Health & Fitness

This article was previously published August 8, 2020, and has been updated with new information.

Vitamin C has always been vital to immune function, but COVID-19 has shone the spotlight on the vitamin in a big way. While everyone is scurrying to stock up on citrus fruits, there's actually another fruit that contains more vitamin C than any other: red bell peppers.

Yes, you read that right. Red bell peppers are often categorized, and cooked, as a vegetable, but because they contain seeds, they're botanically classified as a fruit. Of course, you might not be as concerned with that as much as how they can contribute to your vitamin C intake and what other health benefits red bell peppers have to offer.

Vitamin C in Red Bell Peppers

Although you might immediately think of oranges or orange juice when you hear the term "vitamin C," bell peppers — specifically sweet red bell peppers — are a far better source.

One cup of sliced raw red bell pepper contains 117 milligrams (mg) of vitamin C,¹ which actually exceeds the current RDA for the entire day. For comparison, the same amount of green bell peppers contains around 74 mg.² According to a comparative study in the September 2012 issue of the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture,³ those numbers increase even more if you choose organic bell peppers.

The researchers analyzed the amounts of bioactive compounds in organically grown bell peppers and conventionally grown bell peppers and found that the organically grown peppers contained significantly more vitamin C and higher amounts of carotenoids, like beta carotene, phenolic acids and flavonoids, such as quercetin.

Health Benefits of Red Bell Peppers

Many of the health benefits of red bell peppers can be attributed to the combination of bioactive compounds found within them. A single red bell pepper contains 30 different antioxidants,⁴ making them one of the most nutrient-dense fruits you can eat.

Antioxidants have been shown to help fight heart disease,⁵ prevent cancer,⁶ protect against liver disease and combat oxidative stress and inflammation.⁷ One of the notable compounds in red bell peppers is quercetin, which is known to have a wide range of health benefits. Quercetin has been shown to help reduce inflammation, alleviate pain,⁸ lower blood pressure⁹ and improve learning and memory.¹⁰

Of course, some of the health benefits of red bell peppers are also a result of its high vitamin C content. Although vitamin C is often hailed for its powerful immune-boosting properties, it has a protective effect against heart disease and early death, too.

Researchers who published a study in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in June 2015 looked at the diet and health of 97,203 people. They found those who consumed the largest amount of fruits and vegetables had a lower risk of developing heart disease and lower risk of early death when compared with those with the lowest intakes.¹¹

The researchers concluded that this benefit may be driven by the high vitamin C concentration in fruits and vegetables, since those with the highest plasma vitamin C levels seemed to experience the greatest effect.

Vitamin C has also been linked to better eye health. Oxidative stress is connected to age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and cataracts, two of the leading causes of blindness in older adults.

In one cohort study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in December 2005, researchers found that a high intake of vitamin C, combined with an above average intake of beta-carotene, vitamin E and zinc, could reduce the risk of developing AMD by 35%.¹²

Vitamin C is also heavily involved in your nervous system. It supports your neurons, modulates the transmission of nerve impulses and helps your body make catecholamines¹³ or the hormones dopamine, norepinephrine and epinephrine that help control your stress levels.

A February 2018 study published in the Journal of Critical Care found preliminary evidence that administering vitamin C in addition to standard therapy may help combat inflammation and stabilize heart rate in those with sepsis and septic shock¹⁴ — an emergency situation that accounts for 30% to 50% of all in-hospital deaths¹⁵ and believed to be the underlying cause of some serious complications and death in severe COVID-19 infections. Vitamin C may also be useful for¹⁶:

Protecting against UV damage	Preventing wrinkles and loss of collagen
Healing burns and wounds	Reducing acne
Alleviating dry skin	Antiaging17

How Much Vitamin C Do You Need?

Vitamin C is water-soluble, which means it dissolves in water and is carried throughout the body to your cells for immediate use. Your cells take what they need and anything left over gets excreted from your body through your urine. Unlike fat-soluble vitamins, your body doesn't store any extra for later. Your body also can't make vitamin C on its own. That means it's extra important that you get sufficient amounts from your diet every day.

