Tracked as a goal
Vitamin C tracking
- Unit
- mg
- Default goal
- 90 mg
- Direction
- Reach
What it is, and why people track it
Vitamin C is involved in collagen synthesis, immune function and iron absorption. It is water-soluble, so excess is excreted rather than stored, and intake needs to be reasonably regular.
It is also unusually fragile: it degrades with heat, light and time. The same vegetable can differ substantially between raw, steamed and long-boiled, and between fresh and stored.
Setting your number
AIM targets 90 mg a day, the label daily value. Smokers are generally advised to add about 35 mg.
How good is the estimate?
The most cooking-sensitive nutrient in the registry. Raw versus boiled can differ by half, and a photograph does not always make that clear. Saying how it was cooked helps here more than almost anywhere else.
Questions
- Does cooking destroy vitamin C?
- It reduces it substantially. Vitamin C degrades with heat, light and time, and leaches into cooking water — boiled vegetables can lose a large fraction of what they started with. Steaming and raw preparations retain more.
Also in this group
Sodium
A cap, defaulting to 2,300 mg a day. Most sodium is not the salt shaker, which is why an estimate from the meal itself is more useful than a note to “use less salt”.
Cholesterol
Dietary cholesterol as a cap, defaulting to 300 mg a day — tracked because people are asked to track it, with a note on what current guidance actually says.
Potassium
A goal, not a cap — most people fall short. Potassium is the counterweight to sodium in blood pressure guidance and is missing from most macro trackers entirely.
Calcium
A standard metric with a 1,000 mg daily goal — worth watching on a dairy-free or plant-based diet, where the shortfall is easy to miss.
Track vitamin c without a database search
AIM estimates it on every meal from a photo or a sentence, and lets you correct anything it got wrong just by saying so.