When we mention Vitamin C, the tendency is to think of orange juice. When asked, “are you getting enough Vitamin C?” people tend to answer, “oh yes, I drink a glass of orange juice every morning”.
However, Vitamin C is so much more than a glass of orange juice; it is more than oranges and grapefruits.
Many of the pioneer researchers investigating Vitamin C, or ascorbic acid, believe it has been misnamed; the term ‘vitamin’ implies that it is a micronutrient and that the body requires only trace amounts of it.
In fact, guinea pigs, higher monkeys, certain species of bats and humans are the only creatures on the planet who do not manufacture their own Vitamin C, leading some researchers to propose that the fact that we cannot produce our own Vitamin C stores, constitutes a defect in our genetic hard-wiring.
Extrapolating the amounts required by healthy animals to humans demonstrates that we require far more than the generally stated recommended daily intake (RDI) by health experts and various agencies.
Given the same ratio of ascorbate per body weight of, say, a rat, a human would require something in the region of 2-4g per day of ascorbate when healthy, leading up to 15g per day during serious illness.
Hungarian physiologist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1937 for his discovery of Vitamin C.
He found that ascorbic acid was an essential aspect of biological combustion. This led him to postulate that Vitamin C was an essential substance for maintaining cellular communication within the body.
Cellular communication is essentially to maintain a constant flow of electrical and magnetic fields. The greater the amount of Vitamin C, the better our electron flow and therefore, the more improved the flow of communication between the cells.
Illnesses of any variety occur when this electron flow is impaired. Infectious diseases, allergies, autoimmune diseases and others involve ‘free radicals’. Large doses of ascorbate are among the few substances able to provide enough high-energy electrons to put a swift end to free-radical damage and therefore interrupt the chain reaction that creates free radicals. Therefore, when the body succumbs to illness, the need for Vitamin C becomes huge.
Szent-Gyorgyi and other Vitamin C pioneers who followed him, all discovered that our Vitamin C needs are related to the severity of illness.
In the 1940s, huge interest in Vitamin C as a potential curative for a range of infectious diseases became apparent. Many more pioneers, all forgotten now, published research demonstrating how viral and bacterial disease could be neutralised.
A bacteriologist, Claus Jungeblut, who was studying the statistics from the 1938 Australian polio epidemic, concluded that all those people who had contracted the disease were deficient in Vitamin C.
As early as 1935, Jungeblut, a professor of bacteriology at Columbia University College, claimed that Vitamin C could completely inactivate the polio virus.
During the 1950s, biologist and medical doctor Frederick Klenner began experimenting with large doses of intravenous Vitamin C. Klenner specialised in diseases of the chest. However, he chose to continue as a GP, as this provided him with the opportunity to observe and treat a larger array of illnesses.
He was especially interested in the actions of ascorbic acid. Klenner’s interest in Vitamin C began when his wife, who suffered from bleeding gums, was recommended by her dentist to have a full extraction of her teeth.
Klenner had read that Vitamin C had treated a similar problem on chimpanzees and been successful.
He subsequently treated his wife with Vitamin C and her condition was completely cured. He went on to treat other patients with different illnesses and showed much success.
In 1949, Klenner published a landmark paper in which he described how he had treated polio and other infectious diseases with Vitamin C.
Sixty patients with polio were cured. He shared his success at the 98th annual session of the American Medical Association in 1949.
His bold assertions were ignored and no researcher attempted to follow his success; no funding was apportioned to the role Vitamin C could play in the polio outbreak.
His further work and successes make very interesting reading and bring up many ‘what ifs?’
Klenner and other pioneers who followed him, notably Robert Cathcart, Irwin Stone and Linus Pauling, all experimented with the use of Vitamin C against various infectious diseases.
Pauling was famous for his assertion that Vitamin C would stop a cold from progressing while Cathcart worked on patients with HIV.
In a letter published in The Lancet he claimed his regime has “slowed or stopped or even reversed for several years” the depletion of CD4+T cells by giving oral doses that were close to bowel tolerance.
In Curing the Incurable (Henderson, N.V., Liv On Books, 2002), Thomas Levy details all the scientific evidence for Vitamin C and disease.
He offers a persuasive argument that ascorbic acid is probably the most potent all-purpose medicine currently available.
The fact that it has been so ignored, even ridiculed, by the media and mainstream medicine is no accident.
If a cheap and simple nutrient were to be seriously considered as a modern cure for many illnesses and diseases, it could virtually eliminate the whole of the pharmaceutical industry.
kathryn@maltanet.net