Vitamin C

:This article is about the nutrient.

Advocacy

The fact that man possesses three of the four enzymes that animals employ to manufacture the substance in relatively large amounts, has led researchers such as Irwin Stone and Linus Pauling to hypothesize that man once manufactured this substance in the body millions of years ago in quantities roughly estimated at 3,000-4,000 mg daily, but later lost the ability to do this through evolution. If true, this would of course mean that vitamin C was misnamed as a vitamin and is in fact a vital macronutrient like fat or carbohydrate.

Related Topics:
Irwin Stone - Linus Pauling - Vitamin - Macronutrient

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Dr. Hickey, of Manchester University, believes that man carries a mutated and ineffective form of the genetic machinery for manufacturing the fourth of the four enzymes used by all mammals to make ascorbic acid. Cosmic rays or a retro virus could have caused this mutation, millions of years ago. In humans the three surviving enzymes continue to produce the precurors to ascorbic acid but the process is incomplete and the body then disassembes them

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In the 1960s Nobel Prize winning chemist Linus Pauling, after contact with Irwin Stone, began actively promoting vitamin C as a means to greatly improve human health and resistance to disease. His book How to Live Longer and Feel Better was a best seller and advocated taking more than 10,000 milligrams per day. It sold widely and many advocates today see its influence as the reason there was a marked downward trend in US heart disease from the early 1980s onwards.

Related Topics:
1960s - Linus Pauling - Irwin Stone - Heart disease - 1980s

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Stone's work also informed the practise of Dr. Robert F. Cathcart III, in the 1970s and 1980s. He applied large doses of ascorbate to a wide range of viral diseases with successful results. Cathcart developed the concept of Bowel tolerance , the use of the onset of diarrhoea as an indication of when the body's true requirement of ascorbic acid had been reached. He found that seriously ill people could often tolerate levels of tens of grams per day before their tolerance limit is reached.

Related Topics:
Robert F. Cathcart III - 1970s - 1980s - Bowel tolerance - Diarrhoea

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In 2003 pharmacologists Steve Hickey and Hilary Roberts of the University of Manchester published a fundamental criticism of the approach taken to fix the nutritional requirement of Vitamin C. They argued the in 2004 that the RDA which is based on blood plasma and white blood cell saturation data from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was based on flawed data.

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. According to these authors, the doses required to achieve blood, tissue and body ?saturation? are much larger than previously believed. They allege that the Institute of Medicine (IoM) and the NIH had ignored an open letter from a number of scientists and medical researchers notabley Drs Steve Hickey, Hilary Roberts, Ian Brighthope, Robert Cathcart, Abram Hoffer, Archie Kalokerinos, Tom Levy, Richard Passwater, Hugh Riordan, Andrew Saul and Patrick Holford, which called for revision of the RDA.

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It has been suggested by some advocates that ascorbic acid is really a food group in its own right like carbohydrates or protein and should not be seen as a pharmaceutical or vitamin at all.

Related Topics:
Food group - Carbohydrate - Protein

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Some vitamin C advocates hold that the wider adoption of vitamin C for therapeutic use is hindered by the fact that it cannot now be patented. This means that pharmaceutical companies are unwilling to fund research or promotion of a substance in which they stand to make little profit and which will compete with some of their own patented medicines in which they have invested large sums.

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