Vitamin C & Your Heart

Vitamin C is a well known antioxidant. It has many functions in the human body, including acting as an essential cofactor in enzymatic reactions. It also plays a role in your body’s production of collagen, helps your body turn fat into energy and aids in the production of adrenal hormones.

Vitamin C is a water-soluble vitamin that is not produced by or stored by the human body. The only way that we can get vitamin C is to consume it. Vitamin C is also used by your body for wound healing, repairing and maintaining the health of your bones and teeth. It also helps to absorb iron.

As a powerful antioxidant, vitamin C is known to block some of the damage caused by DNA-damaging free radicals. Over time, free radical damage may accelerate aging and contribute to the development of heart disease and other health conditions. It’s through this antioxidant effect that it’s thought vitamin C may play a role in protecting heart health, perhaps even as much as exercise.

Vitamin C May Be as Helpful to Your Heart as Walking:

A daily dose of vitamin C may have a similar effect as walking on a protein called endothelin, which promotes the constriction of small blood vessels, which increases the risk of heart disease. These results were presented at the American Physiological Society’s 14th International Conference.

Those who took a daily time-release dose of vitamin C of 500 milligrams, reduced endothelin-1-mediated vessel constriction as much as those who walked daily. Endothelin-1 activity is known to be higher in those who are overweight. This doesn’t mean that if you take vitamin C that you can stop exercising. If you do both, you will derive added benefits.

Even beyond vasodilation, a study published in the American Heart Journal revealed that each 20 micromole/liter (µmol/L) increase in plasma vitamin C was associated with a 9% reduction in heart failure mortality.

According to Dr. Andrew Saul, editor of the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, if everyone were to take 500 mg of vitamin C per day, which is the dose required to reach a healthy level of 80 µmol/L, an estimated 216,000 lives could be spared each year.

Vitamin C May Lower Your Blood Pressure and Help Keep Arteries Flexible:
Adding on to vitamin C’s strong role in heart health, people who eat a diet rich in antioxidants, such as vitamin C, may have a lower risk of high blood pressure.

Research published in the journal Hypertension revealed a “strong association between vitamin C concentrations, an indicator of fruit and vegetable consumption, and a lower level of blood pressure.”

Vitamin C is also known to slow down the progression of hardening of the arteries (atherosclerosis). It may help keep your arteries flexible and prevents damage to LDL cholesterol. People with low levels of vitamin C are at increased risk of heart attack, peripheral artery disease and stroke.

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