A Man Ate 100 Zinc Vitamin C Gummies Everyday.

This Is What Happened To His Spinal Cord.

…………………………………….

GC is a 55 year old man, presenting to the emergency room with a broken hip.

His daughter tells the admitting nurse that

She heard a loud noise in the stairwell, as her dad cried out for help

Earlier in his life, GC didn’t pay attention to his health.

When he was younger, he had some problems.

He was overweight and couldn’t control himself, as his family found him hoarding

excess food, and secretly eating every last bit.

In his 30s, GC had health problems.

He had diabetes and gout.

…………………………………………………….

As the years passed, GC started losing feeling in his hands and feet because of his diabetes.

One day he stepped on something sharp.

It cut his foot, and he didn’t realize anything had happened until he saw red puddles in the

shower.

He realized he couldn’t keep living like this.

One doctor he saw wanted to start him on a variety of medicines.

He refused after looking online and found a doctor who recommended and would do gastric

bypass surgery.

This doctor would cut into his abdomen.

They’d create a small pocket of his stomach.

Then, they would reroute his GI tract in to the end of his small intestines.

The small stomach pouch limited the amount he’d eat, so that he’d feel full while

eating less food.

And the reroute would limit the amount of calories he’d absorb.
After the surgery, doctors warned GC that he would need to control his nutrients, because the

bypass can cause some deficiencies in vitamins and minerals.

GC’s diabetes cleared up, but he started redirecting his excess habits.

GC started getting extreme with his health.

Fixing his diet, made his blood sugar control better.

…………………………………..

2 years ago, GC caught the flu.

He was the sickest he had been since changing his life.

He vowed to never get ill again, and started reading online forums about boosting immunity.

He remembered doctors telling him he might eventually have vitamin and mineral deficiency

because of his gastric bypass.

He came across some online videos that told him zinc and vitamin C were absolutely the

best ways to keep the immune system strong.

…………………………………

Everyone in this internet group made it clear— this was undoubtedly the best way to prevent

any illness.

And it’s simply impossible to take too much Vitamin C and Zinc because they’re water

soluble, meaning that any extras will dissolve in the urine and be excreted from the body.

He went to the pharmacy and started buying as many bottles of zinc and Vitamin C as possible.

GC started with the combination Zinc / Vitamin C gummies.

These were delicious, just like candy, without the calories and with only all of the health

benefits.

He thought that if there’s no limits here, he might as well eat the whole bottle.

Anytime GC felt a runny nose or sore throat, he’d eat an extra handful of Zinc Vitamin

C gummies.

Sometimes the pharmacy would be sold out of his favorite brand of supplement.

He read online that denture adhesive cream contained zinc.

for him to eat as a zinc immune booster.

Anytime he was out of his preferred vitamin brand, he’d eat a tube of denture cream

instead.

…………………………………………………….

4 Months ago, GC started feeling a numbness in his hands and feet.

But it wasn’t that he couldn’t feel anything anymore, it was that all he could feel were

pins and needles

He had experienced this earlier in his life and thought it was familiar, but it wasn’t.

This was on top of him losing his sense of taste.

His sides would start hurting.

He had trouble not only walking, but also standing.

And finally when one day he struggled to walk down the stairs and he fell.

Instantly, he knew something was wrong with his hip as he cried out for help, and he was

brought to the emergency room.

……………………………

At examination, doctors found that GC was alert, and oriented.

His brain was in tact, so maybe he really did just slip.

Doctors’ main focus was to fix his broken hip.

A blood test found that GC’s red blood cells were larger than normal, a state called macrocytosis.

Doctors found that the reflexes in his arms were more responsive than normal.

His arms were also weaker than normal.

His feet had some trouble sensing vibrations.

Since he was alert and oriented when he presented to the emergency room, then it means that

his brain was fine.

But reflexes in the arms go through the spinal cord.

Feeling certain things in the feet also happen in the brain, but those impulses have to go
through the spinal cord.

All of this indicating that maybe he didn’t just slip by accident, but that something

is actually wrong with GC’s spinal cord.

And because he has a history of gastric bypass, then that problem could be caused by a vitamin

deficiency.

Another blood test found that GC’s Vitamin B12 levels were on the lower end of normal.

B12 is needed to make DNA, explaining his big red blood cells.

Without enough Vitamin B12, the nerves start to get damaged.

Nerve damage explains why he fell while his brain’s mostly in tact, because his gastric

bypass surgery didn’t allow him to properly absorb nutrients.

They gave him some vitamin B12 injections to fix this, even though it seemed to be borderline.

He got better, and he was discharged as his condition started to improve.

……………………………………..

When he heard about having B12 deficiency in the hospital, GC took this as instructions

to double down on all vitamins and minerals.

As the days passed he had eaten several hundred Zinc Vitamin C gummies, GC’s side started

hurting again.

His sense of taste started fading, again.

And then his doughter started to notice he wasn’t making as much urine as before.

GC was not able to feel his hands and feet.

One day his doughter found him rolling around on the floor,

confused, and he was brought to the emergency room again.

……………………

At examination this time, doctors found that GC’s kidneys were shutting down.

Quickly, they found out that he had calcium oxalate crystals in the little bit of urine

he was able to make.

These crystals don’t dissolve in water, and they can build up and stick in to the
kidneys, blocking flow, not only causing them to fail, but also causing the tubules in the

kidneys to necrose.

The nurse noticed that GC’s movements were spastic.

Neurology consult found that his reflexes in his arms were more exaggerated than normal,

All of this looking like Vitamin B12 deficiency again, but something’s wrong.

He doesn’t have low B12 levels in his blood, and all chemicals associated with vitamin

B12 were normal.

An MRI of his head was normal, but imaging of his spine suggested some kind of neurodegeneration.

Doctors ordered another blood test and found that GC had low copper presence in blood.

…………………………………………………

Vitamin C is broken down to oxalate in the body.

In massive doses, it COULD cause kidney stones

There are cases where someone receives a massive megadose of vitamin C in the hospital and

then going in to kidney failure just some hours later.

But kidney failure, wasnt the cause of GC’s pins and needles feeling in his hands and feet.

His kidneys didn’t cause him to fall down the stairs and shatter his hip.

Kidney failure usually causes build up of things in the blood, because if they were

working properly, the kidneys would be filtering things out, so that wouldn’t cause low copper

presence in blood.

And the kidneys are NOT the reason why part of GC’s spinal cord appears to have degenerated,

bringing us back to zinc and copper.

……………………………..

In the cells of the stomach, and the small intestines, are proteins called metallothioneins.

These sulfur rich proteins neutralize metal ions that come from our diet.

In normal function, some copper in the stomach and intestines bind metallothionein and get

excreted in the feces.

The remaining copper gets absorbed in to the body and is used for essential processes.
If too much zinc is around, it tells the body to make more metallothionein.

And more metallothionein means that all the copper is inactivated by it and none of it

gets absorbed in, to be used in the body.

This is a problem because the brain is the most copper rich organ in humans.

We know the brain needs copper to develop and function properly.

All of this explaining GC’s neurologic problems, that he developed since eating excess zinc

everyday, it simply forced his body to deplete all copper stores, and without copper functioning

in the body, the nerves start to degenerate.

……………………………………

The solution was to give him copper, and tell him to cut it out with the zinc.

He had been discharged from the hospital and was able to go to physical therapy for his hip.

And as he finally learned a lesson about his excess, he made a recovery.