linus pauling, snakeoil or the good stuff? page

[dado]

what's up with this guy, and the massive vitamin c dosing he advocates?

is he an outright quack or is there goodstuff behind his vitamin c ideas?

[indigogirl]

He's not a quack.
I can't quote research. He's well respected.
For general purposes, one can take vitamin C to bowel tolerance, everyone is different.

[carlh]

link to wth you're talking about would be helpful dado

[dado]

this might help. Vindication For Linus Pauling

i didn't read it, but just glanced through. it seems legit; i have good eyes.

[IcarianVX]

I have read and followed Pauling's vit C theory for about 10 years. I take 2g of vit C at night before bed. Figure it can't hurt. The dude had a Nobel prize in science. He isn't a quack.
Also did his Lysine and Proline thing for awhile, but stopped since I eat between 200 and 300g of protein per day. I am probably getting enough of those.

[PaleoPenn]

I remember reading about him and his megadoses of vitamin C back in the 70's but I only recently started that regimen for myself. My Dad claims to have taken a course taught by him at either USC or Mt. San Antonio College back in the early 60's (Prolly USC)

[Stevenhamley]

Definitely not a quack. Although his vitamin C reccomendation is within the toxic threshold for humans and megadoses of antioxidants generally result in a pro-oxidative environment and compromise the hormetic adaptation from exercise for example.

[piano-doctor-lady]

He was a great scientist, but Vitamin C was not where his best knowledge lay. It was early days, much was not known about nutrition.

My dad believed every word, and took megadoses of Vitamin C until he died of prostate cancer at the age of 64. There was far too much he didn't know, and far more that conventional wisdom said which he should never have listened to. He had a "health drink" every morning with breakfast which contained brewers yeast, chocolate drink mix (to make it tasty enough to chug down) and ---- <GROAN> corn oil.

Years after he died, I found a little article in Science News saying that some varieties of prostate cancer are able to manipulate Vitamin C, so they can absorb it, and this enables them to survive chemo and radiation treatments.

He liked the chewable Vitamin C, and it wrecked his tooth enamel. He had to get a nice set of gold caps for his teeth.

I read something once, about Linus Pauling's example of how much vitamin C a dog would make in a day, as if we should take the same amount -- it was something large, at least five or six grams? or maybe even 20? -- and someone in the article asked, "Oh? And how many years will that dog live, again?"

It's possible that NOT being able to synthesize our own vitamin C might account for human lifespan being longer than that of most animals. Possibly we dump vitamin C in urine so quickly because it's dangerous to have too much of it hanging around.