Diabetes - Why Vitamin C is important
Diabetes has become a veritable epidemic in the affluent Western world. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 20.8 million persons in the United States, or about 7 percent of the population, has diabetes, although the illness had been diagnosed in only about two thirds of these people.
Some say that diabetes is an incurable disease - Amputee Coalition of America
The problem is one of glucose metabolism, says Beldeu Singh, and the major problem, apart from a widespread over-consumption of sugars, is that in the presence of excess free radical activity, glucose is transformed into sorbitol. Normally, sorbitol is then transformed into fructose, which our bodies can use. In the presence of free radicals however, sorbitol degrades into toxic metabolites.Pharmaceutical drugs turn our bodies into an environment of high free radical activity. So widespread (pharmaceutical) drug use may very well have something to do with the epidemic of impaired glucose metabolism we see. Antioxidants counter-act free radical activity, but our stores of vitamin C, the antioxidant par excellence, are soon depleted and the recommended 60 to 180 milligrams are insufficient to turn the situation around. It is tempting to say that what we see is actually an epidemic of vitamin C deficiency, rather than an epidemic of diabetes.
Beldeu Singh has written down the information on metabolic pathways involving sugars and insulin in his article
Diabetes - A Glucose Metabolism Problem
(PDF available here)Some extracts relevant to the discussion of vitamin C:
Part of the problem biochemistry in diabetics starts with reduced ability of insulin to bind at its receptor sites on cell surfaces. Oxidatively damaged insulin molecules cannot bind to their receptor sites to facilitate the entry of glucose into the cells where it is routed into the pathway to yield energy. Instead, sorbitol accumulation takes place in the cells of diabetic patients, known to be associated with chronic complications in diabetic patients. A high dose vitamin C (2000mg per day) has been shown to reduce the accumulation of sorbitol. The antioxidant vitamin C is known to suppress the polyol pathway activity induced by high glucose but why are such high doses necessary? In plasma, ascorbate maintains its antioxidant activity, even at very high concentrations. In most species, cells in the liver produce L-ascorbic acid from metabolism of glucose through the glucoronic pathway. In man, however, the absence of one enzyme in that pathway necessitates the dietary intake of a micronutrient, termed vitamin C, to prevent scurvy and oxidative stress that relates to insulin and its ability to bind at its receptor sites on the cell surface.The key factor in L-ascorbic acid dietary intake is the fact that vitamin C entry into cells is insulin mediated and consequently, diabetics do not have sufficient L-ascorbic acid in their cells. This chronic deficiency of vitamin C within the cells in diabetic patients despite adequate intake as per normal standards does not help them as much as a very high intake and the prolonged deficiency of vitamin C in the diabetic is problematic and leads to vascular disorders, elevated blood cholesterol and depression of the immune system.
High doses of L-ascorbic acids and a broad range of dietary antioxidants become important to initiate biological repair to improve healthy biochemistry. Recent studies reveal that high dose vitamin C, alone can provide an effective means of correcting sorbitol accumulation than current pharmaceutical approaches. The role of L-ascorbic acid may lie in its ability to inhibit aldose reductase as well as its ability as an antioxidant to drive the antioxidant-driven pathway that converts sorbitol into fructose by promoting the activity of sorbitol dehydrogenase. The polyol pathway is a two-step metabolic pathway in which glucose is reduced to sorbitol, which is then converted to fructose.
And again, you can get and read the whole article here.
Other articles by the same author available on this site are listed here (scroll down to find the listing)...
posted by Sepp Hasslberger on Tuesday September 9 2008
URL of this article:
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2008/09/09/diabetes_why_vitamin_c_is_important.htm
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