The current recommendation for vitamin C is 75 mg per day for adult women and 90 mg per day for adult men.¹⁸ While daily doses of several hundred mg per day makes sense for many, there's evidence that higher doses, meaning those over 1,000 mg per day, may be better for combating viruses like the common cold¹⁹ and Epstein-Barr²⁰ and as part of the treatment for cancer.²¹

Other Sources of Vitamin C

One cup of sliced red bell peppers provides more than the current RDA for vitamin C, but if you want to increase your intake even more, there are plenty of other fruits and vegetables that are excellent sources of vitamin C as well.

One of the most vitamin C-rich fruits available is the acerola or Barbados cherry,²² which provides 1,644 mg of vitamin C per cup.²³ Compare that to a medium orange, which contains about 69.7 mg of vitamin C.²⁴ Other fruits and vegetables that are particularly rich in the vitamin include²⁵:

Broccoli	Sweet potato	Grapefruit
Tomato	Cauliflower	Kale
Chili peppers	Papaya	Cantaloupe
Brussels sprouts	Tomato/tomato juice	Kiwifruit
Artichoke	Strawberries	Cooked cabbage

Vitamin C Supplements

Supplementation is an option too, but it's best to get what you need from a variety of fruits and vegetables. When you eat fruits and vegetables, you're not only getting natural, easily absorbed vitamin C, you're also getting dozens of other super nutrients, like antioxidants and phytochemicals, which help fight chronic disease, reduce inflammation and help eliminate carcinogens.

However, if you're having trouble meeting your needs with diet alone, you can supplement a healthy diet with liposomal vitamin C, which has enhanced bioavailability when compared to other oral forms of the vitamin.

In one small study published in Nutrition and Metabolic Insights in June 2016, researchers compared liposomal vitamin C supplements to other types of oral vitamin C,²⁶ finding liposomal supplements raised the amount of vitamin C in the blood more effectively than the other unencapsulated types.

That's because the liposomes encapsulate, or surround, the vitamin C, which protects it from the harsh environment of your digestive tract, according to a July 2019 report in the Journal of Liposome Research.²⁷ This helps slows down the release of the vitamin from the supplement and improves absorption.

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The “COVID Chronicles” movie¹ gives a concise look at the pandemic, answering some of the questions that have left many people scratching their heads, because the reality and science don’t seem to match up with what the media is reporting.

Ivor Cummins is a biochemical engineer with a background in medical device engineering and leading teams in complex problem-solving. On his website, TheFatEmperor.com,² he offers guidance on how to decode science to transform your health. He produced “COVID Chronicles” along with Donal O’Neill, a documentary filmmaker in the field of health and human performance.

There were red flags in the pandemic from the start. Because the symptoms of COVID-19 overlap with so many other diseases, the only way to know you have it is to test for it.

The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests used for COVID-19 use a powerful amplification process that makes them so sensitive they can even detect the remains of a dead virus long after infection, Cummins explains. But even beyond that, every positive COVID-19 test is considered a “case” — and therein lies a major problem.

A Positive Test Isn’t the Same as a Case

Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, an internal medicine doctor and former head of health at the Council of Europe, is among those who referred to the COVID-19 pandemic as a “test pandemic” due to the PCR test.³

“It was accepted by WHO, and they said when the test is positive, we have a case of COVID-19. And this is how they started counting the cases,” Wodarg says. “What they counted was the activity of testing. And the more they tested, the more cases they found.”⁴ When labs use excessive cycle thresholds, you end up with a grossly overestimated number of positive tests, leading to a "casedemic"^5,6 — an epidemic of false positives.

Wodarg says COVID-19 “was a ‘test’ pandemic. It was not a virus pandemic,”⁷ because PCR tests may give a positive result when it detects coronaviruses that have been around for 20 years.⁸ In “COVID Chronicles,” Cummins speaks with John Lee, a former clinical professor of pathology at Hull York Medical School and consultant histopathologist at Rotherham General Hospital, who later became the Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust's director of cancer services.

