Vitamins+exercise=bad? Since when?

May 15th, 2009 • education
Tags: chemisty, exercise, science

I came across this article at Corante detailing how “vitamins counteract benefits of exercise”. Now, I may not have done much exercising lately but 10 years ago, I was a trainer and nutritionist and I heavily preached taking vitamins to supplement exercise. Hell, all trainers, dietitians, doctors, nutritionists, and supplement companies do too! And have been for decades. What I want to know is why this new revelation might be important. I, frankly, think it’s a load of bollocks because the test subjects didn’t take recommended values of two specific vitamins, which were no doubt specially selected for the test.

Participants took 10000mg of Vitamin C (yes, a full gram) and 400 IU of vitamin E. Now, the post ends up not talking about vitamin E’s effects whatsoever for some odd reason and instead focuses entirely on vitamin C. The paper and the author — an organic chemist — suggests that vitamin C is inhibiting muscular firing and muscular oxygen production/consumption. Now, is this going to be true when someone takes the recommended value of vitamin C? The patients were taking 1000mg which is actually 1667% RDV. Truthfully, I have a feeling that this much vitamin C was the cause of the observed effects and not the fact that vitamin C itself is the sole cause. Less than 100mg is the RDV of vitamin C and while incredibly difficult to get under doses of a few hundred milligrams, I think focusing on 1000mg was overkill for the entire experiment. Scientists and trainers know that once your body can no longer absorb something, it simply excretes it. In this case, excess vitamin C would simply be sweated out or urinated out.

However, Dr. Lowe didn’t see any of these issues with this study and instead went on to say that the findings were seemingly correct and in fact validate another paper from last year regarding — again, suspiciously — vitamin C inhibiting vascular capacity and growth. I find all of this suspect given that the ingested vitamin is taken in a much higher capacity than our body is known to be able to process. Many of these points are also brought up in the comments without reply from the author. I think this type of experimentation is excellent for understanding exactly what we need and what we should be doing but not when its entire premise is flawed from the beginning. I find it also quite specious that a chemist is backing this up entirely without seeing these same flaws.