First off, as far as I know, there is no vitamin C hypothesis - I basically just made it up - but with intention; I want to make some interesting points about how I conceptualize health in the human mind and body.
Probably anyone reading this will have some notion of what vitamin C is, as in it is a vitamin that is essential to normal health. We cannot synthesize vitamin C in the body as many mammals can, so we must obtain it from the diet. Many of you may have heard of scurvy, a nasty degenerative condition of vitamin C wherein the body begins to literally disintegrate, teeth fall out, and finally if not remedied, you die. Scurvy was the scourge of sailors centuries ago who spent months at sea exploring for new land without the benefit of supplements, canned food or refrigerators. Not knowing what vitamin C was or what it did even if they did know what it is, they often subsisted on rations like salted meats that lasted far longer than foods like citrus fruits, and thus inadvertently consumed very low vitamin C diets while at sea.
An interesting thing about scurvy is that it is not a 'have it or you don't' condition. Subclinical vitamin C levels are actually quite common even in developed nations such as the US and Europe. The deficiencies are typically higher in folks with physical and mental health problems. This subclinical definition means that people, due largely to a processed food diet and high levels of oxidative stress in the body, don't eat enough vitamin C for good health, but do get enough of it to prevent full-blown scurvy. Another interesting thing is that ONLY vitamin C can cure scurvy, or the subclinical deficiency. Modern medicine, for all its marvels, cannot beat nature on this one.
So what's the point here? One is knowing something about the myriad roles vitamin C plays in human health. Besides its role in building collagen to strengthen our connective tissues as seen in the scurvy issue, it is also integral to maintaining brain chemistry, particularly with norepinephrine synthesis, which is responsible for aspects of cognition such as attention, arousal, sleep-wake cycles and memory. Vitamin C insufficiency often results in fatigue, irritability and depression-like symptoms, likely in part due to this aspect of brain chemistry, among others too complex to discuss here.
Vitamin C is also critical to immune functioning, which is also a complex topic, but there are also links between depressed immune systems and mood, although the links may be bidirectional in terms of cause-effect. Vitamin C is also critical to the absorption of non-heme iron from food, so a deficiency could contribute to anemia, which is another potential cause of depression.
In the world of cognitive neuroscience and psychology, the brain-as-computer metaphor has been used for some time to symbolize the way the brain works, i.e., as an input, processing and storage machine. Of course the human brain goes far beyond this with capacities for love, empathy, imagination and so on. However another useful angle to this metaphor is the notion of the hardware and software of the brain, which are tightly linked. The hardware could be thought of as the material brain, while the software is the nature of thinking, perception and so on. As you can see in cases of brain injury, or even more subtle cases like alcohol intoxication, small changes to the 'hardware' result in big changes to the 'software'.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the brain is its role in mind-over-matter scenarios; situations in which the brain defies the laws of science. For example, it is known that in dissociative identity disorder (DID), patients exhibit multiple, very real personalities. They are not acting these personalities out - they literally become another person. Typically this is the result of years of psychological escape from overwhelming psychological trauma and abuse - the avatar creates a world for the victim to flee to for safety when true physical safety is unavailable. These psychological changes are so real however that patients have been shown to change handedness, eye color, or have medical conditions such as diabetes in one personality but not in another.
This raises the question of where the limits to this type of simulated brain reality lie. Could stepping into another personality cure scurvy if one 'personality' had it? I doubt it, but who knows. I don't know of a case study where this has happened, and you can't ethically recreate this in a person. I'm also not sure that an alter-personality, believing that they were a world-class athlete, would suddenly be able to compete at Olympic level without training or experience. So perhaps there are hardline limits on what the software can accomplish that are imposed by the hardware limits. A severe vitamin C deficiency is probably not correctable with psychological beliefs.
My final point is that the mind is capable of far more than we assume, and the DID example points to how limited we might be by expectations, or self-limiting beliefs. The vitamin C example points out that sometimes, you absolutely HAVE to have the basic building blocks of good physical health to facilitate psychological potential. Similarly, depression and other mood disorders are not necessarily purely psychological or based on life experiences - sometimes, there are stark physical aspects that should not be ignored, otherwise healing is inhibited. If you want to be at the best version of yourself, it behooves you to look at all of the components that make up good health - nutrition, rest, sleep, exercise, relationships, mindfulness practices and so on. The hardware and software of the brain are intimately yoked together, and only by paying careful attention to both can you truly optimize your brain's, and by extension your, potential.
If you want to learn more about a holistic approach to optimal health that incorporates the cutting edge aspects of the science of psychology and its relevance for nutrition, exercise, sleep and so on, please reach out here for your free consult:)
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