He echoes Wodarg, stating that during the pandemic, every positive test is considered a case, but “these are two completely different things.”⁹ Normally, if you have a typical cold, for instance, you only become a “case” if you’re hospitalized, but this all changed with the pandemic. Lee says:¹⁰

“In coronavirus, we’ve been counting every single positive test as a positive case. Now this is scientifically and medically wrong. You can have a positive coronavirus test and be completely well. You can have a positive coronavirus test and be excreting minimal amounts of the virus.

To conflate positive tests with cases is simply wrong, and yet the positive cases have been driving government policy and the entire panoply of restrictive actions that have been taken.”

January 13, 2021, “WHO finally questioned the accuracy of PCR testing,” the film notes, and released an information notice that clarified instructions for interpreting results of PCR tests, including the fact that “careful interpretation of weak positive results is needed.”¹¹ “Reported case rates collapsed in the U.S. the following day,” “COVID Chronicles” points out.¹²

Lockdowns Didn’t Work

Lockdowns can be effective if they're implemented when no one has the disease, but once it's already spreading in your population, they don't work. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the lockdown was implemented far too late and caused much more harm than benefit.

The film highlights COVID-19 outcomes around the globe, including in vastly different regions, like densely-populated Khayelitsha in South Africa. It was originally assumed that COVID-19 would devastate the area. They were strictly locked down along with the rest of South Africa, but due to the dense population, the lockdown in Khayelitsha only served to force people further right on top of one another.

Because the area has a long history of battling diseases like HIV and tuberculosis, it was easy for officials to use data from the area, which quickly showed that those most at risk from COVID-19 were elderly, frail or suffering from other conditions like Type 2 diabetes. What surprised many, however, is that Khayelitsha fared much the same during the pandemic as everywhere else in South Africa.

Further, as the second and third waves struck, those in Khayelitsha were much better protected, even as new variants emerged. It was later found that as many as 68% of local residents had COVID-19 antibodies.¹³ As noted in “COVID Chronicles”:¹⁴

“[A]s Delta cut a swathe across the world and indeed South Africa, it was bigger here than any of the prior waves or the variants that we had seen. But in Khayelitsha, that 68% level of antibodies across the community proved to be extremely powerful and very, very protective, even against the new Delta variant.

So while the U.K. was in complete disarray, here we had an informal settlement in an economically deprived region with a population of half a million outperforming the U.K. and many First World nations … they had not intended … for COVID to spread throughout the community. But in doing so, they arrived at a point where herd immunity, if you like, had been reached.”

Other communities also enjoyed high levels of COVID-19 antibodies in the community, including in India, the Orthodox Jewish community in London and Amish communities in the U.S. So, when this virus was left to behave in a manner that would allow it to spread amongst the healthy, they were typically getting to about two-thirds of the population displaying antibody levels.¹⁵

Mask Mandates Didn’t Work

Like lockdowns, mask mandates are another pandemic control measure that’s been pushed as gospel despite lack of effectiveness and evidence of harm. The “Danmask-19 Trial,” published November 18, 2020, in the Annals of Internal Medicine,¹⁶ found that among mask wearers 1.8% (42 participants) ended up testing positive for SARS-CoV-2, compared to 2.1% (53) among controls.

When they removed the people who reported not adhering to the recommendations for use, the results remained the same — 1.8% (40 people), which suggests adherence makes no significant difference. Initially, numerous research journals refused to publish the results, which called widespread mask mandates into question.¹⁷

If masks work, the film points out, you should immediately see a dramatic change in the curve, within 14 days. “If you look at around 10 or 12 countries where they brought in mask mandates, there was no impact on the curve … whatsoever so the empirical science of our own eyes is screaming at us: masks and lockdowns don't really move the needle much, maybe a little, but no one wants to know. It's an ideology now. It's a religion,” Cummins says.¹⁸

Dr. Reid Sheftall also studied mask usage extensively and found mask mandates did not noticeably change the number of cases or deaths the way they should if they actually reduce transmissibility. Countries that used minimal masks were not worse off than neighboring countries with mask mandates.¹⁹

