Eating Your Vitamin C
Vitamin C is an essential nutrient meaning our bodies require it but don’t produce it. We must get it from external sources, and at Live Transformed Co, we believe we were designed to get it from whole foods. So many summer foods are high in vitamin C and we especially enjoy bell peppers, cantaloupe, and strawberries, but given our daily need for this essential nutrient, God also made sure we could get it in fall, winter and spring as well in cool weather foods like citrus, kiwi, and cruciferous vegetables.
You’ve no doubt heard about vitamin C’s importance when you have a cold, but let’s look at some of the reasons this nutrient is so vital to our overall health and wellness.
Vitamin C is a water-soluble nutrient and it occurs naturally in many of the foods that God created, however you’ll often find this added to packaged foods and labeled as ascorbic acid on the ingredients list. It’s an antioxidant and helps protect our cells from damage. Antioxidant is just a fancy word that means it has the ability to block harmful free radicals in our body that would otherwise cause oxidative stress. And THAT’s a fancy way of saying, stuff going on inside us that hurts us.
Vitamin C contributes to things like protection from sun exposure and is important for wound healing. It helps us oxidize fat to convert it into energy and metabolize cholesterol (both of which are important for brain function! - and tons of other things). Our bodies need vitamin C to produce a protein known as collagen which is important for hair, skin and nails.
Vitamin C also plays a vital role in our immune function, absorption of iron, is involved in the repair of tissues and the production of neurotransmitters (how our brains communicate with our bodies), and plays a significant role in growth!
The beauty of a whole food diet, especially one that’s mindful of eating foods in season, is that you don’t have to spend so much time concerned with whether or not you’re consuming the nutrients you need.
But, if you caught our newsletter last week, you know that sometimes even with a solid diet full of organic fruits and vegetables we need an added boost! We prefer to get this added boost through whole food powders like rose hips added to smoothies, oatmeal, energy bites and more, but if supplementing becomes necessary we recommend looking for a high quality, whole food based, organic Vitamin C supplement that your body can absorb well.
Because of it’s prevalence, especially in plant foods, ingesting the Vitamin C your body requires doesn’t have to be hard, but if a whole food way of eating is new for you, or the idea of making changes to your current habits is something you’d like help with, we’d love to partner with you through coaching calls or our Mentorship program (available late summer 2024) to help you make successful, lasting changes!
