Vitamin C is one of the most commonly taken vitamins. However, there is still a large percentage of people who don’t get enough. Vitamin C is the primary antioxidant in the body and protects it’s cells from free radical damage. In addition to that, it is also used by the body to produce collagen – an elastic substance, which makes more than 50% of your skin and blood vessels.
Long-term effects of a chronic vitamin c deficiency
Many people today are afraid of high cholesterol. Why? Because it leads to heart disease and arteriosclerosis. However, this is not the whole truth. The reason why high cholesterol is suspected to increase the chance of dying from a heart attack is simple – the cholesterol builds up on the walls of your arteries and as a result – a plaque forms. This causes blood vessels to become more and more narrow, until they barely let any blood through.
Vitamin C has a big implication in this – cholesterol doesn’t build up on the arterial walls, just because it is ‘high’. It does so in order to repair a damage in the structure of the wall. One of the most common causes of such damage is a chronic low-level deficiency of vitamin c, which in turn slows down your body’s production of collagen and other several other, vital to the circulatory system organic chemicals.