Purpose
To determine which of the
five food groups contain vitamin C. I
chose to investigate vitamin C because I swim everyday, and in order to swim at
my top performance I have to eat a healthy diet. Investigating vitamin C will help me achieve this goal.
Hypothesis
I believe that vitamin C
will not be found in the five major food groups. I predict that it will be found in the fruit and vegetable groups
only. I made this choice because in my research I learned that vitamin C is
found in fruit and vegetable sources.
The purpose of my project was to find out which of
the five foods groups have foods that contain vitamin C. After researching vitamin C, I concluded
that vitamin C would be found in the fruit and vegetable groups.
I learned that vitamin C is a
colorless crystal and is a water-soluble vitamin which means that it dissolves
easily in water. Vitamin C is also
known as ascorbic acid and is a weak acid.
Vitamin C is found in the watery part of fruits and green
vegetables.
Plants and some animals make their
own vitamin C, but humans do not. You
need four enzymes to make vitamin C.
Humans only have three of these enzymes so we cannot produce vitamin
C. Somewhere in our development, we
lost the fourth enzyme and ascorbic acid became a vitamin for us. A vitamin is a group of natural substances
which are necessary in small amounts for growth and good health and which must
be obtained from food or pills, as the body cannot usually produce them.
Vitamin C is probably the most
important vitamin we need to take because our bodies do not make it. We must get this vitamin through our diet or
in a vitamin tablet because our diet alone is not enough. Our diet along is not enough because most of
our vitamin C is lost in our urine. In
addition, smoking causes a very serious loss of vitamin C in our body. One cigarette takes out 25-mg. of vitamin C
in our bodies. A person smoking a pack
of cigarettes a day would lose a lot of vitamin C. Many different things cause our body to lose vitamin C. They say alcohol and stress are things that
also cause you to lose vitamin C. The
recommended daily allowance in the United States is 60 milligrams of vitamin
C. A study in 1992 revealed that people
who have high blood levels of vitamin C live six years longer than people do
with low vitamin C levels.
Vitamin C is an anti-oxidant
essential for tissue growth and repair, and healthy gums. Anti-oxidant is a substance, which slows
down the rate at which something decays because of oxidization. Vitamin C helps to prevent oxidation of
water-soluble molecules that could harm our bodies. If a substance oxidizes it combines with oxygen to form another
substance. For example, iron becomes
rusty when it oxidizes, and an apple becomes brown when it oxidizes.
Other things vitamin C can do for us are fight the
affects of pollution, help to prevent cancer, enhance the immune system, be
helpful against fighting infections, protect against blood clotting and
bruising.
Vitamin C is taken into our intestines and our body uses it within two hours after consuming it, and it leaves our bodies three or four hours after ingestion. Cooking and storage does not affect the amount of vitamin C in foods, but bruising, over cooking, and reheating will. Also, slicing fruits and vegetables and letting them be exposed to light or heat can cause vitamin C loss. ‘ “Eating five fruits and vegetables a day will easily provide 200 mg,” says principal investigator Dr. Mark Levine of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. ’