The Vitamin C myth

I currently have a mild but annoying sneeze-provoking bout of the flu. At times like these I am more likely than usual to remember my less-than-daily dose of vitamin C supplement. When I'm not sick I usually only take it when I remember that it tastes like orange lollies.

Anyway, just about everyone seems to recommend vitamin C for avoiding/surviving a cold. But while wondering exactly how effective it really is I found this somewhat sad little snippet at webmd.com:

The average adult who suffers with a cold for 12 days a year would still suffer for 11 days a year if that person took a high dose of vitamin C every day during that year.

Which I suppose means that my sporadic little doses probably aren't doing anything at all, except feeding my sweet tooth and delivering, potentially, a little placebo effect.

Mayo Clinic reckons that if you develop a cold while taking vitamin C (ie. this probably does not apply to me or other casual users) you can expect about a 10% reduction in the duration of the cold (15% for children), but there are no significant benefits if you only start taking it after the onset of a cold.

The real winners with vitamin C are people in extreme circumstances. If you're a soldier in the sub-arctic, a skier or a marathon runner, you could use vitamin C to cut your risk of developing a cold by about 50%. Some people get all the perks.

Poppy seeds are evil

A friend of mine had a birthday yesterday, so I baked her a cake, which we consumed today. It was a lemon and poppy seed cake with drizzly icing, and it worked out quite well even though I'd never made it before :)

Last night I developed a nasty headache which made me feel nauseous and gross. Then again, this afternoon, I developed a nasty headache which made me feel nauseous and gross. Coincidence? Hmmm.

I'm well acquainted with the rumour that poppy seed consumption can give you a false positive on a drug test, but what I suddenly began to think about was this: poppy seeds make opium... opium is an opiate... morphine is an opiate... I am allergic to morphine. Well, I suffer an adverse reaction to it, which is close enough to allergic I'd say.

So, having employed the help of ibuprofen and a decent nap to numb the painful throbbing of my head, I got onto Google and consulted the very reputable sounding icanhasscience.com, which informed me that morphine is, in fact, derived from the poppy plant.

Apparently a standard oral does of morphine is between 10 and 30 mg. The concentration of morphine in poppy seeds varies widely, but if you ate about 40g of the most highly concentrated seeds you would ingest the equivalent of a 10 mg oral dose of morphine. So theoretically you have to eat a LOT for it to have any real effect. But the only part of the cake that I ate yesterday was some of the uncooked batter off the sides of the scraped bowl... yet it was still enough to give me a nasty headache?!

I started to doubt my own theory, but then found this comment by SciWo on the icanhasscience.com blog post:

I had adverse reactions to codeine and morphine prescribed after surgery, and I’ve noticed several times that poppyseed bread/bagels give me headaches.

So I guess it isn't just me.

My entire cake only contained 50g of poppy seeds, and I'm sure they weren't even high quality, so I guess I'm just ultra sensitive to morphine. There are other recipes out there that would have been far worse though. Like this one, with a whopping 128g of seeds. I feel sick just thinking about it >_<