The Immune and Repair Booster

Vitamin C

Also known as ascorbate or ascorbic acid, vitamin C is a water-soluble vitamin found in foods, predominantly fruit and vegetables. It’s many benefits include the growth and repair of bones, skin and blood vessels.

What Vitamin C can do for you?

Vitamin C boosts your immune system, supports skin health and helps you recover from stress faster.

  • Supports your immune system
  • Helps heal wounds faster
  • Improves cardiovascular health
  • Encourages healthy skin
  • Strengthens blood vessels

The Science

Vitamin C is an essential water-soluble antioxidant involved in collagen synthesis, immune function, and adrenal health. It neutralises free radicals, supports the production of white blood cells, and enhances the body’s resilience to infection and stress. Vitamin C also aids in iron absorption and tissue repair, making it critical during times of healing or immune challenge. As a frontline nutrient, it offers rapid-acting support for the immune system and is essential for maintaining healthy skin, blood vessels, and connective tissue.

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The Studies

"At The Naked Pharmacy, we ensure that all of our supplements are made with effective strength bioactives, so they are clinically proven to work.

We aim for each supplement to be scientifically supported by multiple randomised placebo-controlled studies. All clinical trial studies we use to support our supplements are undertaken on human patients, using the same dosage and formulation of the product. The scientific studies are published in peer review journals."

The scientific studies to support our claims on aged Vitamin C are published in the following peer-reviewed journals:

Study: A critical review of Vitamin C for the prevention of age-related cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease

What the study looked at:

People have long believed that antioxidants like vitamin C can help protect the brain from damage that leads to Alzheimer’s disease and age-related memory loss. But not all studies agree on this — the results have been mixed.

Why some studies are unclear:

Many studies don’t measure actual vitamin C levels in the blood, which makes it hard to know if participants were really low or not.

Food diaries used to estimate vitamin C intake can be inaccurate.

There’s a limit to how much vitamin C the body can absorb at one time — it uses a special transporter (called SVCT1) that can only carry so much.

So, taking very high doses or extra supplements might not help as much as people think, because the body can’t always absorb more than it needs.

What the researchers concluded:

There's a lot of evidence that having healthy levels of vitamin C in the body helps protect the brain as we age.

But the real benefit comes from avoiding vitamin C deficiency, rather than taking big doses of supplements if you’re already getting enough from your diet.

Why it matters:

This review helps clarify that maintaining normal vitamin C levels — not megadosing — is key to supporting brain health and reducing the risk of cognitive decline.

Study: A comprehensive review and recent advances of vitamin C: Overview, functions, sources, applications, market survey and processes

What the paper covers:

It explains how vitamin C works, where it’s used, and how much people need each day.

Worryingly, about 40% of people in the U.S. — and many in Asia and Africa — don’t get enough vitamin C.

It also looks at new ways to deliver vitamin C (like special capsules or skincare tech) to keep it stable and effective.

Why it matters:

This review highlights the huge global demand for vitamin C, the need for better manufacturing and delivery methods, and the ongoing problem of vitamin C deficiency — even in wealthy countries.

Study: Antioxidant vitamins intake and the risk of coronary heart disease: meta-analysis of cohort studies

What the study looked at:

Researchers wanted to know if taking antioxidant vitamins like vitamin C helps lower the risk of coronary heart disease (CHD), which includes heart attacks and blocked arteries.

How they studied it:

They didn’t run a new experiment — instead, they looked at data from 15 long-term studies involving over 374,000 people. These studies followed people for 8 to 15 years to see who developed heart disease and how that related to their vitamin intake.

What they found:

People who had the highest levels of these vitamins were less likely to get heart disease compared to those with the lowest levels.

Vitamin C: 16% lower risk

Dietary vitamin C (from food) showed a protective link.

What it means:

Getting antioxidant vitamins from food — including vitamin C  — may help protect your heart.peer-reviewed

Glossary of terms:

There are a few key terms to be aware of when reviewing these studies:

Randomised Clinical Trial

A clinical trial in which the participants are assigned randomly (by chance alone) to different treatments.

Double-blind study

A study in which neither the participants nor the experimenters know who is receiving a particular treatment. This procedure is utilised to prevent bias in research results.

Double-blind studies are particularly useful for preventing bias due to demand characteristics or the placebo effect.

P-value

The probability of obtaining the observed results of a test. The lower the p-value is, the more confident we can be of a true result. For example, a p- value of 0.001 confirms a result as 99.9% accurate.

Placebo

An inactive treatment used in a clinical trial, sometimes referred to as a “sugar pill”.

A placebo-controlled trial compares a new treatment with a placebo, in order to give greater confidence that the result is only due to the test/active ingredient.