[stubish]

Interesting but still needs research. Correlation, not causation of course. And citric acid... surely the amount used as a preservative would be dwarfed by other sources. Might be worth taking with a pinch of salt (a preservative they did not link to any problems!)

[larpingscholar]

And "Ascorbic acid (E300) was also specifically linked to cardiovascular disease." That is, they are claiming that vitamin c gives you heart disease...

[adrian_b]

That does not mean much unless the dose is specified.

Any vitamin will cause diseases in high enough doses, the problem is that for most of them, like also for most other essential nutrients, the safe upper limits of daily intake are known with much less certainty than the lower limits.

I browsed quickly through TFA, but it did not seem possible to estimate which are the vitamin C doses that might be harmful, which would have been the really useful and interesting information.

There is the additional circumstance that vitamin C added as a preservative, like also sugar added to some juice, is present as a water solution, so it will be absorbed quickly and efficiently immediately after ingestion. Both vitamin C and sugar that are incorporated in some fruits or vegetables will be released more slowly and possibly incompletely from them.

Thus a smaller dose of preservative vitamin C might be equivalent with a greater dose of vitamin C ingested as bell peppers, kiwi fruits, blueberries etc., which means that the safe limits for vitamin C added as a preservative (or taken as powder or pills) might need to be lower than when it is a natural component of food.

[stubish]

Some vitamins, including vitamin C, cause various problems in high doses. Is the amount used as a preservative enough to count as a 'megadose' of vitamin C?

[gus_massa]

Nah. You need 2g=2000mg to overdose https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h... It's not impossible using supplements, but food has too little.

[pinkmuffinere]

+1. Researchers in the field will have better insight, but the immediate confounding factor i think of:

People that eat more preservatives are likely eating more unhealthy food in general (microwave meals, shelf stable snack and cookies, etc). This group is probably not dominated by people that eat tons of canned beans, sauerkraut, or other things that are generally-healthy-but-have-preservatives. And of course we would expect health problems from large quantifies of those unhealthy-but-preserved foods.