Liposomal Vitamin C: Dr. Thomas Levy

According to Dr. Thomas Levy, one of the leading experts on vitamin C, oxidative stress at the cellular level is the underlying cause of nearly every chronic degenerative disease that affects us. And if you can identify and address the root cause of this stress – whether it is coming from pathogens or exposure to toxins – and restore the antioxidant capacity of your tissues, you can resolve most diseases.

Dr. Levy believes that vitamin C is extremely powerful against infectious and chronic diseases. He has emphasized time and again that chronic deficiency of vitamin C is often one of the primary reasons that we contract many common infectious diseases. He further stresses that use of higher, optimal doses of vitamin C should be given proper recognition in mainstream medicine and this could be a very important step in significantly reducing the use of many antibiotics and other drugs.

Vitamin C: A powerful tool in maintaining overall health

  1. Works as a powerful anti-oxidant as it can donate electrons to neutralize free radicals that cause oxidative damage to cells and tissues.
  2. Works as an antibiotic as it increases production as well as activity of white blood cells and antibodies
  3. Works as an anti-viral preventing viral replication in the cells
  4. Acts as a critical ingredient in collagen synthesis and repair. Collagen is the main structural protein in the body that provides strength and integrity to various connective tissues, such as skin, nerves, muscles, ligaments, tendons, blood vessels, heart, eyes, hair and teeth.
  5. Increases bio-availability of other nutrients, such as iron and vitamin E.

Vitamin C Health Benefits

  1. Prevents scurvy, a condition where the entire body starts to disintegrate from a lack of collagen
  2. Helps in growth and repair of tissues
  3. Strengthens and activates the immune system
  4. De-activates bacterial and viral infections
  5. Improves cardiovascular health and function
  6. Lends strength and integrity to arteries, thus making them less vulnerable to develop atherosclerosis (formation of plaque or fatty deposits).
  7. Reverses hardening of arteries
  8. Supports and improves the health of skin, bones, joints and muscles
  9. Controls systemic inflammation, thus reducing the risk of chronic degenerative diseases
  10. Reduces cellular (DNA and other substructures) damage caused by exposure to ionizing radiation
  11. Rids the body of toxic heavy metals, including mercury, through detoxification.
  12. Prevents premature ageing at the cellular level

High doses of Vitamin C

Humans can’t make their own vitamin C and need a regular supply from foods and supplements. While low doses, which can easily get from vitamin C rich foods and supplements, are enough to maintain good health, prevent scurvy and meet the body’s metabolic requirements, you need vitamin C in much higher, and optimized doses to prevent and treat chronic ailments – including heart disease, cancer, chronic infections and critical toxin exposures.

There are studies suggesting that high doses of vitamin C help in killing cancer cells while leaving healthy cells unharmed. [1] In another study, scientists found that high doses of vitamin C result in cancer cells becoming more sensitive to the effects of chemotherapy and radiation. The researchers demonstrated that pharmacological doses of vitamin C are non-toxic and well-tolerated; and may help improve the treatment outcome when combined with standard radio-chemotherapy. [2]

Many health experts, including Dr. Thomas Levy, believes that if your vitamin C intake is not working for you, this means you are not taking enough. That’s where liposomal technology steps in.

Liposomal technology is fast emerging as a powerful delivery mechanism to make vitamin C and other nutrients more accessible to the tissues and cellular structures, thus offering better health outcomes than standard oral vitamin C supplements and sometimes even better than intravenous administration.

Liposomal technology: Unique, more effective drug/nutrient delivery system

Liposomal technology uses liposomes as unique carriers that can get a wide variety of nutrients and drugs into the areas of the body that are otherwise not very effectively accessed by even IV administration. These substances can be enzymes, anti-cancer drugs and an array of vitamins such as vitamin C, vitamin D, B-vitamins, CoQ10 and many other nutritional supplements.

To truly understand what liposomes are and what they do, we first need to highlight an extremely important factor when it comes to achieving maximum benefits from any drug or nutritional supplement. This factor is known as ‘Bio-availability’.

What is bioavailability and why does it matter?

Bioavailability is the degree to which a nutrient or drug becomes available to the target cells in the body – for both absorption and metabolic utilization. If an ingredient is not fully used (absorbed and metabolized), it won’t benefit your health.

Again, bioavailability depends on a lot of factors. Oral drugs must survive a harsh gastrointestinal environment, blood metabolism and metabolism in the liver. These drugs can be destroyed completely or partially by the stomach’s acidic environment and digestive enzymes, thus giving you low bio-availability and a low absorption rate.

