Magical thinking and irrational ideas concerning health

[Serpentine]

My apologies - I didn't mean to be misleading. It's just that I'm tired of all the scaremongering (had an argument with a fructose alarmist earlier so I'm a little cranky) particularly with vaccination.



My reply to both your and Serpentine's points, is that taking that point of view means that doing anything is a potential health risk - it's all a matter of evaluating the acceptable risk.

You need considerable ingestion over an extended period for Vitamin C to cause a health risk, such that barring any other underlying conditions, you would have to be taking silly amounts orally on a daily basis. If you'd like me to look up this value, I can.

Here's a fun fact: water fails the occupational exposure limits for hazardous chemicals*, which used to be defined as ingestion of 100 times the daily exposure in a single dose should produce no adverse side effects - 100 times the recommended total daily intake of water is 370 litres, which simply isn't physically possible.

Does that mean you should stop drinking water as it's a health risk?

*This is a silly example if it isn't obvious - OELs are now defined on a case by case basis but water does have a oral LD50 of 90ml/kg: link.

This is an amusing opposition, since my only issue is that, simply, you made a declaration ("Vitamin C is harmless") that is simply factually incorrect, and the main time the risk of Vitamin C poisoning has been a real issue was in a case that exactly fits in with this thread: There was a fad for "macrodoses" or "maxidoses" or something like that (I forget, and it's been a while since I read it) of Vitamin C, where people were encouraged to consume huge amounts as a miracle cure-all. A lot of people had some pretty serious medical problems, including some deaths, as a result.
No, I'm not saying that means everyone should stop using Vitamin C, and your insinuation to that effect is pure strawmanning and pretty ridiculous since we're not even in opposition here. It just means that, well, just about anything is bad for you if you have too much of it - up to and including water (aka dihydrogen monoxide, the most dastardly of all chemicals!).