Source : Perth Now news
An Australian nutritionist is urging families to rethink vitamin C tablets and gummies this winter, warning many shoppers would be surprised by how they’re made and that they won’t prevent the common cold.
As cold and flu season bites, clinical nutritionist Angela Gioffre, who is registered with the Australian Traditional Medicine Society, said many shoppers assumed the vitamin C supplements sold in supermarkets and chemists came straight from fruit.
In reality, many standard vitamin C supplements contain ascorbic acid made through industrial manufacturing rather than vitamin C extracted directly from oranges, berries or other fruit.
“When consumers see oranges and berries on the packaging, they may naturally assume the vitamin C inside has been extracted directly from those fruits. In reality, the product is usually an isolated, industrially manufactured nutrient,” Ms Gioffre told NewsWire.
That lines up with how vitamin C is commonly made at scale.
The long-running Reichstein process and other industrial methods start with glucose and use a mix of fermentation and chemical steps to produce ascorbic acid, the form of vitamin C found in many supplements.
Some traditional methods have also used acetone as a processing aid, though not as an ingredient in the finished product.
Still, the more important point for most families is not how the tablet is made but what it leaves out.
Research published in the open-access journal Nutrients by vitamin C researchers Anitra Carr and Margreet Vissers found synthetic and food-derived vitamin C are absorbed similarly in humans, but a tablet still does not offer the same overall nutritional value as fruit.
Whole fruit gives people vitamin C along with fibre, water and a range of other nutrients and plant compounds.
The science on colds is also more limited than many people may think.
A major Cochrane review of vitamin C and the common cold found regular supplementation did not reduce how often people caught colds in the general population.
It did, however, find vitamin C could slightly shorten how long a cold lasted and make symptoms a little milder.
The review found the average cold was cut by about 8 per cent in adults and about 14 per cent in children.
“It is therefore more accurate to say that regular vitamin C supplementation may make a cold slightly shorter or milder for some people, rather than describing it as a reliable cold preventive or cure,” Ms Gioffre said.
That means vitamin C may still be useful in some cases, but it is not a fix-all for winter illness.
Health advice from bodies including the Australian Centre for Disease Control, NSW Health and SA Health continues to focus on the basics: washing hands, covering coughs and sneezes, staying home when unwell and lowering the spread of respiratory viruses.
Ms Gioffre said families should also think twice before treating vitamin gummies as a replacement for fruit.
“Gummies may also contain added sugars and acids and can be very similar to lollies. They are easy for children to overconsume and should always be stored safely,” she said.
Health experts have warned about that risk, and poison centres have reported growing concern about children overconsuming gummy vitamins, especially products that contain iron.
Rather than relying on supplements marketed as immune boosters, Ms Gioffre said parents should focus on the basics that support health over winter: enough sleep, regular meals, hydration, movement, time outdoors and a variety of foods across the week.
For fussy eaters, she recommends repeated exposure to healthy foods and building around vitamin C-rich foods a child already accepts, such as kiwifruit, mandarins, strawberries, tomatoes, broccoli or potatoes.
“There is no single food or supplement that can ‘boost’ the immune system enough to prevent every infection,” Ms Gioffre said.
Forest Super Foods founder Justin Snyder, whose company sells freeze-dried camu camu powder, said people who wanted a supplement should think about whether it came from a wholefood source rather than an isolated nutrient.
Research on freeze drying has found it can preserve nutrients better than some other drying methods, helping foods stay closer to their original profile, and wholefood powders may appeal to people looking for something closer to the original food.
“Camu camu berry on the other hand is washed and dried and sometimes put into capsules. That’s the whole process. Nothing is added, and nothing is removed. There’s no chemical processing involved,” Mr Snyder told NewsWire.
Supplements can still have a place where there is a genuine need, but they should not be seen as equal to fresh produce or as an automatic answer during cold and flu season.
