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Is this why taking Vitamin C is good when you start to get a cold?
I'm glad I'm not the only one who observes this rather mysterious obsession with demonstrating that Vitamin C has magical properties.
On a side note, Linus Pauling was notorious for, late in life, after winning all his Nobels and other such prizes, pushing the idea that megadoses of Vitamin C would cure all cancers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Medical_research... https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/high-dose-vitamin-c-and... He died in 1994, of cancer.
>He died in 1994, of cancer. Why is this brought out in such a dismissing and ironic way? He claimed that there may be some treatments with Vitamin C, not that if you take a little a day you'll be immortal. Hell, there are so many different types of cancer, that even if megadosing C helped with one it probably wouldn't help with all. He lived to his 90s. At that point it was either cancer or heart disease that kills…
Is this why taking Vitamin C is good when you start to get a cold?
If you consider the evolution of homo sapiens and it's predecessor, homo erectus, you have about 1.98 Million years where their diet would have been rich in Vitamin C; berries, fruit, vegetables etc.; their primary food sources, supplemented occasionally by meat when available. Farming only began to develop around 20,000 years ago, causing grains take a bigger role in home sapiens diet and reducing the relative Vitam…
Is this why taking Vitamin C is good when you start to get a cold?
Vitamin C has been proven to not have an effect on viral colds either way.[1] Vitamin D on the other hand has been proven to be an immune system modulator.[2] Unlike Vitamin C, most people develop Vitamin D deficiency.[3] I strongly advice you and everybody based on these studies to get yearly blood work and talk to a doctor about taking 4000IU daily supplement of Vitamin D. Also massive doses of Vitamin D can have n…
While human and animal studies have shown that vitamin C does significantly improve immune function,[1] over 40 years of research suggests that routine vitamin C supplementation does not prevent the common cold but modestly reduces its duration and severity in the general population, and halves the risk of catching a cold in people exposed to extreme physical stress, while the few therapeutic trials of vitamin C treatment of the common cold have been inconsistent.[2][3]
On a side note, Linus Pauling was notorious for, late in life, after winning all his Nobels and other such prizes, pushing the idea that megadoses of Vitamin C would cure all cancers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Medical_research... https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/high-dose-vitamin-c-and... He died in 1994, of cancer.
>He died in 1994, of cancer. Why is this brought out in such a dismissing and ironic way? He claimed that there may be some treatments with Vitamin C, not that if you take a little a day you'll be immortal. Hell, there are so many different types of cancer, that even if megadosing C helped with one it probably wouldn't help with all. He lived to his 90s. At that point it was either cancer or heart disease that kills…
It’s uncomfortable to those with analytical minds to accept the fact that we know so little about the human body and how it works. Studies are always contradicting each other because the scientific method dictates that studies must be reduced to the minimum of variables. But the body is far too complex for that. Most of what I was taught nutritionally in school as a kid was wrong. Most of the health advice was wrong. We were told butter is evil and we should eat margerine. We were told fat was evil and that cholesterol causes heart disease despite no evidence other than correlation. We don’t know how or even if consumed cholesterol gets turned into cholesterol in the bloodstream. It’s virtually universally believed that salt is bad despite it being an essential nutrient. It’s universally believed that sun is bad and we must slather ourselves with sunscreen and now we all have Vitamin D deficiencies. Read the literature that comes with any prescription drug and there will be a paragraph explaining that they have no idea how the drug works. Many are no more effective than a placebo. There’s a perception that has persisted most of my life that we are always at a point where we have these things figured out, but ten years later they are proven wrong, but we don’t seem to notice that.
There is an almost religious fervor surrounding science when it comes to our health and nutrition. Lots of research in the past few years surrounds gut bacteria, something that wasn’t even on the charts even 10 years ago. Now we are realizing that we not only know nothing, we know less than nothing.
I don’t think Pauling will be vindicated on Vitamin C because this came from a time when it was universally thought that there was a pill or an injecton for anything and we just had to discover it. If you read Pauling’s books, you’ll realize that he never advocated it as a panacea, but part of a complete dietary and mental regimen. His research is compelling and it’s not hard to see how he came to the conclusions that he did.
