Vitamin C is a water-soluble vitamin that can be found in citrous fruits and vegetables as well as in dietary supplements. Vitamin C is a necessary for tissue repair, collagen formation, and neurotransmitter enzymatic production.
Vitamin C, or otherwise known as Ascorbic Acid, is a water-soluble vitamin. It dissolves in water and is given to the body’s tissues, but it is not well stored, therefore it must be consumed daily through food or supplements.
The term Ascorbic Acid refers to Vitamin C in its purest form, not bound to any other compound. Some researchers regard ascorbic acid as the best form of oral Vitamin C supplementation, and ascorbic acid is the form used in most clinical studies demonstrating the therapeutic effectiveness of Vitamin C.
Factors requiring a higher Vitamin C intake include smoking, alcohol ingestion, stress, diabetes, pregnancy, and certain drugs, including oral contraceptives, antibiotics, acetylsalicylate and anti-inflammatory medications.
Vitamin C is a potent antioxidant that can neutralise damaging free radicals and helps to manage infections and repair wounds. Collagen is a fibrous protein found in connective tissue that is woven across the body’s many systems, including the nervous, immunological, bone, cartilage, blood, and others. The vitamin aids in the production of numerous hormones and chemical messengers that are important in the brain and nerves.
“The diseases of the heart and the cardiovascular system are the number one killers of present-day Americans.” – Dr Irwin Stone
If you are sick, one effective way of high-dosing C orally is to get a glass bottle (1–1.5 litres), put in 20-30 g of vitamin C powder (around 4-5 teaspoons) and fill with water, then drink throughout the day and replenish whenever necessary. This ensures high potency C is delivered on a regular basis simultaneously with water intake.
Vitamin C is very safe for children and highly effective when they get fevers or childhood ailments. For adults, clinical evidence shows that mega-dose vitamin C (oral and IV) is effective for all forms of infection, flu, muscle weakness, muscle pain, chronic lower back pain, general pain management, periodontitis, and the more serious stuff we’re going to examine in this section.
Dr. Frederick Klenner was a pioneer in the use of Vitamin C in the 1940’s. Klenner stated: Some physicians would stand by and see their patient die rather than use ascorbic acid because in their finite minds it exists only as a vitamin.” Take a look at this PDF link with regards to Klenner’s pioneering work into Vitamin C. Today (2022) Vitamin C is still seen as quackery pretty much by the mainstream medical profession. Click here to download a study in Vitamin C bias and the mainstream medical profession.
Dr. Klenner recommended daily preventive doses of 10,000 to 15,000 mg/day. He advised parents to give their children their age in vitamin C grams (1 g = 1,000 mg). That would be 2,000 mg/day for a two year old, 9,000 mg/day for a nine year old, and for older children, a levelling-off at about 10,000 mg/day. As for me, I simply say, “Take enough C to be symptom free, whatever that amount may be.” It worked for my family. I raised my children all the way into college and they never had a dose of any antibiotic. Not once. It is high time for medical professionals to welcome vitamin C megadoses and their power to cure the sick. Cure is by far the best word there is in medicine. It would seem that you cannot spell “cure” without “C.” I do not think Dr. Klenner would dispute that.”1
Because smoking lowers levels of ascorbic acid in the body, researchers theorised that vitamin C supplementation may affect blood lead levels in smokers. A clinical study was therefore performed on 75 adult men 20 to 30 years of age who smoked at least one pack of cigarettes per day, but had no clinical signs of ascorbic acid deficiency or lead toxicity. Subjects were randomly assigned to daily supplementation with placebo, 200 mg of ascorbic acid, or 1,000 mg of ascorbic acid. After one week of supplementation, there was an 81% decrease in blood-lead levels in the group taking just 1,000 mg of ascorbic acid daily.2
Though images of toothless sailors and dentally challenged pirates spring to mind whenever scurvy is mentioned, Old Tooth Rot is still very much a modern disease, silent and widespread, and is rarely diagnosed as such because we’re not allowed to call it scurvy anymore. Between 1497 and 1499, veteran Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama lost over a hundred men to the disease on one voyage alone. According to naval records, between 1600 and 1800 over one million British sailors died of scurvy. Yet for hundreds of years the cure for this gum-rotting, organ-destroying disease was well known to peoples credited by the West with limited medical intelligence.
