Vitamin C and COVID-19
Written By: Kelly Drane
Everyone is familiar with vitamin C. Most of us know we can get it from orange juice- which is often our go-to drink when we’re sick. Right?
We know it helps our immune system but most of us don’t really know how. We just know that if mom put it in front of us for breakfast or when we had the sniffles that we were definitely going to drink it.
Assuming you’ve already looked at the picture we posted above, you’re realizing that your whole childhood was a lie.
Just kidding. ;)
But seriously. Let’s get into it. In a meta-analysis study that over 11,000 people took part in, it was found that taking vitamin C to avoid getting sick down the road did NOT decrease people’s chances of developing a cold. However, a small subgroup of this greater population did a study to see if this was true or not in people exposed to extreme cold temperatures and exercise and found that 50% of these people had a reduction in colds by taking vitamin C preventatively. So yeah, taking vitamin C might prevent you from developing a cold later on, but only if you’re in the subarctic or training for a marathon. And that’s not even guaranteed.
There are tons of articles out there showing that taking vitamin C after cold symptoms appear can reduce the duration and severity, but there are many that disprove that. The results are, in fact, so inconsistent and minimal to begin with that no one can definitively say that taking vitamin C will help you get over your cold faster.
As far as COVID goes, there’s a lot of things up in the air. Right now, there is no evidence proving that vitamin C will protect you from getting COVID. And that makes sense- if it can’t protect you from the common cold, what makes us think it can protect us from a new deadly virus?
There have been a few studies done in the hospital where COVID patients were given a large dose of IV vitamin C and recovered more quickly than those who didn’t receive vitamin C- but we can’t take this information from one or two studies and say that vitamin C helps you get over COVID faster. That’s a “this caused that” mentality and its dangerous. Unfortunately, we need a lot more studies, with more participants, less variables, and a controlled setting for us to truly understand how vitamin C correlates with COVID.
I’m dropping the links to these studies below in case anyone wants to fact check for themselves!
Take care and be well.
Kelly
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17636648/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7553131/
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs43440-020-00176-1
