# Vitamin C

Category: Vitamins & Minerals

Also known as: ascorbic acid, ascorbate

Vitamin C, chemically known as ascorbic acid, functions primarily as an oxidant inside the body, not an antioxidant. Peat emphasized that within cells, roughly 80% of the vitamin is in the oxidized form, dehydroascorbate (DHA), which works with oxygen to protect cellular…

11 passages · 1 author · 2012–2023 · Most-cited: [Ray Peat](https://bioenergeticoracle.com/md/voices/ray-peat/index.md)

Canonical page: https://bioenergeticoracle.com/concepts/vitamin-c

## Synthesis

**Vitamin C**, chemically known as ascorbic acid, functions primarily as an **oxidant** inside the body, not an antioxidant. [Source 6, 9] Peat emphasized that within cells, roughly 80% of the vitamin is in the oxidized form, **dehydroascorbate** (DHA), which works with oxygen to protect cellular apparatuses by guiding electrons toward elimination and preventing a *reduced state* of excess electrons. [Source 1, 6, 9] This intracellular role is catalytic, moving electrons to be consumed by oxygen and ultimately supporting carbon dioxide balance over lactic acid production. [Source 9] Standard analytic methods that measure only the reducing power of ascorbic acid are therefore blind to the vitamin's true biological activity in foods, leading to a vast underestimation of its presence in animal tissues. [Source 3, 11]

Peat argued that a proper diet rich in fruits, meat, milk, and eggs provides ample vitamin C, making supplementation unnecessary and often harmful. [Source 3, 7, 11] He personally found that after ceasing supplements, his urine contained 1,000 to 2,000 milligrams of ascorbic acid daily, extracted from foods like meat and milk where it is concentrated as DHA. [Source 3, 7] Arctic explorers demonstrated that a meat-only diet prevented scurvy, yet official nutrition charts still show no vitamin C in meat because they fail to measure the oxidized form. [Source 1, 11] Peat stated that all foods except grains, beans, and nuts are very good sources, and a good human diet properly analyzed contains 3,000 to 4,000 milligrams daily. [Source 3, 8, 11]

Peat's personal history with synthetic ascorbic acid revealed a stark divergence in effects based on manufacturing era. In 1953, taking 50 mg tablets of "cevitamic acid" permanently cured his chronic poison oak allergy. [Source 2, 4] However, around 1956, new cheap manufacturing processes using sulfuric acid contaminated with **heavy metals** like lead and iron produced 500 mg tablets that immediately triggered allergy symptoms, a sore throat, and a chronic cough. [Source 2, 4, 5] A free radical chemist later demonstrated that dissolving reagent-grade synthetic ascorbic acid in distilled water generated a concentration of free radicals equivalent to a *killing dose of x-rays*, catalyzed by trace heavy metal contaminants. [Source 2, 5, 8, 10] Peat found that as little as two to three milligrams of the synthetic substance could provoke an inflammatory reaction, while consuming gallons of orange juice or other high-vitamin C foods caused no such issues. [Source 5, 7]

The danger of commercial ascorbic acid lies in its action as a powerful **reductant** that can donate potentially toxic excess electrons, especially when combined with endotoxin in the intestine, setting up massive inflammation. [Source 1, 6, 10] Peat noted that the oxidized DHA form obtained from food does not carry this risk, as it is already in the state the cell requires. [Source 1, 6] He also observed that many people allergic to synthetic ascorbate reacted similarly to riboflavin and rutin, which were manufactured from cornstarch by oxidation, suggesting a common industrial contaminant, likely heavy metals introduced with sulfuric acid. [Source 2] Linus Pauling dismissed Peat's concerns about contamination and allergenicity, but Peat maintained that the only clean and safe vitamin C is that found in fresh, whole foods. [Source 2, 3]

## People also ask

### How does vitamin C act as an oxidant inside the body?

Peat argued that about 80% of intracellular vitamin C exists as dehydroascorbate, an oxidized form that works with oxygen to guide electrons toward elimination, preventing a reduced state of excess electrons and supporting carbon dioxide balance over lactic acid production.

### Why did Peat consider synthetic ascorbic acid supplements dangerous?

Peat found that after 1956, synthetic ascorbic acid was often contaminated with heavy metals from manufacturing, which could catalyze free radical generation equivalent to a killing dose of x-rays and provoke inflammatory reactions even in milligram amounts.

### How can a meat-only diet prevent scurvy if nutrition charts show no vitamin C in meat?

Peat explained that standard tests measure only the reducing power of ascorbic acid and miss the oxidized dehydroascorbate form concentrated in animal tissues, so meat and milk actually provide ample vitamin C when properly analyzed.

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## Cited passages

Passage numbers match the `[Source N]` markers in the synthesis above.