“That makes sense,” Cummins says, “because 40 years of science have been unanimous, pretty much, that for influenza viruses, surgical masks and coverings are highly ineffective. So it agrees with the science.” Yet, the media claim masks are effective, based on a “flurry of papers” that came in around June 2020 saying masks could be good. “So a few weeks of papers have overturned a few decades of scientific sense,” he adds.²⁰

Injections Aren’t Working

It’s now been uncovered that the viral loads of COVID-19 are similar among people who’ve been injected and those who have not.²¹ “What kind of a vaccine needs three vaccinations, and a maybe a fourth, and more, within months?” Cummins asks. “The answer is a vaccine that’s not really working very well at all.”²²

The media message that the pandemic is now a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” is also misleading, since data from Israel showed that similar numbers of people were being hospitalized for COVID-19, whether they were injected or not.²³ Cummins notes:²⁴

“There’s a lot of trickery with the data. The hospitalizations are difficult because you can’t get the raw data, and they’re very confounded data. In one case … the U.S. came out with shock stories that 99% are unvaccinated. However, they were accounting for way back … before the vaccines were available.

So the lion’s share back then were unvaccinated because the vaccines weren’t here yet. So there’s a lot of trickery — I would say fraud — in the way the data’s being presented.”

People who’ve received only one injection of an mRNA series are also referred to as unvaccinated, which further biases the data to again make it look like more uninjected people are being hospitalized. What’s more, the film notes, “In 2021, professor Sir Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, stated that, ‘… herd immunity by vaccination is not a possibility because it [Delta] still infects vaccinated individuals.’”²⁵

Is This a Pandemic of Lifestyle?

Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a consultant cardiologist and chairman of public health collaboration in the U.K., is also featured in “COVID Chronicles,” speaking about the underlying factors that make certain people more vulnerable to COVID-19 — namely lifestyle-related diseases driven by poor diet.

This aspect of prevention via a long-term healthy lifestyle, which could save lives in future pandemics, is another tenet that’s ignored by the dominant narrative. Malhotra explains:²⁶

“I think what we’ve had is a fast pandemic, in terms of COVID, that has exacerbated and taken advantage of a slow pandemic, which is the pandemic of chronic, lifestyle-related diseases that have been putting stress on our health care system for many, many years, and our NHS, certainly even before COVID, was already at a breaking point.

But actually, COVID has broken the back of the NHS, and the main reason behind this is because we failed, for many, many years, to tackle prevention head on, specifically the biggest driver of these chronic diseases: poor diet.

Ultraprocessed food, which is the heart of the problem, is now half of the calorie consumption in the British diet. It’s about 60% of the calorie consumption in the United States, and there’s a very clear correlation between, already, countries that had 50% or more of the population overweight or obese had 90% of the deaths from COVID-19. So, poor metabolic health means poor immune health.

But beyond this, we know that the real drivers of this problem are structural. These are to do with the environment and with misinformation that is being subjected on the public for the purposes of profit. And the two real culprits behind this, in my point of view, are the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry.

And the collusion of academics, medical journals, doctors and politicians for financial gain with these industries is the heart of the problem. This needs to be exposed, and the public needs to understand and realize that the biggest enemies of democracy are the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry.”

If Not for Media, Would You Know There’s a Pandemic?

The film implies that COVID-19 presented an opportunity that multiple entities have used to further their own agendas, while media have served as a tool for overriding science and common sense. It’s important to stay grounded and think critically to avoid falling victim to unnecessary panic and stress. Cummins notes:²⁷

“A key thing to remember, I think, is if you turned off the media, no one would know there’s an epidemic. Even during the surges in Ireland, in both seasons, if you did not have access to the media, you would never know.

No one really knew anyone who died — outside of someone in a nursing home, someone of elevated age or with stage 4 cancer — most people did not know anyone who died. Right? Isn’t that incredible, in a massive pandemic, as we’ve been told?”

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