When Vasco da Gama set sail for India from Portugal on the East African coast on July 7, 1496, to conquer the kingdom, trade, and Christianity, he was accompanied by 160 sailors. In the old days, only those foods were taken with them during the voyage, which lasted a long time in the dry state. In most cases, therefore, there was no place for fruits or vegetables on the sailors' food list while on board.When he reached Mozambique on the east coast of Africa after being floated at sea for about seven months in a row, many of his sailors' hands and feet were swollen and bruised. Their gums were so swollen that they could not chew anything with their teeth.
The people of Mozambique saw the plight of the sailors of Vasco da Gama and gave him a piece of advice. They said that more and more orange and lemon juice can cure the disease of sailors.
Vasco da Gama mentions in his diary that his sailors recovered after eating lemon-orange juice for only six days. (1)
On his way back from India, Vasco da Gama's fortunes were not so good. For whatever reason, they couldn’t buy lemons or oranges.
The army, which had embarked on a historic voyage with 160 sailors, returned with only 70 men. None of these 100 sailors drowned. They lost their lives again due to swollen gums, swollen limbs and wounds. (2)
Those of us who are accustomed to eating vegetables and fruits on a daily basis today cannot even imagine how the lives of at least two million sailors were lost in the Middle Ages by not eating only these little vegetables and fruits. (3)
Swollen gums, swollen hands and feet, this deadly disease was called 'sea plague', its real name is scurvy. And while searching for a cure for this scurvy, a magical molecule, vitamin C, was discovered.
Vitamin C is a carbon cycle based compound, its cycle is called the furan cycle. The chemical name for vitamin C is ascorbic acid.
Vitamin C is an essential element of the human body's immune system. Although its main function is to control the bonding, transport and coordination between the connective tissues of the organism. Apart from this, it also acts as a stress management, free radical elimination, anti-viral-anti-bacterial, anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory compound in our body.
Today, as we struggle to cope with the global epidemic of Covidavirus, which is caused by the coronavirus, vitamin C has emerged as a magic molecule because of its innate qualities.
★Why is Vitamin C the best weapon against Covid-19?
To know the answer to this question, we must first understand what actually happens to us after the infection of coronavirus in the body.
The real name of the coronavirus is ‘SARS COV-2’. Yes, that's right you can now become known as a SARS Virus. The problem is, it has spike proteins outside the prion shell.In any picture of coronavirus you will see many thorny grains on the skin. These granules are the spike proteins that make the virus more than a thousand times more contagious than its twin brother, the SARS virus. That's why while SARS infected only 40,000 people worldwide in eight months, the coronavirus infected more than two million people in just four months, of whom more than 1.5 million have already died.One by one, the health systems of the most developed countries in the world are collapsing.
After the coronavirus enters our body, we are infected and do not get hospitalized or die. We die as a result of the response of our body's immune system to the coronavirus.
Once the coronavirus enters the body, it attacks the alveolar cells in our lungs. The function of alveolar cells is to maintain the supply of oxygen to the blood. After the alveoli attack, the virus oxidizes the ferrous iron in our blood to hemoglobin and turns it into ferric iron.As ferrous iron turns into ferries, it can no longer absorb oxygen, resulting in the loss of our ability to carry oxygen by losing red blood cells. This causes ARDS, or Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome. As a result of ARDS, patients with Covid-19 suffer from severe shortness of breath / pneumonia.