How often have you heard the advice that, when you're sick, you should drink orange juice? There's a reason behind that advice: oranges are packed with vitamin C.
They aren't the only foods to give you the essential vitamin, but they're one of the most readily accessible and, critically, delicious for children.
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What is Vitamin C?
Vitamin C – also known as ascorbic acid – is an essential nutrient for hundreds of processes and purposes throughout your body. It's used alongside protein building blocks to form collagen, the scaffold that cells are built on. That means it's critical for building blood vessels, cartilage, muscle, and bone, as well as healing wounds.
On top of that, it's an antioxidant, so it can help with free radicals and oxidative stress. It helps your body protect itself from exposure to damage from sources like secondhand smoke, UV radiation, and more. Vitamin C is also critical in your body's management of iron, so it helps prevent anemia. There's even some evidence that it may help delay or prevent certain cancers, cardiovascular disease, and other diseases.
Vitamin C is generally common in the foods we eat, especially if you eat a healthy, balanced diet full of whole foods, vegetables, and fruit. Red peppers, oranges, kiwis, broccoli, strawberries, brussels sprouts, cabbage, and many other fruits and vegetables are rich in vitamin C.
To put things into perspective, the recommended daily intake of vitamin C for adults 19 years of age or older is 90 mg for males and 75 mg for females. A single half cup of raw red bell peppers contains 95 mg of vitamin C.
Vitamin C Deficiency
Vitamin C deficiency is relatively rare in the modern world. If you're deficient, you end up with a series of symptoms, including fatigue, inflamed gums, spots on the skin, joint pain, poor healing, depression, and anemia; collectively, we call this scurvy.
Popular culture tends to think of scurvy as a seafarer's disease, primarily because there was an era before vitamin C was understood, where scurvy was prevalent due to limited diets available on ocean-faring ships. While scurvy can be fatal, it's also easily treatable simply by consuming more vitamin C.
Vitamin C Overdosing
Vitamin C is water-soluble. If you get more than your body can use through diet or supplements, the excess is simply processed through your kidneys and excreted through urine.
In some people, taking far too much vitamin C – on the order of thousands of milligrams – can cause some adverse effects. These include nausea, diarrhea, and stomach cramping. In certain individuals with hemochromatosis – a condition that causes excess iron storage in the body – excess vitamin C can exacerbate the problem.
High doses of vitamin C can also contribute to kidney stone development.
What is Liposomal Vitamin C?
If you've ever browsed vitamin shelves at your local pharmacy or done research into vitamin supplements, you've likely seen liposomal vitamin C. It's broadly available from the same producers of standard vitamin C and is labeled as having "enhanced absorption."
It's also dramatically more expensive. A bottle of 250 tablets of 500 mg vitamin C is only about $8, whereas a bottle of 100 capsules of 500 mg liposomal vitamin C is nearly $30. Pricing, of course, varies by brand and storefront, but these numbers illustrate the difference; liposomal vitamin C is, on average, 10 times more expensive than standard vitamin C.
The question is, what does it mean for vitamin C to be liposomal, what do vendors claim it can do, and do any studies back up those claims?
What Does Liposomal Mean?
A liposome is a spherical layer of lipids, which is the category of molecule that encompasses fats, sterols, mono- and diglycerides, phospholipids, fat-soluble vitamins, and waxes, among other things. They're used in a thousand ways throughout the body, both good and bad. You can think of a liposome as a container into which other molecules can be placed. Your cell walls are made of liposomes, for example.
While liposomes are used naturally by the body, they can also be used via technology to encapsulate other molecules. This does a lot of things, but the most important claim is that it can take something like, say, a water-soluble vitamin and encapsulate it in a liposome that allows the body to treat it as if it's a fat-soluble vitamin.
Why is this important? Broadly speaking, your body will happily absorb as much of anything fat-soluble as it can and store it away in your body fat for use later. Water-soluble nutrients cannot be stored in the same way and instead are purged. This is an important part of how your body regulates different kinds of nutrients and avoids over-storing nutrients that can have adverse effects in large quantities.
This is an oversimplification, but it's all we really need to know to understand liposomal vitamin C.
Liposomal technology is valuable and important for increasing the absorption of, for example, certain therapeutic drugs used to treat brain tumors, ischemia, and brain infections. They're unusually effective as a medication delivery mechanism, and have a very low chance of immune reaction or biological rejection, and they can be administered in many ways, including intravenously.
What Are the Purported Benefits of Liposomal Vitamin C?
In order to evaluate the value of liposomal vitamin C, we first need to examine the claims made about its benefits.
Primarily, the claimed benefit of liposomal vitamin C is that it increases your body's ability to absorb and use the vitamin C you consume. When you eat foods that contain vitamin C or take a vitamin C supplement, the vitamins suffer a lot of attrition.
- Digestive enzymes in saliva and stomach acid destroy some of the vitamins.
- Much of the vitamins aren't absorbed through the intestines and end up passing through you.
- Of the vitamins that are absorbed, relatively little of it is able to pass through cell membranes and be absorbed by cells.
- Not all of the vitamin C that makes it into your system is used, and the remainder is excreted via the kidneys and urine.
- All of this assumes you aren't taking other vitamins or medicines or have an illness that hinders vitamin C absorption.