### Source 1 — One Radio Network: Ray Peat with Patrick Timpone — December 21, 2020

Ray Peat · Interview · Dec 21, 2020

> **Patrick Timpone:** On the vitamin C, do I recall that you're not a big fan of using just ascorbic acid or sodium ascorbate?
>
> **Ray Peat:** Yeah, because of that reduction. It's a powerful reductant. And what you want to do is get it into your cells in an oxidized form. without pushing the growth of cancer cells, for example, or starting a process of inflammation. Once it gets into the cells, about 80% of vitamin C is in the form of dehydroascorbate. And that means that eating meat, the animal's vitamin C that it makes, is in all of its tissues, including the muscles, and at least 70% to 85% of it will be in the invisible oxidized form, DHA. And so when you're eating meat, you're taking in lots of vitamin C, and still the official... Department of Agriculture charts don't show any vitamin C content for meat, even though Amundsen, was that his name, the Arctic Explorer, showed that they did fine if they ate meat all winter, didn't get scurvy.
>
> **Patrick Timpone:** How many oranges would we need a day to get plenty of vitamin C?
>
> **Ray Peat:** Oh, the anti... A scurvy dose is only about one orange a day is enough. But for general health, it's fine to eat 20 a day.

### Source 2 — Ray Peat Email Advice Depository — Post 941

Ray Peat · Email · Dec 19, 2022

> **Ray Peat:** The alteration of production processes in vitamin E manufacture when the evil soybean monopoly bought the industry from Eastman Chemical is analogous to what happened earlier in the vitamin C industry, as profits were maximized. The dramatic vitamin C studies in the 1930s often used only 15 or 25 milligrams per day. In 1953, my first experience with it (which was still sold as "cevitamic acid")involved 50 mg per day, and over a period of just 2 or 3 days, my chronic awful poison oak allergy disappeared. Up until this time, it was still too expensive to sell in large doses. Around 1955 or '56, new manufacturing methods made it cheap (and, for some reason, the name changed from cevitamic to ascorbic) and the average tablet went up to 500 mg. The first time I tried the new form, around 1956, I developed allergy symptoms within a couple of days. Over the next 20 years, my own increased sensitivity to synthetic ascorbate led me to look for such reactions in others. The same people who reacted to it often reacted similarly to riboflavin and rutin, which were also made from cornstarch by oxidation. I ascribed the reaction to some industrial contaminant that they had in common, possibly the heavy metals introduced with the sulfuric acid. The heavy metal contamination of synthetic ascorbate is so great that one 500 mg tablet dissolved in a liter of water produces free radicals at a rate that would require a killing dose of x-rays to equal. The only clean and safe vitamin C now available is that in fresh fruits, meats, etc. The commercial stuff is seriously dangerous.

### Source 3 — Ray Peat Email Advice Depository — Post 562

Ray Peat · Email · Nov 8, 2019

> **Question:** [Where Does Ray Stand On The "Ascorbic Acid Is Not Vitamin C" Claim?]
>
> **Ray Peat:** I found that many people are highly allergic to commercial ascorbic acid , reacting intensely to as little as a milligram or two, while they have no reaction to natural foods containing large amounts of ascorbate. When I hadn’t been taking vitamin C supplements for a few months, I analyzed my uring and found that it contained about 1000 milligrams per day. I found that much of the vitamin C in food, for example in meat, is in the form of dehydroascorbate, which isn’t visible to the standard analytic methods that depend on the reducing power of the vitamin. As muscle metabolizes, some of the dehydroascorbate that it contains is reduced to ascorbic acid, and some of that is lost in the urine. When I stopped eating grains, beans, and nuts, the amount of vitamin C in my urine increased considerably. Properly analyzed, a good human daily diet contains 3000 to 4000 mg of vitamin C. Linus Pauling was unaware of the importance of the dehydro- form of the vitamin in food, and he denied that the commercial ascorbic acid could be allergenic. A free radical chemist found that reagent grade ascorbic acid contained enough heavy metals, including iron, to catalyze the formation of an extremely high concentration of free radicals when it’s dissolved in distilled water. Traces of oxidation products, such as those formed when a solution of glucose is heat sterilized, probably account for the allergic reactions. Szent-Gyorgyi recognized the identity of vitamin C as ascorbic acid, though the first names he proposed for it were ignose and godnose. [references]

### Source 4 — One Radio Network: Great Monthly Talk with Ray Peat PhD (August 17, 2020)

Ray Peat · Interview · Aug 17, 2020

> **Ray Peat:** I had my own long-term experience with vitamin C. Starting in 1953, at the time, it was sold as cevitamic or C-vitamic acid, but it was still the ascorbic acid discovered partly by Albert Santorci. I had heard about the virtues of it, It was sold in 50 milligram tablets. And I had, for many years, from the age of eight, the first time I spent any time in the woods, I was extremely susceptible to poison oak. And working in the woods in 1953, I... was almost incapacitated by extreme poison oak. And someone told me about vitamin C. I took, I think it was just one or two of these 50 milligram tablets over the weekend and had no more poison oak. reactions ever again in my life.
>
> **Patrick Timpone:** Wow.
>
> **Ray Peat:** A slight itch if I handle it, but those 100, 150 milligrams over a weekend had that absolute effect. So when the big tablets came out in 1956, 500 milligram tablets, someone, people were talking about it as preventing colds. I took one tablet. Next morning, woke up with a sore throat in the car.
>
> **Patrick Timpone:** You did? Just one 500 milligrams of vitamin C?