In the winter of 1534/5, French explorer Jacques Cartier found himself stranded when his ship became trapped in the ice in a tributary of the St Lawrence River in Canada. Soon his crew began dying of scurvy. Out of one hundred and ten men, twenty-five had already perished and many others were so sick they were not expected to recover.
Believing that the condition was caused either by bad vapors lurking in the hold of his ship or some malignant cause to do with the ‘sea airs’ (a common belief at the time), Cartier was astonished when help came from an unexpected direction. Some friendly local Indians showed Cartier how to boil pine needles and bark from the white pine, later found to be rich in Vitamin C.3 His sailors swiftly recovered after drinking the beverage. Upon his return, Cartier enthusiastically reported this miraculous cure to medical authorities but his observations were dismissed as “witchdoctors’ curses of ignorant savages” and the authorities did nothing about the information they were given, except to log it into their records. On a lengthy voyage to Brazil, Sir Richard Hawkins, the famous Elizabethan admiral, faced scurvy among his crew and discovered that eating oranges and lemons cured the condition quickly. However, despite reporting this phenomenon to the English authorities and to any physicians who would listen, the information was again ignored by the establishment. Sound familiar?
So deaths from scurvy became so numerous that by the 18Th century more British sailors were dying from ascorbate deficiency than were being killed in combat. In 1740, British admiral George A Anson set sail to circumnavigate the globe in his flagship Centurion. Originally starting with six ships and almost 2,000 men, Centurion was the only ship to return. Anson reported that scurvy alone had killed over 1,000 of his men.
The great embarrassment this event caused in Admiralty circles prompted Scottish naval surgeon John Lind to seek a cure for the disease. On 20th May 1747, Lind began an experiment which dramatically demonstrated that fresh greens and plenty of fruits eaten by scurvy sufferers produced stunning recoveries. Later experiments showed that those who ate a diet fortified with these vegetable and fruit elements did not contract scurvy.
The reaction of the establishment was predictable. The Admiralty and numerous physicians, who were attempting to solve the same problem (and earn grants and fame into the bargain), barely acknowledged Lind’s findings. It took 48 more years and thousands more scurvy deaths before Lind’s advice finally became official Navy quartermaster policy. Ironically, after implementing this simple measure, the British, who became known as ‘limeys’ because of their new nutrition procedure, soon gained strategic ascendancy on the world’s seas. After 1800, British sailors never contracted scurvy. The naval might of Britain’s enemies, however, continued to be decimated by it, with the exception of the Dutch. Author G Edward Griffin surmises that the founding of the British Empire in large measure “was the direct result of overcoming scientific prejudice against vitamin therapy.” 4=
By the 1930’s, purified vitamin C had been successfully isolated by Albert Szent-Gyorgi and scurvy officially consigned to the footnotes of history. For the correct cure to reach this status in Europe, all it had taken to conquer scurvy was 400 years of incompetence, millions of deaths, and finally the realisation that the answer did indeed lie in a simple diet of fruit and The Doctor Within.
Have we learned this valuable lesson? Of course not. The slower version of scurvy is now the leading cause of disease death in the industrialised nations, but you know it better today as heart disease.
Cardiovascular or heart disease is the umbrella term for any disease of the heart and circulatory system. This includes, but is not limited to, stroke, coronary heart disease, cardiomyopathy (the weakening of the heart muscle), myocardial infarction, arrhythmia, atherosclerosis, arteriosclerosis, thrombosis, angina pectoris, embolism, heart murmurs and hypertensive heart disease (caused by high blood pressure).
