Vitamin C Regenerates and Detoxifies Your Hormones

This is excellent news.  One thing I like about health and nutrition news these days is that findings are becoming more and more specific. Hormone health is vitally important to a sense of well-being and vigor. So reading how Vitamin C regenerates your hormones is particularly good news.  It's not just good for fighting colds, so consume more of it during your week. 

Sometimes called the 'sunshine vitamin' because it is found in high levels in citrus fruits, vitamin C has a uniquely regenerative role in hormone health and cancer prevention that has been overlooked for over twenty years!

Here is the science:

Published in 1993 in the journal Radiation Physics and Chemistry and titled, "Photo-induced regeneration of hormones by electron transfer processes: Potential biological and medical consequences," Austrian researchers explored the role that vitamin C plays in preventing the degradation of steroid hormones into toxic and cancer-promoting metabolites known as "hormone transients."  Their stated goal was "to investigate if hormone transients resulting by e.g. electron emission can be regenerated."

The molecular structure of progesterone, estrone (a form of estrogen) and testosterone is such that when exposed to differing biological and/or environmental conditions, e.g. UV light, pH, temperature, they lose electrons, becoming toxic and often carcinogenic metabolites that represent a burden on the body's eliminative capabilities. Vitamin C is a well-known electron donor, which is to say a substance that donates electrons to another compound (i.e. a 'reducing agent'). Vitamin C's ability to donate electrons can have an antioxidant effect as far as neutralizing free radicals, or as is the case with transient hormone metabolites, a structurally regenerative one.

Remarkably, vitamin C was capable of almost complete regeneration of estrone and quite significant regeneration of both progesterone (52.7%) and testosterone (58.6%). 

These experimental results have profound implications if they prove to carry over to human physiology. For instance, vitamin C may offer an alternative (or at least adjuvant and/or 'drug sparing' effect) to hormone replacement therapy, which suffers from the problem of 'feeding the deficiency,' i.e. negative feedback loops operative within our endocrine system can result in the down-regulation of endogenous steroid hormone production when exogenous forms are supplied.

Vitamin C, of course, is exceptionally safe at high doses and has hundreds of proven health benefits (view our Vitamin C health benefit database), whereas conventional chemopreventive agents for cancer, e.g. Tamoxifen, and hormone replacement therapy using animal derived and/or synthetic hormone analogs, cause a wide range of adverse health effects, including at times increased mortality.  

For additional related research you can read two previous on vitamin C's role in cancer treatment in intravenous form and vitamin C rich foods like pomegranate as an alternative to hormone replacement therapy.

Sayer Ji is the founder of GreenMedInfo.com, an author, educator, Steering Committee Member of the Global GMO Free Coalition (GGFC), and an advisory board member of the National Health Federation.