Exercise in a Pill: New Benefit of Vitamin C

Yesterday we wrote about vitamin C and anxiety in high school students. Today, we’re writing about vitamin C again. This time the research is on vitamin C and cardiovascular disease in overweight people. . . . 

This study divided thirty-five overweight people into two groups: one group took 500mg of time-released vitamin C a day for three months while the other exercised by walking briskly five to seven days a week.

What the researchers wanted to know was how the two treatments would compare for their effect on a protein called endothelin-1, or ET-1 for short. ET-1 constricts blood vessels and, therefore, increases your chances of cardiovascular disease. The reason they looked at overweight people is because the blood vessels of overweight people are known to have elevated activity of ET-1. Exercise is known to decrease ET-1 activity, so, the  question was, How would vitamin C stack up?

The surprising answer was that it stacked up just fine: the relatively low dose of vitamin C reduced ET-1 casused blood vessel constriction as much as walking for exercise did.

That’s not to say that simply taking vitamin C can replace exercise, because exerise has many benefits. But it is very interesting and important for overweight people to know that vitamin C does deliver this cardiovascular benefit equally well.

American Physiologial Society 2015; 14th International Conference on Endothelin: Physiology, Pathophysiology and Therapeutics