

Vitamin C



"What these findings are really saying to people as we move out of the rich-food holiday season and into January is eat your fruits and vegetables," said Maret Traber, a professor in the OSU College of Public Health and Human Sciences and Ava Helen Pauling Professor at Oregon State's Linus Pauling Institute. "Eat five to 10 servings a day and then you'll get the fiber, you'll get the C, and you'll really protect your gut with all of those good things."


A patient is considered to have metabolic syndrome if he or she has at least three of the following conditions: abdominal obesity, , high blood sugar, low levels of "good" cholesterol, and high levels of triglycerides.

Findings published in Redox Biology suggest the type of eating that leads to metabolic syndrome can prompt imbalances in the , with impaired gut function contributing to toxins in the bloodstream, resulting in vitamin C depletion, which subsequently impairs the trafficking of vitamin E.


"Vitamin C actually protects vitamin E, so when you have , vitamin E is used up and vitamin C can regenerate it," Traber said. "If you don't have the vitamin C, the vitamin E gets lost and then you lose both of those antioxidants and end up in this vicious cycle of depleting your antioxidant protection."

Lipid peroxidation is the oxidative degradation of polyunsaturated fatty acids that are a major component of living cells; it's the process by which try to stabilize themselves by stealing electrons from cell membranes, causing damage to the cell.

"If there's too much fat in the diet, it causes injury to the gut," Traber said. "Bacterial cell walls can then leak from the gut and slip into circulation in the body, and they're chased down by neutrophils."


"The white blood are scrubbing with bleach and that destroys vitamin C," Traber said. "The body is destroying its own protection because it got tricked by the gut dysbiosis into thinking there was a bacterial invasion."

And without intervention, the process keeps repeating.

"People with metabolic syndrome can eat the same amount of vitamin C as people without but have lower plasma concentrations of vitamin C," Traber said. "We're suggesting that's because this slippage of bacterial cell walls causes the whole body to mount that anti-inflammatory response."



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More information: Maret G. Traber et al, The Relationship Between Vitamin C Status, the GUT-Liver Axis, and Metabolic Syndrome, Redox Biology (2018). DOI: 10.1016/j.redox.2018.101091
Citation: Metabolic syndrome patients need more vitamin C to break cycle of antioxidant depletion (2019, January 3) retrieved 18 May 2022 from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-01-metabolic-syndrome-patients-vitamin-antioxidant.html

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