Megadosing Vitamin C

Dear Readers,

I recently joined a Facebook group for megadosing Vitamin C. I've been taking 2500 mg/day and thought that was a lot. Oh no, that's the pansy dose apparently! I'm now taking 10,000 mg/day and have been for about 2 weeks.

I like everything I'm learning about C. (Plus it's cheap!) More to come on megadosing Vitamin C, this morning I wanted to share Fred Pauser's post on how C has worked for him.

#linuspaulingwasontosomething

Vitamin C? But It’s Just a Vitamin...

Guest Post by Fred Pauser

Vitamin C is probably the most discussed and most controversial of all vitamins. According to some authorities we need only 70-90 mgs/day (that’s the RDA) and that the upper safe limit is 500, and some say 2,000 mgs is maximum. On the other hand, some independent nutritionists say that most people should get AT LEAST 3,000 mgs/day of vitamin C, and for optimal health often 10,000 mgs/day is recommended, or more (i.e.: take to “bowel tolerance”).

For many years we have been hearing people say, if you catch a cold take vitamin C suggesting that it will help. But also for years many of us have followed that advice only to discover that vitamin C did NOT seem to help at all! What about the claims that vitamin C can help against heart disease or Polio? If it can’t even help against the common cold, what good could it be against much more serious diseases?

So what’s the truth about vitamin C?

First, it is important to understand that almost all animals (about 99%) manufacture vitamin C in their body. The few exceptions include humans, Guinea pigs, our ape relatives, and certain fruit-eating bats. We humans are missing one enzyme necessary for converting glucose into ascorbate. (Ascorbate is chemical name for vitamin C.)

Tests on animals that DO manufacture ascorbate in their body indicate that (body weight adjusted to correspond to human body weight) such animals manufacture anywhere from 2,000 mgs to 13,000 mgs per day when healthy, and vastly more than that when sick. Animals make an average of 9,000 mgs/day (weight adjusted).

If animals need so much vitamin C, why should humans need so little (as the RDA – “recommended daily allowance”)?

The genius Linus Pauling PhD won a Nobel Prize for his revolutionary discoveries in chemistry, plus 40 honorary PhD’s from universities all over the nation in appreciation. (And then for very different work he got the Nobel Peace Prize.) Pauling began studying the related field of biochemistry when in his 60s. He established the Linus Pauling Institute where he and his team studied “orthomolecular medicine” – which means treating diseases with nutritional substances.

For many years Pauling took 18,000 mgs of vitamin C (ascorbic acid / sodium ascorbate) per day. He lived to 93 and was productive up until very shortly before his death.

The amount of C that Pauling took was based upon two points. 1) Animals manufacture 9,000 mgs/day. 2) He estimated that his own body absorbed only 50% of the vitamin C powder that he took in orally. So he doubled the amount that animals manufacture in order to have an amount in his blood equal to what animals have in their blood.

The Common Cold:

Pauling wrote a book decades ago about the favorable effects of vitamin C against the common cold. So why do many people say vitamin C did not help? As mentioned above, I personally came to that same conclusion years ago – vitamin C did NOT seem to reduce or shorten MY cold symptoms. Back then, with the onset of a cold I would step up my daily intake of C to about 1000 mgs. I thought that was a LOT – after all, the RDA for a man is 90 mgs. But it happens that up against an established cold, 1000 mgs of C is almost worthless!

Finally I studied in depth about vitamin C and I learned about DOSE, DOSE, DOSE! That was over 3 years ago. Since then I’ve had only 2 chances to try out my new knowledge in regard to colds because I’ve been mega-dosing vitamin C every day so colds no longer had much chance to get started – except on 2 occasions when my resistance was knocked down.

On the first of those two occasions, as soon as I realized a cold was coming on I immediately doubled my daily amount of C (to about 30,000 mgs). I caught it early. The cold was eliminated within 2 days.

The next time a cold came on I was lax and did not step up the C, so the cold became deeply established. THEN I stepped it up the C to 40,000 mgs/day which quickly brought the symptoms down to a mild level, but the cold took over a week to completely clear away. If I had stepped up to 100,000 mgs/day I might have eliminated it, or maybe not – my research indicates that a SEVERE cold may require 200,000 mgs of intravenous ascorbate to be quickly eliminated (but no one is likely to go to that extreme for a cold.)

So, YES, vitamin C is effective against colds IF ENOUGH IS TAKEN. And to answer the question above about whether vitamin C can help against coronary heart disease – I was diagnosed with this problem almost 4 years ago. I used orthomolecular treatment ONLY, of which vitamin C was a key component… and I am cured.

And in regard to Polio (as an example):

During a Polio epidemic in North Carolina in 1948, Dr Fred Klenner MD cured 60 out of 60 cases of Polio using only intravenous vitamin C. (Resources here and here.)

The AMOUNT of C you use is critical:

The sicker a person is, the more C they need, in which case “bowel tolerance” (the amount of C a person can take before loose stool occurs) may be vastly increased. In other words, an amount much above my normal daily intake of 16,000 mgs would have given me diarrhea, but with a cold I could take much more with no such such side-effect. The body will absorb what it needs if you supply it. Also, the sicker one is, the more frequent should be the doses.

Vitamin C has been used successfully by many MDs and NDs in the treatment of a large variety of diseases (intravenously and orally). And aside from illness, vitamin C performs many necessary ongoing functions in the body.

Here’s a partial description of what vitamin C does:

• It strengthens the immune system and has direct antipathogen properties.

• It is a strong anti-oxidant and counters inflammation.

• It neutralizes toxins.

• It is necessary for making the most abundant protein in the body – collagen, which is the main protein in connective tissue. Collagen holds us together!

• It is an anti-histamine and is effective against many allergies.

• It serves as a cofactor for many enzymes in the body.

Vitamin C has been used successfully by many unconventional medical doctors in the treatment of a very wide variety of diseases (often intravenously). Although all vitamins are necessary for good health, vitamin C is considered by many such MD’s and nutritionists (including Pauling) to be the most important.

Dr. Thomas Levy MD is a cardiologist and a nutritionist with a lifetime of experience. I highly recommend his books about vitamin C. The book titled Primal Panacea would be a great start.

In the words of Mark Twain: “Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.”