Losing or even maintaining your weight is hard, and it is all about not taking in more calories than you burn up. The rate at which you burn calories is your metabolic rate, so if you increase your metabolic rate, you burn more calories faster. There are ways to increase your metabolic rate, but taking vitamin C is not one of those ways.
Metabolism
Your metabolic rate is the rate at which your body cells engage in all the reactions they need to run to maintain function. Some of these reactions are the very familiar ones through which you burn nutrient molecules for energy. Other cellular reactions include production of proteins that have structural and functional roles in the cells, building of hormones, and repair of damage from exposure to environmental toxins and radiation, explains Dr. Lauralee Sherwood in her book "Human Physiology."
Vitamin C
Vitamin C is also called ascorbic acid. It's an antioxidant vitamin, meaning that it helps prevent oxidative stress, which is damage to genetic material, cellular proteins, and other components of cells when they're exposed to toxins and radiation. Vitamin C also has important roles in helping the body make connective tissues like collagen and in immune system function, explains Dr. Gary Thibodeau in his book "Anatomy and Physiology."
Metabolic Rate
Vitamin C does many things in the body, but it can't affect your metabolic rate; there's no scientific evidence to suggest that the vitamin impacts the rate at which cells burn energy. In fact, most chemicals that increase metabolic rate do so by activating the sympathetic or "fight or flight" branch of the nervous system, as caffeine does. Such compounds temporarily increase heart rate, respiration rate and energy consumption, but the effect isn't long-lived.
Effective Strategies
If you want to lose weight, there are more effective strategies than trying to impact metabolic rate through vitamin C supplementation. For instance, you can try burning more calories each day through increased physical activity. In addition to the physical activity burning calories directly, it also helps increase your muscle mass. Muscle burns more calories than fat, even at rest, so the more muscle on your body, the higher your metabolic rate will be. And unlike caffeine and other metabolism-boosting chemicals, the effect of muscle isn't temporary.
References
- "Human Physiology"; Lauralee Sherwood, Ph.D.; 2004
- "Anatomy and Physiology"; Gary Thibodeau, Ph.D.; 2007
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