I just wanted to make a couple of comments re ascorbic acid you may find helpful. Pure ascorbic acid is colorless and should appear pure white in powder or tablet form. Its oxidation product, dehydroascorbic acid, which is what grows into orange juice as you shake it up in air, is amber colored. Your body has the ability to reduce dehydroascorbic acid back to ascorbic acid once the dehydro form has been transported into cells. However this process oxidizes thiols, such as glutathione. Thus your body can make use of both the oxidized and reduced forms of ascorbic acid. However, if you want to ingest the "antioxidant" form of vitamin C you need the pure white form. Almost all Vit C tablets that I have seen have an amber color to them. Without analysing them it is impossible to know if the color is coming from dehydroascorbic acid or from impurities in the several binders used when manufacturing tablets -- which should also be colorless if pure. The color of most tablets is identical to the color of dehydroascorbic acid. For what it's worth, my best guess is that most tablets contain partially oxidized Vit. C. It's the oxidation of Vit C. to dehydroascorbic acid that contributes to the off flavor of orange juice that's been stored too long or shaken excessively. You can of course buy pharmaceutical grade pure ascorbic acid as a pure white powder. However dissolving this in water or juice and drinking it is very bad for your teeth unless you limit the time the ascorbic acid solution is in your mouth and rinse carefully with water afterwards. I was fortunate enough to hear Linus Pauling review his Vit. C. clinical studies carried out in the UK. For much of Pauling's adult life he took two grams! of vit. C. with each meal. He also steadfastly maintained that massive doses of Vit C. were a cure for Rhinovirus if caught early. For that he recommended 15-20 gram of Vit C. divided over a twenty four hour period. I personally have tried this and it works! Small doses do nothing in this regard. When his UK experiments were repeated by others in the U.S. doses of a few hundred milligrams were used. As predicted by Pauling these small doses had no detectable affect on the course of a Rhinovirus infection. At the very high doses recommended by Pauling as a cure for the common cold however, you will experience some mild gastrointestinal disturbance, but nothing else. To double your blood concentration of ascorbic acid you need to increase your intake 10-fold. If you normally take 500 mg per day you will need to take 5 grams to double your blood concentration. In other words most of the additional Vit C intake is eliminated. Pauling died in 1994 at age 93 from Prostate cancer. He was scientifically active into his 90s. I heard him speak twice, once on Vit C., at the National Laboratory where i was working, and again years later on structural chemistry to a rapt standing room only audience at a National American Chemical Society Meeting. He is the only person to receive two unshared Nobel Prizes, one for his elucidation of the Chemical Bond and the other for his anti nuclear weapons testing activities. He narrowly missed winning two other Nobel prizes. Many still today, including myself, consider his General Chemistry text, the text he used when teaching CalTech freshmen, as an unrivaled masterpiece of clear writing in which he laid out all of the fundamental principles underlying the field of chemistry and used them to logically and lucidly interconnect the physical and chemical properties of matter. (the last edition was , i believe, in the early 1970s. It is still available used, and just as relevant now as then.) I will mention one other tidbit re Pauling. In his lecture on Vit. C clinical studies, Pauling happened to mention, it was in the early 1970s, that in addition to being too low on Vit. C, American diets are dangerously low in folic acid! He made a big point on stressing that the RMD values put out by the FDA were the minimum levels of intake needed to prevent disease but in some cases far were from the optimum level. It wasn't too many years after I heard Pauling's remark specifically about folic acid -- important for methylation in the gut, that it was discovered that low folic acid in pregnant women was a cause of scoliosis in newborns. Pauling of course did not know this at the time of his warning, but he was very clear that folic acid intake in American diets was too low. I distinctly remember him saying that. Today it is routine for pregnant women to be prescribed a folic acid supplement. They ought not to stop taking this supplement the rest of their lives, as should we all..
My father was health food nut in the 70s. I know he was a massive fan / advocate of Jack LaLane and I remember pictures of Pauling in the health food newsletters to which he subscribed. My dad had me take large quantities of Vitamin C growing up. he was also very particular about the companies who made the supplements. ( I am almost never sick... once in the last five years.) My dad was not sick a day his adult life until he had esophageal cancer. He took lots of Vitamin C everyday and emulated Jack LaLanne. I have always believed in daily exercise... per Jack Lalanne. But, I ceased taking Vitamin C when I heard I was pissing out the excess. You have convinced me to return to large does of Vitamin C. thanks....
The argument that you are just pissing away money on vitamins is a common one but hyper-dismissive. Excreting higher levels of Vitamin C is not an indication that anything more is just "excess." The question is: how much do I need to take to increase the blood serum levels.?In an ideal biological system everything you need gets absorbed and beyond that excreted. But we do not have an ideal system. The amount needed to raise your blood levels will also raise the amount being excreted as well. What you are actually doing is increasing the body's opportunity to increase Vitamin C, not guaranteeing that all will be absorbed. In a clinical setting you can get around that a bit by putting ascorbic acid in an IV drip, but at home, not so much. Unlike Vitamin D or A or E which are fat soluble/stored, Vitamin C is water soluble like the B vitamins so its half-life is short and if you do need to spread out you intake over the day to keep your serum levels up.
The C that I showed is not processed in the digestive tract, it is lypospheric and encapsulated in a fat molecule so it is processed via the fat channel meaning you can take more than 500mg without it being wasted. It has the highest bio-availability of any Vitamin-C taken orally. I take two packets of lypospheric a day and augment with 2x1000mg Ester-C capsules which is not ascorbic acid but is a mineral ascorbate that is easier on the stomach and is absorbed more readily. So I'm taking 1g every 6 hours for 4g total. I wake up at 6AM to take a packet and then go back to bed lol. Ascorbic acid is only tolerated up to about 500mg and the rest passed in urine. It also causes some side effects like skin dryness.
Yeh, the most common side effects are stomach acid burn and/or diarrhea but that is more related to the form of Vitamin C, which is almost always ascorbic acid. The workaround on that is to take in in the form of calcium ascorbate or one of the preparations such as you mentioned. But your basic online, down at walgreens, whatever form will be ascorbic acid and yes that does get to very acidic in larger doses. Calcium ascorbate is quite available.
I have been Megadosing on Vitamin C for the last 2 years... I generally drop 8-10 1500mg pills when I am in a compromising position (long haul flight, meet with sick people, feel a sore throat coming on, about to blast RRY16's Mom)... works for me...not 100% but pretty close...
Imagine Hillary being President right now. Her head would be jerking all over the place with seizures. And Bill would be raping all the interns.