The Most Brilliant and Crazy Man You’ve Never Heard Of

The father of modern chemistry (a two-time Nobel Prize winner) is also responsible for the myth surrounding vitamin C

I’m going to start this one off differently, so bear with me…

What do you take when you get a cold? Just so we’re clear, there’s nothing out there that will cure the common cold — there are remedies that lessen the severity of symptoms and some that claim to shorten the length of symptoms, but nothing actually cures it. Perhaps you take some cough medicine or pseudoephedrine to mitigate your symptoms; these are all common actions most people take when they get a cold.

However, there is another, somewhat large school of thought that says you should completely saturate your body with vitamin C. Many of us grew up with this mindset: get a cold, drink plenty of orange juice because the vitamin C boosts your immune system, which helps you get over the cold faster. (Fun fact: there is more vitamin C per unit volume in natural red pepper juice than natural orange juice.)

Thing is, there’s no evidence that this is true. At all. Your body very tightly controls the amount of vitamin C it carries, which has a max capacity between 200–400 milligrams (mg). That’s it. Those 1000 mg packets of Emergen-C — you’re peeing out anywhere from 600–800 mg and any other vitamin C that you’d get from your food throughout the day. Yes, vitamin C absolutely is critical for…