Vitamin C

It might be one of the most well-known vitamins, and for good reason - it has a lot of extremely important functions, including protecting your cells and keeping them healthy, and maintaining your skin, blood vessels, bones and cartilage. If you’re wounded, vitamin C will help with healing, and if you don’t get enough of it, you might end up with scurvy.

Your body doesn’t store vitamin C, so you need to get your hands on food that contains it every day in order to help your body maintain its most important functions and ensure your immune system is running at peak capacity:

Wound Healing: Because Vitamin C helps your body produce collagen, you need it in order to keep your skin, muscle and other tissues healthy - if you don’t have enough vitamin C, you might experience a slower rate of healing when you injure yourself, because your body can’t produce enough collagen. During a time of recovery, your pharmacist might recommend vitamin C supplements to help increase your healing speed.

Cardiovascular Health: Vitamin C might have antioxidant properties and help widen your blood vessels, which could help protect your body against heart disease, high blood pressure and hypertension. If you visit your local pharmacist for a blood pressure test, they may recommend some lifestyle changes to help with your heart health - in addition to diet and exercise, vitamin C supplements may help you keep your heart as healthy as possible.

Anemia: One of the things Vitamin C is great for is the absorption of iron, so if you suffer from iron deficiency anemia, and you’re taking iron supplements, adding a Vitamin C supplement into your routine may help you get the most out of your medication.

Where Can I Get Vitamin C?

You’ll find vitamin C in a wide variety of fruit and vegetables - as John Woodall published in his 1636 essay on the restorative effects of fresh fruit and vegetables, which he wrote in response to the accounts of sailors suffering from scurvy. A century later, James Lind demonstrated that the consumption of citrus fruit could prevent and even cure scurvy, and four decades after that, the British Navy made lemon juice a requisite for all naval voyages.

Luckily, you don’t have to drink lemon juice. You’ll find plenty of vitamin C in oranges and orange juice, and other brightly coloured produce including peppers, strawberries, blackcurrants, broccoli, brussels sprouts - and even potatoes.

If you’re ages 19 to 64, you need about 40mg of vitamin C a day, and you should be able to get it all in your daily diet - but if you’re struggling, have a chat with your local pharmacy team about bringing supplements into your diet. Your pharmacist will warn you of the dangers of taking too much vitamin C, which can cause stomach pain and diarrhoea - but as long as you’re taking less than 1,000mg per day, you should be fine.

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Before scurvy gets the better of you, check out your nearest chemist and have a chat with a friendly pharmacist to get to grips with the vitamins and minerals your body needs to work at full capacity on a daily basis.