Vitamin C

[banth]

Is it hamful to take too much vitamin C, and if so, how much is too much? I have been taking two 500mg tablets a day as I have a bad cold, but it says each tablet is 833% the RDA. My mum says the body doesn't absorb over a certain amount so you can't overdose, but my partner says otherwise. Can you overdose on vitamin C?

[qapmoc]

Well the rda for vitamin C is around 60Mg per day, so 1000mg is a lot and while your mum is right in theory sudden changes in your intake levels can lead to digestive upsets and fatigue etc..... It seems that nobody has yet offically died from overdose of vitamin C if that means anything.

[funnywebsite]

I don't think you can overdose on Vitamin C. Your body just flushes the excess away. Best to eat some natural vitamin C if you can.

[Englishbird]

My mum's always told me what your mum's told you! I don't think it can do you any harm, when you're ill you need more than the RDA anyway as your body is working overtime to try and put you right.

If you're feeling poorly, try taking some Echinacea and Zinc aswell. hope you feel better soon.

You can OD on vitamins A and D tho btw.

[DavidUK]

Some alternative practitioners suggest, if you are ill, increasing your vitamin c intake until you start to get diarrhoea. This would probably be several g's a day though. Certainly, 1000mg a day while you are ill won't do you any harm. It's far safer than drugs to "relieve the symptoms".

And, although it would be much better to get your c from food, most of our food is stored for so long and so processed that it doesn't have much c left by the time you eat it!

As for RDA, you can't really take much notice of that. It's the level of a vitamin that if you had less than this, over a sustained period, you would become ill. But by taking larger doses while you are ill, you are using the c therapeutically, which isn't the same thing.

Some good multivitamins and minerals might be better than c on its own, though.

[Hamish]

Vits can be classed as water or lipid (fat) soluble. Water sol vits are easily removed from the body when in excess, but not fat soluble ones. This is why vit c may be taken in high doses but not vit A (for eg). It is possible to OD on vit C, symptoms are like survy (yes, a vit c difficieny). My GP told me to take high dose vit c, similar to yours, a while back when I was run down, I was already eating about 7 pourtions of F&V! Sill going strong.