Its common these days to see people buying up vitamin C tabs, pills, and chewables at the beginning of cold and flu season. While some swear by the immune system boosting properties some still question whether these supplements really help. There are many studies that definitively show Vitamin C is needed by the body for production of collagen and without it you will eventually die of scurvy. Other studies have found benefits of the vitamin in other areas, making use of its antioxidant properties. While some claim the vitamin can be used in high doses to cure the common cold or lessen the degree and severity of illnesses.First off Vitamin C has been studied as an aid in fighting cancer. One exciting, but preliminary study was performed on live cancer cells in a test tube environment. Scientists administered infusions of Vitamin C to a set of nine cancer cell cultures and four normal cell cultures. The cancer cells had a fifty percent decrease in survival rate, while the normal cells appeared to be unaffected. The vitamin C appeared to kill cancer cells in a laboratory environment. While this is promising it should be noted that this is not a study that was performed in humans and many things can be promising in the laboratory but some things just don't work out in the real world trials.Diabetics may be interested to know that Vitamin C is being studied as a way to increase the body's receptiveness to insulin. The disease is partly characterized by the blood vessels inability to respond Nitric Oxide (NO) which is secreted by the walls of the blood vessel and encourage the muscles to relax increasing blood flow to the areas of the body. The vessel walls don't relax and thus contribute to the body's insulin resistance. It's been confirmed that injections of vitamin C have been shown to improve vessel wall reaction to NO in diabetic patients. The new study is going to observe the effectiveness of oral vitamin C in Diabetic patients.There were many, many studies performed to try and determine whether vitamin C can indeed prevent the common cold. In the seventies there were a series of trial run by a team headed by a Dr. Terrence Anderson at the University of Toronto. His studies found the same results as many other studies, that vitamin C though necessary in the body doesn't prevent the common cold. It does seem to lessen the length of time you have a cold by half a day on average and there is no need to take really high doses to achieve this. It appears that you can get the same effect as a very high dosage of vitamin C in a higher than usual dosage of 250mg during a cold when the cold ends you should return to the recommended daily value of 60mg.