It’s good to hear I’m not the only one learning from history and realizing the uncomfortable fact that we know so little and this treatment of ulcers is the exception rather than the rule. How did we not discover this was bacterial for so long? It’s not like this is the 19th century after all.
On a side note, Linus Pauling was notorious for, late in life, after winning all his Nobels and other such prizes, pushing the idea that megadoses of Vitamin C would cure all cancers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Medical_research... https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/high-dose-vitamin-c-and... He died in 1994, of cancer.
Lots of mice studies don't translate well into humans. This one is highly specific -- a specific mutation. It's unlikely to have much bearing on real world cancer.
"To test the effect of vitamin C, two million HCT116 or VACO432 cells were injected subcutaneously into the flank of 6 to 8-week-old female athymic nude mice (Harlan, Indianapolis, IN). After 7-10 days, mice with tumors of 40-60 mm3 were randomly divided into two groups. One group was treated with freshly prepared vitamin C (sodium ascorbate in 400 ul PBS, 4 g per kilogram of body weight) by intraperitoneal (IP) injection twice a day (HCT116: n=6, VACO432: n=6). Control group mice were treated with PBS instead of vitamin C with the same dosing schedule (HCT116: n=4, VACO432: n=7)."
[...]
[Caption Fig 2:]
"Tumor sizes were measured 2-3 times per week in an unblinded manner."
http://www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aaa5004
Not only are they mice, but they have no immune system[1]. Also, the dose of vitamin C is like consuming an entire bottle twice a day (~240 g)[2]. They are honest about the lack of blinding, which is good, but obviously that should make us wary of these findings. Also, they do not report tumor size before splitting into treatment vs control groups (only saying mice with 40-60 mm^3 tumors were used). Put the larger ones in the control group and you can easily appear to be slowing tumor growth for totally artefactual reasons.
For example, start with low initial (40) and high initial (60) cells in two different mice. If the cells all divide every day how many do you expect after 1:3 days. Low: 40,80,160; High: 60,120,240; Difference: 20,40,80. The difference seems to grow just due to the starting conditions, growth rates were the same. So these results are uninterpretable without knowing the starting tumor sizes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_mouse
[2] http://www.allergyresearchgroup.com/buffered-vitamin-c-240-g...
On a side note, Linus Pauling was notorious for, late in life, after winning all his Nobels and other such prizes, pushing the idea that megadoses of Vitamin C would cure all cancers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Medical_research... https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/high-dose-vitamin-c-and... He died in 1994, of cancer.
There are really many types of chancer, and Vitamin C (if confirmed) seems to help only from some types of it. So that he died of cancer say absolutely nothing about Vitamin C.
Mice synthesize their own vitamin C; humans do not (hence, it should properly be called ascorbic acid in mice, not vitamin c). The biological pathways involving this compound are very different between species, and deserve special consideration.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>He died in 1994, of cancer. Why is this brought out in such a dismissing and ironic way? He claimed that there may be some treatments with Vitamin C, not that if you take a little a day you'll be immortal. Hell, there are so many different types of cancer, that even if megadosing C helped with one it probably wouldn't help with all. He lived to his 90s. At that point it was either cancer or heart disease that kills…
I never understood the mocking, either, especially since he’s been proven extremely right about the ill-effects of consuming processed sugars. I suspect it’s rooted in his anti-nuclear and anti-war views and it just grew from there. His views on Vitamin C were just a convenient target. It’s uncomfortable to those with analytical minds to accept the fact that we know so little about the human body and how it works. St…
In a sound bite X More! vs. X Less! has a lot to do with peoples eating habits and overall health not just how good or bad X is.
Especially when it often breaks down as Benefits A, B, C vs. problems X, Y, Z. Yes, sometimes we add a benefit or risk to the list and or change the risk weights slightly, but rarely do things change all that much from one decade to the next.