When you’re trying to stop an impending cold, walk through the aisles of any pharmacy and you’ll come across a range of options—from over-the-counter remedies to cough drops and herbal teas to vitamin C powders.
The belief that vitamin C can help you stave off a bad cold has existed for decades, but it has since been proven false. That said, vitamin C can help relieve colds in other ways. Here’s what you need to know.
“Nobel Laureate Dr. Linus Pauling famously claimed in the 1970s that high doses of vitamin C could prevent the common cold,” said Mike Sevilla, a family physician in Salem, Ohio.
But Pauling has little evidence to support his claims. The basis for his argument came from a single study of a sample of children in the Swiss Alps, which he then generalized to the entire population.
“Unfortunately, follow-up studies have shown that vitamin C does not protect against the common cold,” Seville said. However, this misunderstanding persists.
“In my family clinic, I see patients from different cultures and backgrounds who are aware of the use of vitamin C for the common cold,” Seville said.
So if you’re healthy, feeling well, and just trying to prevent colds, vitamin C won’t do you much good. But if you’re already sick, that’s another story.
But if you want to cut down on cold time, you may need to exceed the recommended dietary allowance. The Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences recommends that adults consume 75 to 90 mg of vitamin C per day. To combat that cold, you need more than double the amount.
In a 2013 review, from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, researchers found evidence from multiple trials that participants who regularly took at least 200 mg of vitamin C over the course of the trial had faster rates of cold. Compared with the placebo group, adults taking vitamin C had an 8% reduction in cold duration. Children saw an even bigger decrease – a 14 percent decrease.
In addition, the review found that, as Seville said, vitamin C can also reduce the severity of colds.
You can easily get 200 mg of vitamin C from one small papaya (about 96 mg) and one cup of sliced red bell peppers (about 117 mg). But a quicker way to get a larger dose is to use a powder or supplement, which can give you as much as 1,000 mg of vitamin C in a single packet—that’s 1,111 to 1,333 percent of your recommended daily intake.
If you plan on taking so much vitamin C per day for an extended period of time, it’s worth discussing with your doctor.
Post time: Jun-02-2022