Studies by researchers at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts observed that low levels of vitamin C leads to elevated cholesterol levels which has been shown to dramatically increase the risk for heart disease. They also discovered that when more vitamin C is consumed, cholesterol levels declined! Blood levels of vitamin C and HDL (healthy cholesterol) were tested in 1,372 men and women. Those who had the highest levels of vitamin C in their blood had 10 percent more HDL ("good" cholesterol) than those with the lowest vitamin C levels.
In a study at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston, 138 men and women ages 20 to 65 took 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C a day for eight months. According to Paul Jacques, Sc. D, an epidemiologist and author, “We saw significant increases in HDL cholesterol - an average of 7 percent - among those volunteers who started with low levels of vitamin C in their blood”. More than half of the adults in the United States who don’t take supplements containing vitamin C have low levels of vitamin C in their blood, according to Robert A. Jacob, Ph.D., a research chemist in micronutrients at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Western Human Nutrition Research Center in San Francisco.
Researchers who are following up on these studies for the Baltimore Longitudinal Study on Aging (National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, Maryland) agree. The Baltimore researchers measured blood levels of vitamin C in 316 women and 511 men between the ages of 19 and 95. The researchers found that the more vitamin C people got, the higher their HDL - but only up to a point. The study indicated that women who took 215 milligrams a day and men who took 346 milligrams a day increased their bodies’ HDL to maximum levels.
The inescapable conclusion is that vitamin C does what statins do - lowers cholesterol -- without side-effects*. If the statin drugs were patterned after Vitamin C, they lack many other benefits of the vitamin. For example, vitamin C promotes the production of coenzyme Q10.
It is interesting that in addition to vitamin C, our bodies require many B vitamins to synthesize CoQ10. Voluminous research has found beneficial effects from ascorbic acid supplementation similar to the effects found from smaller dose CoQ10 supplementation.
Every human body makes up to 500 mg of CoQ10 daily; no human body can make vitamin C. As important as CoQ10 is for health, vitamin C is more important, perhaps an order of magnitude. The fact is that most mammals synthesize ten times more vitamin C than they do CoQ10 when adjusted for body weight.
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