Smoking and Vitamin C Deficiency

Magpie

Magpie

Jedi
Hey y'all:

Quick query. I've been researching smoking and vitamin C deficiency (a lot of my friends are horrified that I smoke and they mean very well when they come up with studies that suggest that "just maybe perhaps" there is possibly a chance that I'm killing myself --we live in the south and so no one will say things directly-lol--) Specifically my friend "heard" that smoking created a vitamin c deficiency by prohibiting absorption.

BUT when I was trying to research this particular corelation online...I got one medical study that is really confusing, a lot of links from vitamin companies advertising their miracle "anti-smoking" vitamins, random sites suggesting that vitamin c can assist with lung development in fetuses of smoking mothers, and a stern talkin' to from webmd about smoking in general--and then when I tried to search the smoking threads on the forum (not gonna lie...have not read the Entire thing-) I cannot search: smoking, vitamin C--because each search word must have at least two letters (hence vitamin C gets booted) and "smoking, vitamin" doesn't give me exactly what I'm looking for either.

SO: please help me by suggesting different search parameters if there is a portion of the smoking thread dedicated to this topic already, or if there are some studies floating around out there that would be very helpful regarding this particular "deficiency" in smokers-I would very much appreciate it.

In discussing this particular suggested issue with my better half, our theory is that if you are eating a ketogenic diet, your mineral/vitamin absorption should be optimized anyway...and seeing as how carbs/sugars/gluten restrict proper mineral uptake so if you're a smoker and you eat those sorts of bad foods then perhaps it could lead to a deficiency but then again you'd have a deficiency whether you smoked or not so....I'm not really sure that smoking=deficiency...

And one-two-three Discuss!
 
Re: Smoking and Vitamin C Deficientcy

I don't know about studies on this matter.

But has you seem to understant, vitamin C and carbs compete for the same receptor in the body so if you are on a ketogenic diet you should absorb much more than people on a high carb diet.

Also you are probably aware that high dose supplementation of vitamin C (ascorbic acid or sodium ascorbate) could be beneficial for a lot of thing, and it's cheap.
I am a smoker and it seems that I can tolarate only little vitamin C supplement since I am on the ketogenic diet.

FWIW
Jérôme
 
Yeah magpie, your friends should be completely horrified to know that they are actually the ones with a severe vitamin C deficiency IF they are eating a diet high in carbs ;)
 
The other thing is that this sort of data usually comes from an "epidemiological study" where different groups are compared In relation with one factor. When one group does better than the other, then you have an "association" between the two. So it may be that some studies are able to show an association between smoking and vitamin C deficiency. But this in no way can be automatically translated into "smoking causes vitamin C deficiency". To be able to do this jump, you need other things, like a likely biochemical mechanism. So an epidemiological study can only ever give you a suggestion, but if you want to prove the causation, you will need to design a proper prospective controlled, preferably randomized, study.

Because the association may be due to some other unknown factor. One could argue, that smoking is related to lower socioeconomic status, and this again may cause changes in diet leading to lower levels of vitamin C. So the causative factor would really be the diet related to the socioeconomic status of the participants, and smoking is just a flag for this.

This is a problem that is very pervasive in medical research, and such "causations" are done very frequently. And then, a few years later, once the proper studies have been done, the theory falls apart completely.
 
Yup, being on a ketogenic diet reduces the need for vitamin C. I've been in ketosis for years and been smoking for decades. I don't take much vitamin C anymore - I used to take very high doses when I was eating tons of carbs. FWIW.
 
To search for Vitamin C and smoking, type "vitamin c" smoking into the search box. That's how you can bypass words being more than 1 letter.
 
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