Why, you are absolutely right!! By this time other compensatory
mechanisms have had a chance to replace the actions of the
missing Vitamin C. We can surely count the ways. We tend to
consume less fruits and vegetables, we tend to cook what we
do eat, we "warm it up" if it's a leftover, 27% or so still smoke,
obesity levels are at an all-time high, sedentary lifestyles have
become the norm, "supersize me" has become wonderfully
prophetic, glutathione, the major tissue antioxidant diminishes
with age, and you in your naivete assure yourself and others that
our bodies have certainly developed compensatory mechanisms
for making up for the deficient Vitamin C.
That's fine. You could probably note how the ascorbate gets
oxidized into dehydroascorbic acid (DHA) and then glutathione
comes along to reconvert DHA back to C; but then the glutathione
is oxidized. But then we throw in lipoic acid, in its reduced form,
which can then regenerate oxidized glutathione, and NADH can
regenerate oxidized lipoic acid.
But you didn't come in to discuss biochemistry, you came in to
suggest that surely over these many years, the body has developed
ways of compensating. Yep, you're right. There are ways. That are
relatively effective.
Too bad that there are still too many people that are tired of being
tired,
and don't know what to do about it. Dealing with the oxidative
stresses is
one of those ways. Think they are being effective at that with their
diet
soft drinks? High phosphoric acid and they wonder why their bones are
disintegrating, high caffeine to give them a big physiologic sugar
load,
and cause steady central nervous system activation, along with being
fattening (isn't that ironic?) by driving the sugars up, so they can
go
into the tissue for CNS-driven activity, and then if they don't get
used
they get stored as fat. Kinda neat how such a descriptive word as
"diabesity" has come along. And how the fast-food places generally
only have caffeinated 'diet' drinks.
But anyway, you were telling how "simple minded generalisations about
human vit C needs should be treated with caution." And I completely
agree with that simple-minded reminder. That's why I say things 'might
be considered', because whatever gets done needs to be well-researched
by the person considering it.
On May 18, 6:34 am, Chris Malcolm <c...@holyrood.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> In alt.support.diabetes Michael B <baugh...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
> > National Science Foundation Council on Animal Nutrition advocated
> > 50mg/kg Vitamin C per day for nonhuman primates. Humans might
> > want to take that advice, too.
> > For those not aware, there are 2.2lbs/kg. So a 220 pound person
> > would be 100 kilograms, and it would be reasonable to be getting
> > 5 grams of Vitamin C per day, to deal with oxidative stress.
>
> That would be a reasonable supposition had not humans evolved a number
> of other mechanisms to replace the actions of the missing vit C. The
> ability to manufacture vit C has been absent from the human genome for
> long enough that such compensatory adjustments should be expected,
> although not long enough to expect them to have become perfected. So I
> would suggest that simple minded generalisations about human vit C
> needs should be treated with caution.
>
> --
> Chris Malcolm c...@infirmatics.ed.ac.uk DoD #205
> IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
> [http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/] 
Iron Restriction For Health 
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