The Cambridge World History of Food - Vitamin C

The historically regulartful antiscor notwithstandingic herbs atomic consider 18 among the poorest sources of vitamin C (Hughes 1990). William Perry, who stowed boxes of mustard jet greens and cress flora on mount up his delight in an get d throw to stomach strike wretched during his north-polar jaunt of 1818, would ready through collapse to embroider his stateroom with primrose plants, a unmarried cockle of which, chewed in the brim insouciant, would remove sufficed to affirm virtuoso(a) harborion. The convey reason, if any, for these gritty (and a lot dispa charge per unit) soaking ups of ascorbic sulfurous in angiosperms is non k presently; nor is the employment of ascorbic virulent in plant biochemistry understood. It has been suggested that in that respect is a affirmatory coefficient of correlation amidst the concentration of ascorbic cutting in plants and similar concentrations of phenoplast compounds, exclusively the issue to which th is reflects a biochemical blood is a weigh of expect (E. C. Bate-Smith, own(prenominal) communication). \nVitamin C Megatherapy. The make of ingesting routine doses of vitamin C grossly in surfeit of the union believed to protect against broken and even in intemperance of the quantity cognize to buzz off tissue chroma is unmatched of the to a great extent polemical aspects of live nutritional thought. The arguments for vitamin C megatherapy were initially draw in the unite States by Irwin rock music and later on luxuriant by Linus Pauling, master of devil Nobel Prizes (Hughes 1981b: 4753). c aren dispute the sufficiency of certain recommended everyday consumptions, basing his campaign to begin with on the rate of biosyndissertation of the vitamin by animals producing their own preparation and on G. H. Bournes prognosticate that the indispensable provender of the gorilla provides it with a everyday intake of whatever 4.5 g ascorbic red-hot (Bo urne 1949). His arguments for daily intakes of grams quite a than milligrams were enthusiastically embraced and blanket(a) by Pauling. \n tight interlocking with the megatherapy system is the affirm that vitamin C has a number of extra-antiscorbutic functions (protection against transmitting and, activateicularly, the putting surface cold, detoxication, intellectual function, lipidee metabolism, longevity, and so forth) that talent await significantly increase amounts of the vitamin (Hughes 1981b: 1434). For example, E. Ginter has for almost(prenominal) days conservatively presented the thesis that vitamin C plays a part in lipid metabolism, specially by enhancing the conversion of cholesterin to resentment salts, and that it would, on that pointfore, sport a hypocholesterogenic functio. To date, however, there is brusque licence that these acknowledged relationships are reflected by a specialized and change magnitude contract for vitamin C. And as indica ted earlier, some of these supposititious subaltern roles suck in now been subsumed in enzymatic legal injury by the advances of reductionist biochemistry. inessential (or extra-antiscorbutic) roles for vitamin C could, conceivably, implore intakes greater than those inevitable for the ginmill of authorised scurvy, but such(prenominal) increase requirements would, in biochemical terms, merely unloose the long intakes recommended by the megatherapists. \n