All of this is natural in our biology. In fact, dietary recommendations for vitamin C consumption account for this; the recommended daily intake reflects how much vitamin C you need to eat to have the perfect amount.
Other claims about liposomal vitamin C amount to "the benefits of vitamin C, but more" because of the increased absorption. Thus, claims are made that liposomal vitamin C can:
- Reduce the incidence of cataracts and age-related macular degeneration.
- Improve collagen production and maintain youthful skin and active healing.
- Bolster immune function by providing antioxidant value and supporting antibody production.
- Reducing LDL cholesterol oxidation and thus reducing the chance of atherosclerosis.
- Boosts the synthesis of neurotransmitters and reduce depression.
If you're skeptical, good; it's always a good idea to be skeptical of the claims made by the people selling you the vitamins, especially when they're a) more expensive than standard vitamins and b) making bold claims on a wide range of benefits.
All of this leaves us with two major questions.
Does the science back up any of these claims about liposomal vitamin C?
Are there downsides to liposomal vitamin C?
Let's dig into the science first.
What the Science Says About Liposomal Vitamin C
Using liposomes as an encapsulation method for things like medications is well understood, but does it work to increase absorption of vitamin C? On this front, at least, things seem accurate.
A 2020 study looked at the absorption of vitamin C in liposomal and standard forms and found that liposomal vitamin C was absorbed 1.77 times better. This was a very small study, though, with only a single dose and two treatments.
A similar 2020 observational study attempted to physically watch the absorption of vitamin C and liposomal vitamin C using electron microscopy and ultrasound. Their goal was also specifically to observe it through the process of digestion, rather than intravenous administration. Their results, as well, show increased absorption.
Another study, in 2024, observed that liposomal vitamin C appeared in 27% greater concentrations in blood plasma and 20% greater in leukocytes (white blood cells) compared to standard vitamin C. This was a double-blind, placebo-controlled random trial, the gold standard format for a study of this sort, but it only examined 27 people, a low sample size.
All of this seems to confirm that liposomal vitamin C is at least somewhat better absorbed than standard vitamin C. So, let's look at what the science says about the actual benefits of this form of vitamin C.
A 2016 study examined vitamin C's impact on ischemia-reperfusion injuries. These are injuries caused by blood returning to an area that has been deprived of adequate blood flow, and it's known that vitamin C administered intravenously can help. The study found that liposomal vitamin C was better absorbed but provided similar levels of protection. In other words, vitamin C helps, but it didn't seem to matter how the vitamin C was obtained.
A detailed analysis in 2020 of cataracts found that there was very little evidence that vitamin C supplementation of any form impacts cataracts, except in cases where the individual in question was already mildly deficient; taking excess vitamin C does not benefit cataracts or surgical recovery, liposomal or otherwise.
The same story repeats for other purported benefits of liposomal vitamin C: nothing has really been proven outside of very, very small studies. Everything else is an assumption based on the higher absorption rates.
Is Liposomal Vitamin C Worthwhile?
While it's seemingly proven to be true that liposomal vitamin C is better absorbed than standard vitamin C, it's an open question as to whether or not it's actually beneficial.
On top of that, the processes used for liposomal encapsulation may not be ideal and could have long-term consequences we haven't seen. Liposomal preparations may be fine for medications but are not approved for food because of the use of organic solvents and detergents in the manufacturing process. Moreover, liposomal vitamins have a short shelf-life and, as mentioned at the start, are significantly more expensive.
What stands out to me is this:
- Liposomal vitamin C is not proven to be beneficial above a baseline adequate vitamin C intake.
- Liposomal vitamin C is much more expensive than standard vitamin C.
- A lack of studies and far-reaching observation means there's some question about long-term consequences.
I put 45 mg of vitamin C – non-liposomal – in my MicroVitamin because I know that taking a little more than the recommended daily intake is harmless and that ensuring adequate intake despite variance in diet is essential. At the same time, I choose not to use liposomal vitamin C due to the lack of proven benefits over regular vitamin C while increasing the cost 10-fold.
As things stand, liposomal vitamin C may be promising as a less intrusive delivery method than intravenous administration of vitamin C and may be more effective at addressing a deficiency, but it's not worthwhile as a stand-alone supplement in my mind.
Sources:
- Vitamin C Health Professional Fact Sheet: https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminC-HealthProfessional/
- Vitamin C Consumer Fact Sheet: https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminC-Consumer/
- Mayo Clinic - Is it possible to take too much vitamin C? https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/expert-answers/vitamin-c/faq-20058030
- Science Direct: Liposomes: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/liposome
- Evaluation and clinical comparison studies on liposomal and non-liposomal ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and their enhanced bioavailability: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32901526/
- Enhanced Resorption of Liposomal Packed Vitamin C Monitored by Ultrasound: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7356785/
- Liposomal delivery enhances absorption of vitamin C into plasma and leukocytes: a double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized trial: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39237620/
- Liposomal-encapsulated Ascorbic Acid: Influence on Vitamin C Bioavailability and Capacity to Protect Against Ischemia-Reperfusion Injury: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4915787/
- Vitamin C and the Lens: New Insights into Delaying the Onset of Cataract: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7602486/
- Vitamin C and Cardiovascular Disease: An Update: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7761826/
- Vitamin C supplementation lowers serum low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglycerides: a meta-analysis of 13 randomized controlled trials: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19674720/
