The full importance of vitamin C in reaching and maintaining optimal health remains largely unappreciated by most traditional health care practitioners. Certainly, it is widely appreciated that vitamin C is required to sustain life, and that its severe deficiency in the body reliably results in the development of scurvy, with death following shortly thereafter in the absence of new vitamin C intake. However, it is not widely appreciated that optimal human metabolism requires the assimilation of new multigram (macronutrient) quantities of vitamin C on a daily basis, not just 50 to 100 milligram (micronutrient) quantities. Read more.