Over 3,000 Americans die every day from heart disease in its various forms. According to the British Heart Foundation it killed 198,000 people in the UK in 2007 alone.5
Compare this with the number of road-accident-related deaths in the UK in 2008 (approx. 2,600), and you understand just how big a killer heart disease really is, not just in Britain and the US, but across Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, China and Russia. There are predictions that all regions of the world will be affected by heart disease in a similar way by 2020.6 Currently in the USA it remains a bigger killer than cancer.7
As far back as the 1940’s, doctors have been questioning the true nature of heart disease. J C Paterson, a Canadian pathologist, first suggested that the problem could actually be a result of vitamin C deficiency – a type of long-term, low-level, stealth-scurvy. Since then, other doctors researching in the area, such as Linus Pauling and C A Clemetson, have seconded this theory. Dr Matthias Rath, an understudy of Pauling’s, writes:
“Animals don’t get heart attacks because they produce vitamin C in their bodies, which protects their blood vessel walls. In humans, unable to produce vitamin C (a condition known as hypoascorbemia), dietary vitamin deficiency weakens these walls. Cardiovascular disease is an early form of scurvy. Clinical studies document that optimum daily intakes of vitamins and other essential nutrients halt and reverse coronary heart disease naturally. The single most important difference between the metabolism of human beings and most other living species is the dramatic difference in the body pool of vitamin C. The body reservoir of vitamin C in people is on average 10 to 100 times lower than the vitamin C levels in animals.” 8 [emphasis ours]
Scurvy occurs when the collagen matrix in the body begins to break down. With heart disease, the scurvy process is much slower, sometimes taking years to develop. As Dr Rath reports, vitamin C is essential for the production of collagen and elastin, the elastic, fibrous materials which knit the walls of arteries and blood vessels together. Collagen fibres are a lot like the steel girders you see when builders are erecting a new skyscraper. Each fibre has been calculated to be far tougher and stronger than an iron wire of comparable width. Collagen cells form the structure for arteries, organs and skin, so a chronic vitamin C deficiency sees the commencement of a collapse in the arterial walls, necessitating a healing process in the form of lipoprotein(a) fats, which the body attempts to use to bond the thousands of tiny breaches in the arterial walls.
These lipoproteins are Nature’s perfect Band-Aid. They are extremely sticky and form the atherosclerotic deposits associated with advanced forms of heart disease. Cardiovascular medicine, unaware or willingly ignorant of the underlying nutritional deficiency cause of atherosclerosis, focuses its attention on vilifying the lipoproteins’ LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol content as one of the primary causes of heart diseases, when it is in fact the healing (survival response) precursor brought on by a chronic vitamin C deficiency. Today the drug industry has predictably mobilised a multi-billion-dollar business of anti-cholesterol drugs, which have wrought devastating results in cardiac patients, necessitating a further $20 billion drug program to combat all the side-effects.9 Rath and Pauling discovered that:
Coronary arteries sustain the most stress since they are the primary roadways for blood being pumped by the heart. The need for ongoing repairs of the leaky artery walls produces an overcompensation of repair materials, such as cholesterol, triglycerides and low-density lipoproteins (LDL), produced in the liver, which lead to infarctions as this plaque builds up. Other areas, such as arteries in the legs, are also affected. Varicose veins often develop as a result of this ongoing healing process.
Autopsies of military personnel killed during the Korean and Vietnam wars showed that up to 75% of the victims had developed some form of atherosclerosis even at ages of 25 or younger. Yet those servicemen who had been captured by the enemy and incarcerated on rice and vegetable diets were later, upon release and a medical examination, found to have cleared the plaque during their captivity.
Victims of accidents are often found to have developed atherosclerotic deposits that would have become a problem had they lived longer. Dr Rath comments:
“The main cause of atherosclerotic deposits is the biological weakness of the artery walls caused by chronic vitamin deficiency [malnutrition]. The atherosclerotic deposits are the consequence of this chronic weakness; they develop as a compensatory stabilizing cast of Nature to strengthen these weakened blood vessel walls.” 11
Science knows a lot about cancer. It is the most studied disease of our century. We are aware that cancer is caused by environmental toxins, we know that cancer is a chronic disease, we know that all cancer patients have a parasite/fungus/yeast problem, and we know from Dr Otto Warburg, 1931 Nobel laureate, that cancer occurs when cells switch from oxygen respiration to fermentation. But there’s another fact about cancer not so widely recognised by the public, and up until recently vehemently denied by doctors. Cancer is a metabolic disease. It is connected in some way to diet.
Cancer is caused by a healing process that has not stopped on completion of its task. Cells damaged by mutagenic, environmental toxins divide abnormally, invading normal cells, proliferating without restriction, causing tumours that can be aggressive and invasive, able to infect and destroy bone. Tumours are essentially fungal material which has been duplicated inside fermenting cells. Cancer cells demand a lot of nutrients and can adversely affect the oxygen levels of the body. When cells do not receive enough oxygen, they revert to a primitive form of fermentation, releasing large amounts of free radicals as they metabolise sugars for energy.
