Vitamin C: the modern world’s greatest placebo?

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, nor do I have any medical knowledge or training whatsoever. But I do like to rant about things I find silly and illogical.

All right boys and girls, it’s time for another article where the Maitre d’ buys something and then greatly exaggerates the details of his purchase. What? You don’t like those articles? Well, too bad, ’cause the Chef hasn’t posted anything in forever. And frankly you’re probably getting tired of me posting old images and getting all misty-eyed as I reminisce about them.

So anyway, I’ve been getting a cold for like a week. Maybe not a cold. I don’t know what it is, actually. But my body is telling me I’m about to feel like crap, I just don’t know exactly when.

I don’t want to feel like crap, and I obviously have some advance warning, so I figure there must be something to do about it. So, among other things, I bought some of those vitamin C drops. You know, the ones they sell in the cough drop aisle, that look like cough drops, that are made by the same companies that make cough drops, but aren’t actually cough drops? Yeah, those.

I eventually realize what they are is a dosage of vitamin C equal to 100% of the recommended daily allowance. And nothing else. For those of you without the supplement facts in front of you, that’s about 60mg. That’s a little scary, because for a lot of vitamins, you don’t want to get too much. And I could eat these things like candy.

So, not seeing a warning on the bag about how many you should eat in a day or how often you should take these, I did the only sane thing a man could do. I looked it up on WebMD. Because I’d hate to eat two of these things in the course of a day and be found dead from vitamin C poisoning, not knowing the limit was one drop a day.

Turns out you have to take a crapload of vitamin C before you risk any ill effects, at least according to WebMD. I should have remembered this, because I’ve been given a crapload of vitamin C before.

The guy I used to work for in college was a bit of a health nut. He bought a lot of vitamins and herbs and such, and apparently stayed up on what they all did and how much you should take. He wasn’t one of these militant herbalists who has a vitamin/herb for every ailment known to man, but he did have a couple. And one of those was a remedy for colds.

So whenever I’d get a cold, he’d tell me I needed to take something like 2 to 3 1000mg vitamin C pills a day. They needed to be those little caplets that contained powder, too–other types of pills weren’t absorbed as easily and so you didn’t get the full 1000mg from them. For those of you keeping track at home, that’s like… well, my math’s a little off, but that’s approximately a metric farking crap-ton more than the 60mg US RDA. If you’re taking that much, I’m not sure why you’d worry about losing a couple hundred milligrams here and there by using the wrong type of pill. (Then again, this was his approach to a lot of things: more is always better.)

He assured me that vitamin C is water-soluble or something like that, so any extra vitamin C would pass through my system. Apparently this is how they treated colds for pilots back when he was in the Air Force. And apparently his brother who was some kind of doctor or something had done a study about how an excess of vitamin C is passed out through sweat or urine or something. (I’m not sure if this was the same the brother that graduated with the degree in Space Law, but it wouldn’t surprise me.)

Anyway, I’m not sure if the stories were true or not. Obviously, he knew what he was talking about when he said that you can take a lot of vitamin C without it hurting you. But from the way I saw him interact with customers, the stories could have been “little white lies” that were somehow more convincing than “trust me, I read it in this random nutrition book.”

Either way, I’m not sure it really helped me feel that much better. And the vitamin C drops didn’t really help either, even though I took like 6 yesterday. The cold has set in and I’m beginning to feel like crap.

The funny thing is, I swear that supplements like vitamin C drops exist only because vitamin C is fairly harmless. You could eat a small bag of those things and odds are it won’t kill you. It might not make you feel much better, because (despite vitamin C actually being a useful and important vitamin), there’s probably a point at which it does no further good for you. But you can safely eat a bunch and feel like you’re doing something to prevent a disease you have little control over. It’s the illusion of control.

And honestly, that seems to be the big thing in food marketing right now. Look at how many drinks and foods have a few extra vitamins or herbs in them, and then their label is plastered with their purported benefits. Pepsi Max is “envigorating cola,” Vitamin Water names it flavors for each blend’s supposed effects, and Halls Defense claims to support your immune system (despite the disclaimer that the FDA hasn’t evaluated that statement).

Not that these probably aren’t true to a degree. I would doubt, however, that their effects are large enough to make any claims about. At best, they’re probably accompanied by some sort of placebo effect. But I think the marketing angle is that we now have the technology to produce magic potions. The truth is, I think they’ve just figured out that the public wants to believe in magic potions.

Which is probably not a horrible tragedy. Certainly, this isn’t the same sort of belief that says modern medicine is a bunch of greedy liars, and is hiding the real secrets of natural remedies. (As someone who would be very dead right now without modern medicine from a disease natural remedies are powerless to cure, I find that attitude highly offensive.) While these “magic potions” may not actually be doing much, no one’s relying on them to save lives, and they probably don’t have any horrible side effects. The worst you can accuse them of is making your wallet a little bit lighter.

But both beliefs have the same sort of magical thinking at their core: there exist substances that can give us significant benefits with no practical limitations and no side effects. It’s something we desperately wish were true. It’s why fad diets are popular, and spammers can still sell miracle-cure pills.

The truth is, obviously, that such change comes only from changing a number of variables. And significant, real change only comes with some sort of sacrifice–either time, or the possibility of side effects, or effort, or by determination. Sometimes there’s no magic cure, and we just have to suffer.

That said, I think I may go back to bed in a bit. My bag of vitamin C drops is mostly empty, and I think I’ve still got quite a bit more cold to suffer through.