### Source 5 — One Radio Network: Great Monthly Talk with Ray Peat PhD (August 17, 2020)

Ray Peat · Interview · Aug 17, 2020

> **Patrick Timpone:** What could be in some of these things, vitamin C and other supplements as we know them, that could be causing the allergic thing? Just extra things, extras that they put in there?
>
> **Ray Peat:** No, something was happening in the substance itself. A chemist, a free radical chemist, published an article describing taking... chemically the purest form of synthetic ascorbic acid that was available not from a tablet but straight from the it was called reagent grade and putting 500 milligrams in a liter of distilled water then putting it in an apparatus that detects free radicals and the apparatus showed that Nothing but the pure vitamin C and the pure water was producing the concentration, a steady production of free radicals that a killing dose of x-rays would have produced shining on the water. And he said, isn't that amazing that a person can swallow this and their stomach isn't killed? the way the x-ray produced radicals would kill it. He said that shows something about our tissue defenses.
>
> **Patrick Timpone:** So it's not the vitamin C itself. I mean, obviously, we get good stuff with oranges and fruit. It's the way that this stuff is made in the lab.

### Source 6 — One Radio Network: Great Monthly Talk with Ray Peat PhD (August 17, 2020)

Ray Peat · Interview · Aug 17, 2020

> **Ray Peat:** When it's attached to a molecule like that, that's fine. It isn't a reactive free radical. But when something like ferrous iron is in the cell contacts water, it creates a free hydroxyl radical. An attached hydroxyl radical is part of everything normal, like sugar is full of attached hydroxy particles. And inside the cell, about a ratio of 8 to 1 of the vitamin C isn't in the form of ascorbic acid at all. The cell turns it into dehydroascorbate. And so about probably 80 or 85% of the vitamin C in our bodies doesn't show up in a test. So it gives people the impression that meat and seafood And some plants don't contain any vitamin C when it's actually there in the form of dehydroascorbate. And dehydroascorbate works like oxygen to protect against the excess electrons. So if you take in a huge amount of any reducing material, which could be ascorbic acid or the various things that have been advertised as supplements, antioxidant supplements. Those contribute potentially toxic electrons that can produce the hydroxyl radical if they reach an excess level in your stomach and bloodstream. because where they're really going to do their work is inside the cell in the oxidized form. Many of the flavonoid chemicals in oranges, for example, and guavas and vegetables and fruits, the colored yellow pigmented or orange pigmented chemicals molecules. Historically, they've been called antioxidants like vitamin C, but like dehydroascorbate, when they get in the cell, they are functioning as oxidants working with oxygen to defend you against the stress-induced free radical excess electrons.

### Source 7 — One Radio Network: Health of the Human Body

Ray Peat · Interview · Mar 19, 2019

> ## Vitamin C: Synthetic vs. Natural
>
> **Patrick Timpone:** Is there anything you take regularly to hedge your bets?
>
> **Ray Peat:** I have stopped using any nutritional supplement orally. I found that I could consume gallons of orange juice—huge amounts of vitamin C—without issue. But the smallest amount of a vitamin C supplement gave me a bad cough, intestinal inflammation, and headaches. When I stopped taking it, those symptoms went away. It would take only about 2 milligrams of synthetic ascorbic acid to make me sick, whereas I could consume 4,000 milligrams of ascorbic acid in natural food forms.
>
> **Patrick Timpone:** So you don't feel it's necessary to supplement vitamin C?
>
> **Ray Peat:** No. After I stopped taking it, I checked how much ascorbic acid was coming out in my urine. I was excreting between 1,000 and 2,000 milligrams daily. I was extracting vitamin C from meat and milk. Nutrition charts show meat has very little ascorbic acid, but the same molecule in the oxidized form—dehydroascorbate—is concentrated in the cells. In the cells, ascorbic acid acts as an essential oxidant. We get this form in meat, eggs, and milk.