In our view, vitamin C should be used in ALL cancer cases, both oral (titrating intake to bowel tolerance) and IV (intravenous). Studies show that when vitamin C is given intravenously in mega-doses, it is selectively toxic to cancer cells. Dosage varies from 30,000 mg to 200,000 mg IV/24 hours, sometimes more.12 There are no reported side-effects aside from a dry mouth and a spacey feeling in the head. The treatment is thought to work by producing large amounts of hydrogen peroxide at the cancer site (massive oxygen). Recent press reports of the effectiveness of this simple treatment have rekindled the public’s interest.13
www.doctoryourself.com states:
“There are many good reasons to give large quantities of vitamin C to a cancer patient. Ascorbic acid strengthens the collagen ‘glue’ that holds healthy cells together and retards the spread of an existing tumor. The vitamin also strengthens the immune system and provides a surprising level of pain relief.
But there is more. Vitamin C has been shown to be preferentially toxic to cancer cells. Laboratory and clinical studies indicate that, in high enough doses, one can maintain blood plasma concentrations of ascorbic acid high enough to selectively kill tumor cells. If you have not heard about this, it is probably because most of the best publicized (but worst designed) vitamin C and cancer studies simply have not utilized high enough doses. Now, however, Hugh Riordan MD and colleagues have treatment data which ‘demonstrate the ability to sustain plasma levels of ascorbic acid in humans above levels which are toxic to tumor cells in vitro and suggests the feasibility of using AA as a cytotoxic chemotherapeutic agent.’”
Influenza is not the only infectious disease that vitamin C can treat. Dr Frederick R Klenner was curing serious viral illness in the 1940’s using high-dose vitamin C, both IV and oral. Today, his work is unknown by almost all doctors, so today, despite reasonable levels of hygiene, government media campaigns and a wealth of antibiotic-prescribing doctors, infectious disease plagues the modern world. One of the more serious examples is MRSA, a drug-resistant virus that all too often strikes in supposedly one of the most hygienic environments on Earth – the hospital.
The fact is, those with a robust immune system and clean and detoxified body do not suffer from infectious diseases. Chief causes of a depressed immune system will be lack of nutritious food, dehydration, vitamin D deficiency, food allergies, a constant intake of refined sugar and sugary drinks, and stress, which depletes vitamin C reserves in the body. Low levels of vitamin D are thought to be why we get most colds and flu in the winter. Optimising your diet and D3 (calcidiol) serum levels, plus ensuring good levels of C in the system, are the three best factors for avoiding these problems.14
Influenza is a common complaint, one that drives any number of people into surgery waiting rooms where they give it to everyone else. Often doctors prescribe nothing more than bed-rest, plenty of water and lots of vitamin C. Yes, some doctors do prescribe vitamin C, not in any meaningful quantities or because they know specifically how it helps, but because common sense can penetrate even the darkened halls of Hades on occasion.
Dr Thomas Levy cites more than 1,200 studies in which vitamin C was used to treat infectious diseases successfully.15 These included whooping cough, hepatitis, polio, common colds, influenza, ebola, herpes and pneumonia. Up until the 1950’s, there was considerable interest in the pharmaceutical properties of vitamin C, but with the introduction of antibiotics, economics took over. Klenner postulated that vitamin C worked as a broad-spectrum antibiotic, activated the immune system and “proceeds to take up the protein coats being manufactured by the virus nucleic acid, thus preventing the assembly of new virus units.”[16] If the cell dies and breaks down, vitamin C prevents these new particles from becoming virus cells. Vitamin C also strips away the protective protein armour of the virus cell, allowing the white blood cells to attack it.
So versatile is vitamin C that forward-thinking physicians should be engaging their patient’s co-operation in tanking up for all occasions. The older you are, the better. Ascorbate therapy works by oxidising and removing free radicals, preventing the replication of viral cells, preventing oxidative cell stress, promoting the immune system by the production of antibodies and white blood cells, and strengthening the body against secondary infections that can kill. Consider what would happen if governments encouraged all hospitals and care homes to optimise their patients’/residents’ vitamin D levels, ensured an 80% plant-based diet, 60% of it raw, hydrated them with clean spring water instead of Sunny Delight, and gave their charges therapeutic doses of vitamin C throughout the day.
The world would witness miracles of Biblical proportions. This is not rocket science. It’s a matter of scientific and historical record that nutrition cures as well as prevents. Anyone who tells you differently is a menace. Why wait until ministers pull their heads out of their expenses forms to fix this? Each one of us has the capacity to understand what is at stake here and act accordingly. Britain could save the vast majority of the 200,000 deaths annually from heart disease alone with a little educated foresight. The best doctor in the world is not the one charging $300 per hour, it’s The Doctor Within.
Read More About Vitamin C Here: Vitamin C Health Professional Fact Sheet
References