In addition, drugs or nutrients that are water soluble, for example, vitamin C, may not be able to effectively cross cell membranes that are essentially made of fats. There are a lot of other factors that can affect a drug or a nutrient’s bioavailability – including age, health status of gastrointestinal tract, liver health, drug formulation (oral, tablet, liquid or liposomal), interaction with foods and other medications etc.

So, for a nutrient to become useful and bio-available, it is important that it reaches where it is best utilized (whether intracellular, extracellular or both). And a drug delivery system that can help reach the required substance into that desired cellular space or target molecular site without consuming too much of energy is considered the most effective system. And that’s what liposomes basically do.

What are liposomes?

Liposomes are small bubbles made of phospholipids, which are essentially the same type of fats that our cell membranes are made of. It is the structure of phospholipids that is key to how liposomes function and work as highly efficient nutrient and drug delivery systems.

A molecule of phospholipid is made up of a head (a phosphate group) and tail (2 chains of fatty acids), joined together by a glycerol molecule. The phosphate head is attracted by water (hydrophilic), whereas the fatty acid tails are repelled by water (hydrophobic).

When you place a liposome in an aqueous solution, the phospholipid molecules align themselves in such a way that the hydrophilic head drifts towards the water and the hydrophobic tails shifts away from the water. This arrangement makes the head turn outward (reaching towards the liquid) and the tails inward (hiding away from the liquid). This natural assembly of phospholipids gives rise to closed structures, where a hollow core is enveloped by a double-layer membrane. These small, spherical structures with bi-layer configuration are called liposomes.

Liposomes can be filled with a drug or a nutrient, and these encapsulated ingredients are then ferried and delivered to targeted cells within the body. Liposomes are doing a lot of things while carrying and delivering their payloads to the desired site. They protect the nutrients from degradation that inevitably happens in the gastrointestinal tract. As a result, the enclosed content is directly delivered to the bloodstream and into the cells. Liposomes also protect the enclosed substances against free radicals.

When you are introducing a water-soluble nutrient like vitamin C into a fat-soluble matrix (cell membranes, for example), there are bound to be challenges with nutrient uptake and utilization. Since liposomes are basically made of the same fat that your cell membranes are composed of, this helps liposomes to quickly and easily cross the membrane-barrier without much resistance and without consuming high amounts of energy. This is an important requirement to make a nutrient or drug more bio-available and useful. All these factors make liposomal encapsulation a far superior method of delivering vitamin C directly into the intracellular space, where it functions at its best.

While there may be some ambiguity around whether liposomal vitamin C is more effective than IV procedures, one thing is certain: the liposomal approach is not only practical, less invasive but also far more inexpensive than IV vitamin C, that can only be administered in hospitals and specialized clinics under the supervision of a qualified healthcare professional.

Benefits of Liposomal Vitamin C

Liposomal encapsulation increases the bioavailability of vitamin C exponentially and even offers additional benefits.

  1. Protects vitamin C from being destroyed in the digestive tract
  2. Delivers directly in to the cells and their substructures, for enhanced absorption and utilization
  3. Maintains high levels of vitamin C in the blood, without causing bloating, diarrhoea and other symptoms of gastrointestinal irritation.
  4. Protects encapsulated vitamin C against free radicals
  5. Delivers an absorption rate similar to vitamin C given through intravenous route.
  6. A far more convenient way than IV to achieve increased levels of vitamin C in cells

Oral vitamin C supplements, whether in tablet, pills and powder forms, are not efficiently processed and absorbed by your body. Moreover, much of the vitamin C taken this way is flushed out in the urine. To be optimally healthy and disease-free, it is important to recall that you are looking at using vitamin C in far higher doses than what is generally recommended. Taking high doses of regular oral vitamin C supplements is likely to cause gastric distress including gas, abdominal cramps, and diarrhoea. What better way to increase your cellular vitamin C levels than using liposomal vitamin C, a nutrient delivery strategy that promises higher absorption and higher bio-availability?

References:

  1. Garry R. Buettner et al. Tumor cells have decreased ability to metabolize H2O2: Implications for pharmacological ascorbate in cancer therapy. Redox Biol. 2016.
  2. Schoenfeld et al. O2⋅− and H2O2-Mediated Disruption of Fe Metabolism Causes the Differential Susceptibility of NSCLC and GBM Cancer Cells to Pharmacological Ascorbate. Cancer Cell. 2017.