### Source 8 — Acidity and Alkalinity

Ray Peat · Interview · Mar 16, 2012 · http://l-i-g-h-t.com/files/herb-doctors-acidity-X-alkalinity.mp4

> **Ray Peat:** Yeah. And some experimenters in the naturally carbonated mineral springs found that people were absorbing carbon dioxide through their skin. Even though their body changed a lot of carbon dioxide, the body has such an affinity for it that it will soak up the mineral water against the gradient as if we had pumps in our skin.
>
> **Herb Doctor:** So it's going from a low concentration to a high concentration.
>
> **Ray Peat:** Yeah. It's a matter of solubility. The enzymes turn from the bicarbonate into a gaseous carbon dioxide form which dissolves in our fats and cells.
>
> **Herb Doctor:** A person was talking purporting the use of ascorbate at the rate of up to 130 grams per day. And it was 9 parts ascorbate and 1 part ascorbate acid and it was supposed to be keeping certain types of cancer from growing and actually causing some to regress. Did you know much about it, because it's vitamin C but I understand the processing for these things is less than desirable.
>
> **Ray Peat:** They keep changing the technology. I don't know exactly what they're doing now but as recently as about ten years ago, a free radical chemist dissolved a gram of pure powdered ascorbic acid in a liter of distilled water and found that there were enough heavy metals in that purified vitamin C to produce as many free radicals as a killing dose of x-rays would have produced.

### Source 9 — Ray Peat and Bud Weiss on Ketogenic Diets

Ray Peat · Interview · Aug 22, 2023 · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g8jDAXIsY0

> **Bud Weiss:** Okay, well in terms of just what you're just speaking about, as you know I'm sure, Linus Pauling got really huge on vitamin C, and it's interesting that the NIH never gave him $50,000, which is all he was asking for, to do research on the importance of vitamin C. But how do you see his notion about i think he was talking about 10 000 milligrams of vitamin c a day and he didn't care what kind it was he just said you know they get the cheapest you can how would that play a part in what you were just talking about in terms of that
>
> **Ray Peat:** Robert Cathcart advocated taking vitamin C to bowel tolerance and I said well laxatives are good especially for cancer patients and bowel tolerance means cathartic effect and I think that's a big part of those huge doses of oral vitamin C but the metabolic effect of vitamin C it is as an oxidant since it's in the dehydro oxidized form inside the cell It's really functioning primarily as an oxidant, protecting the various apparatuses of the cell by keeping them. They're folding, conformation, everything is regulated by whether they're oxidized or reduced. And so the oxidized state of vitamin C is one of the essential things for keeping the electrons guided away from disruption and towards the oxygen elimination.

### Source 10 — Safe Supplements with Ray Peat [Generative Energy #31]

Ray Peat · Interview · Jul 19, 2020

> ## Contamination and Manufacturing Issues
>
> **Danny Roddy:** Do you suspect these substances are made in a cheap way that poses risks?
>
> **Ray Peat:** When Vitamin C was first on the market up until 1953 or '54, it was sold in very small 50-milligram tablets. That was during the time when all of the classical amazing results were published. I think that was because it was free of contaminants. The new cheap way of making it from glucose involved sulfuric acid, which was almost always contaminated with lead. Over the decades, there have been chemical innovations for making it even more cheaply, but each introduces some kind of chemical adulterant. In the *Journal of Free Radical Biology* in the late '90s, someone published a study of reagent-grade, high-purity ascorbic acid. They dissolved a gram in a liter of distilled water and measured it in an electron spin analyzer. The researcher said that spontaneously, upon dissolving, the content of free radicals was as high as would have been produced by a killing dose of x-rays. He said it was amazing this amount of free radicals didn't kill the intestines. It was apparently from traces of heavy metals like iron.

### Source 11 — One Radio Network: Ray Peat with Patrick Timpone — September 21, 2021

Ray Peat · Interview · Sep 21, 2021

> **Patrick Timpone:** 3,000, okay.
>
> **Ray Peat:** So apes, for example, eating lots of vegetables and occasional bugs and slugs and things are getting as much vitamin C as a goat, which can make its own vitamin C. So there's no need to supplement if you don't. eat the vitamin C free foods such as grains and nuts and beans.
>
> **Patrick Timpone:** Because they'll dispense vitamin C out of the body? They'll get rid of it?
>
> **Ray Peat:** No, those simply don't have any. But milk, for example, and meat is a major source of vitamin C that the explorers found that they didn't have to take lemons or canned fruit with them when they were spending months in the Arctic. If they ate meat, because they proved that meat was a very good source of vitamin C, it turns out that all animal tissues contain lots of vitamin C, but they were simply not measuring the right material. Vitamin C, the reductant, is not the biologically effective intracellular vitamin C. It's the dehydroascorbate. It functions as an oxidant, not an antioxidant in our cells. And You have to use a different procedure for measuring the oxidant form of vitamin C, which is intracellular. And so if you use the wrong technique, you're simply blind to the amount of actual vitamin C effect in our foods. And all the official agencies are still deliberately... staying blind to the amount of vitamin C in their diet.

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