Many customers may remember Bogdana founder, JL Gruber, interviewing Linus Pauling on our show Let’s Talk About Health on WOR radio. Linus Pauling was the only person to ever win 2 undivided Nobel prizes. Dr. Pauling is known as one of the twenty greatest scientist to ever live. He is in a company with other greats such as Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.
Among many other things, in the 1960s he began to investigate the role of Vitamin C in human health and he published many studies.
Dr. Pauling was convinced that a cause of atherosclerosis is a lifelong deficiency of vitamin C. He laid out a molecular basis to explain vitamin C’s connection with lipoprotein-a, a major component of the plaques found in the blood vessels linked to cardiovascular disease. Pauling was convinced that high doses of vitamin C could help prevent the onset of cardiovascular disease.
One of the first human studies that substantiated the benefits of vitamin supplements was announced in 1992 and showed that people who took 800 mg a day of vitamin C lived six years longer than those who consumed the FDA’s recommended daily allowance of 60 mg a day. This ten-year study, published in the journal Epidemiology, showed that high vitamin C intake extended average life span and reduced mortality from cardiovascular disease.
Until now, scientists believed that vitamin C‘s anti-cancer potential was due to its antioxidant capabilities. However, researchers at the University of Iowa found that vitamins C may actually work by generating free radicals that destroy cancer cells while avoiding healthy cells.
Now a new study at the University of Salford in England found that vitamin C was up to 10 times more effective in stopping cancer than experimental treatments. The research shows that vitamins C targets and kills cancer stem cells which are responsible for cancer tumors growing and spreading. Cancer stem-cells are believed to be resistant to chemotherapy. Researchers believe that they may be a trigger to recurrence of tumors and their growth, which allows them to spread throughout the body, eventually causing death. Controlling cancer stem cells it the only way to control cancer, especially metastatic cancer, the main killer of patients.
It is no surprise that Vitamin C has been shown effective in other health areas:
Scientific studies at John Hopkins found that 500 mg of vitamin C each day significantly reduced blood pressure.
A European study of almost 20,000 men and women found that mortality from cardiovascular disease was 60 percent lower in people with the highest concentration of vitamin C in their blood.
A Finish study published in Allergy, Asthma & Clinical Immunology found that the presence of Vitamins C in the body cut the symptoms of bronchoconstriction during exercise in half, and also increased capacity of the lungs small airways by 50 to 150 percent in more that 40 percent of people with asthma.
Vitamin C is an important nutrient for overall health. But unless you eat many servings of fruits and vegetables every day, you may want to take a vitamin C supplement. Dr. Pauling shared with Mr. Gruber and the listeners of WOR that he took 10,000 milligrams of vitamin C a day. He lived to be 96.