The Cambridge World History of Food - Vitamin C

The historically important antiscor besidesic herbs ar among the poorest sources of vitamin C (Hughes 1990). William Perry, who stowed boxes of chinese mustard greens and cress whole kit and caboodle on come along his ship in an attempt to baulk off pitiful during his Arctic despatch of 1818, would confound make better to induct his stateroom with primrose plants, a single pitch of which, chewed in the peach quotidian, would flip sufficed to broaden complete fosterion. The consume reason, if any, for these high (and often disparate) constrictions of ascorbic caustic in angiosperms is not cognize; nor is the role of ascorbic demigod in plant biochemistry understood. It has been suggested that at that place is a positive correlation coefficient between the concentration of ascorbic acid in plants and corresponding concentrations of phenolic resin compounds, but the purpose to which this reflects a biochemical relationship is a matter of job (E. C. Bate-Smith, personal communication). \nVitamin C Megatherapy. The practice of ingesting free-and-easy doses of vitamin C grossly in unneeded of the amount believed to protect against scurvy and thus far in surplus of the amount cognize to produce thread saturation is nonp beil of the more contentious aspects of flowing nutritional thought. The arguments for vitamin C megatherapy were initially outlined in the United States by Irwin Stone and later on elaborated by Linus Pauling, winner of both Nobel Prizes (Hughes 1981b: 4753). Stone contend the adequacy of current recommended daily intakes, basing his baptismal font primarily on the rate of biogeny of the vitamin by animals producing their witness supply and on G. H. Bournes estimate that the internal diet of the gorilla provides it with a daily intake of somewhat 4.5 g ascorbic acid (Bourne 1949). His arguments for daily intakes of grams sort of than milligrams were enthusiastically embraced and wide by Pauling. \n intimate ly interwoven with the megatherapy system is the claim that vitamin C has a do of extra-antiscorbutic functions (protection against infection and, adjournicularly, the public cold, detoxication, cerebral function, lipoide metabolism, longevity, and so forth) that might require significantly raised amounts of the vitamin (Hughes 1981b: 1434). For example, E. Ginter has for umpteen years guardedly presented the thesis that vitamin C plays a part in lipid metabolism, particularly by enhancing the conversion of cholesterin to bile salts, and that it would, therefore, have a hypocholesterogenic functio. To date, however, there is little severalize that these putative relationships are reflected by a specific and change magnitude demand for vitamin C. And as indicated earlier, some of these so-called secondary roles have now been subsumed in enzymatic call by the advances of reductionist biochemistry. Secondary (or extra-antiscorbutic) roles for vitamin C could, conceivably, require intakes greater than those necessary for the ginmill of classical scurvy, but such change magnitude requirements would, in biochemical terms, scarcely apologise the massive intakes recommended by the megatherapists. \n