You wake up with a stuffy nose and your first reaction might be to down a glass of orange juice. Don’t bother: everything we know about research shows that mega-doses of vitamin C are absolutely, positively useless at fighting colds. All that extra orange juice will do nothing to shorten your sniffles.
This all leads to the question: how did America get sold on a massive vitamin C myth? Is it vitamin manufacturers, trying to get us to purchase more pills? Has the orange industry tried to dupe us?
Part of it has to do with the fact that vitamin C is rarely harmful, so there’s been little impetus to intervene.