Vitamin C

I’m going down a rabbit hole again.  The one paper on the synergistic effects of fasting and vitamin C that my friend sent the other day led me to download a good dozen related publications.  Reading them will take some time.  Synthesizing and condensing all the information will take even longer.  But there’s no reason not to forge ahead with what I've got already.  Let’s get started with vitamin C.  I don’t have to read papers for that.  Wikipedia and the internet in general tell me all I need to know.

Vitamin C is a fairly simple organic compound and an essential nutrient.  It is involved in tissue repair and important for the function of the immune system.  It also functions as an antioxidant, which means it can mitigate oxidative damage to proteins and DNA.  Humans – in contrast to most animals – cannot make it themselves.  It needs to be consumed with food or as dietary supplements.  For most people, a reasonably healthy diet is all it takes to get enough vitamin C.  The story could end here but it doesn’t.

Many decades ago, the great chemist Linus Pauling hypothesized that elevated levels of vitamin C give all sorts of benefits, from beating the common cold to longer, healthier lives.  His megavitamin theory keeps floating around in various incarnations that are promoted by Pauling’s acolytes to this day.  Health food stores sell big tubs of vitamin C, but the idea behind it has been debunked.

The Office of Dietary Supplements, which sounds like a Monty Python sketch but is in reality an information dispensary of the National Institutes of Health, writes that consuming increased amounts of vitamin C is of limited value.  Its tissue and plasma levels are tightly controlled.  The more vitamin C is consumed, the smaller the share that’s absorbed.  Popping more pills won’t do much.  Most of the stuff leaves the body straight away through strained kidneys.  The narrow range of allowed concentrations probably determines the antioxidant properties of vitamin C.

How can high doses of vitamin C then help the body fight cancer?  The key here is that we’re talking about intravenous administration and not oral consumption.  Put vitamin C straight into the blood, and you can reach concentrations around 100 times higher than by ingestion.  Such high levels may change the properties of vitamin C from antioxidant to pro-oxidant.  The potential generation of hydrogen peroxide with selective toxicity toward cancer cells is quite exciting.  In the next post, I’m going to dig through some of the studies of the relationship between vitamin C and my cancer.