy. People who smoke, those under stress, and pregnant women need a little more.

Different health groups suggest different amounts of vitamin C to stay healthy:

• The UK Food Standards Agency suggests 40 mg per day.
• The US Food and Nutrition Board (2001) suggests 60–95 mg per day.

Some scientists think humans need more vitamin C to have similar levels in their blood as animals that make their own vitamin C:

• The Linus Pauling Institute and US National Institutes of Health (NIH) suggest 200 mg per day.
• The Vitamin C Foundation suggests 3000 mg per day.
• Thomas Levy suggests 6000–12000 mg per day.
• Linus Pauling himself suggested 6000–18000 mg per day.

Taking very high doses (thousands of mg) might cause diarrhea. This is usually harmless if you lower the dose right away. Some researchers believe that diarrhea shows you've reached your body's limit for vitamin C.

Because the vitamin C molecule is small, your kidneys can't hold onto it very well. Even a low level in your blood will cause some to show up in your urine. Animals that make their own vitamin C always have some in their urine.

Can Vitamin C Help When You're Sick?

You need vitamin C in your diet to prevent scurvy. It's also known for possibly helping with colds and flu. However, the scientific evidence for this is mixed. The effect might depend on how much you take and how often. The Vitamin C Foundation suggests taking 8 grams every half hour to see an effect on cold symptoms.

People Who Support Vitamin C Use

Fred R. Klenner, a doctor, reported in 1949 that very large doses of intravenous (given through a vein) vitamin C helped people with poliomyelitis.

Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling, a chemist, started actively promoting vitamin C in the 1960s. He believed it could greatly improve human health and help fight off diseases.

A small group of doctors and scientists still believe vitamin C is a cheap and safe way to treat infectious diseases and deal with many types of poisons.

Some studies suggest that you need high levels of vitamin C in your body for it to work well as an antioxidant.

There's also some research showing that vitamin C can benefit animals in veterinary medicine.

A large study in 2002 by Dr. Thomas Levy looked at how well vitamin C treats infectious diseases and poisons. He claimed there's a lot of scientific proof for its healing role.

Some people who support vitamin C say it's not used more in medicine because it can't be patented. Pharmaceutical companies want to make money for their shareholders. They might not want to research or promote something that won't make them much profit.

Images for kids

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  Vitamin C supplements at a drug store.

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  The Nobel prizewinner Linus Pauling suggested taking vitamin C for the common cold in a 1970 book.

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  Citrus fruits were some of the first sources of vitamin C used by ship doctors.

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  James Lind, a British Royal Navy surgeon, found in 1747 that fruit prevented scurvy. This was one of the first recorded controlled experiments.

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  Albert Szent-Györgyi won a Nobel Prize after finding a way to make a lot of vitamin C for research. He lived in Szeged, which was a center for paprika (red pepper) production.

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  Potato with peel contains 20 mg/100 g of vitamin C

See also

In Spanish: Vitamina C para niños