We Aren’t Applying All We Know About Vitamin C

Almost 8 in 10 Americans rate the quality of their personal health care as “excellent or good.”  But compared to what?  Most Americans only hear that America spends more on healthcare than any other country and that it has the most advanced healthcare in the world.  Yet for all the money spent, the US ranks 38th in life expectancy.

How would patients know how to measure the quality of care they receive unless they have something to compare it against?

Japan, with the highest overall life expectancy from birth of 84.5 years, compared to 78.9 years in the U.S., has a completely voluntary vaccination program and according to the Japanese Society for Orthomolecular Medicine, has over 400 trained practitioners at “vitamin C clinics” dotted across Japan’s five main islands.  This author can only count 1 vitamin C clinic in the U.S. (Riordan Clinic, Wichita, Kansas)

For the want of a single vitamin, Americans may be losing out on the best healthcare in the world.  While American physicians continue to embrace the cholesterol paradigm of health, Japan has turned to vitamin C.

Cholesterol phobia

The typical American is conditioned to be cholesterol phobic.  Maybe you fell for the false paradigm that cholesterol is the enemy of mankind without being informed cholesterol is required to make vitamin D, sex hormones (testosterone, estrogen), and fat-dissolving bile, and is required to transport fat-soluble nutrients to tissues in the body such as vitamin E, lutein, beta carotene.

Your body (liver) makes 80% of this cholesterol, the diet contributes 20%.  Eating low-fat/low-cholesterol foods is almost meaningless given your liver is pumping it out.

Statin cholesterol-lowering drugs are liver toxins.  They make the liver malfunction.  When herbal supplements do that, they call that liver toxicity.

Maybe cholesterol-phobia was actually part of a covert effort to limit reproduction and population size.  America never had fertility clinics until cholesterol phobia was created.

Only decades later do we learn that as many people experience mortal heart attacks with low cholesterol as high.  But habits have been created, people live in the past, trust their doctors, and 25 million Americans still take statin drugs.   And you probably never heard, women should never be prescribed statin drugs.  Leading cardiologists have faced off seven manufacturers of statin drugs to say why statin drugs should never be prescribed.  Statin cholesterol drugs have been shown to add just 4 days to your life.  The cash-cow for cardiologists is statin drug prescription renewal.  It keeps their appointment books full.

Cooking up diseases to maintain the disease-care industry

I’ve attempted to alert the public that public health agencies are simply minions for Big Pharma.  Disease mongering, conjuring up more disease to treat for the financial gain of the health care industry, is standard practice in American medicine.  We have a dystopian heath care system where diseases are created for the financial gain of the drug, device and delivery system rather than based upon its moral mandate, which is to prevent disease altogether, in other words, put itself out of business.  Wall Street will not allow that.  The stock price of the Hospital Corporation of America is in the balance.  Cooking up recipes for disease rather than prevention of disease has been an ongoing veiled practice, at least since vitamin C was discovered by Svent Gyorgyi (1937) and vitamins by Casimir Funk (1912).

But vitamin C just cures scurvy, right?

Well that is not all.

Because pharmaceutical drugs are designed to address a single disease the public has grown accustomed to the false notion that vitamins only address vitamin deficiency – scurvy.  In the mind of modern medicine, scurvy is largely a malady that occurs in the 3rd world, and maybe a few winos, but otherwise not commonly here in America, especially with vitamin fortified foods.  By the way, makers of vitamin C pills can’t even say their products remedy scurvy on a product label.

Now vitamin C is a cure-all by virtue of the fact all diseases involve something called free radicals (unbalanced oxygen and nitrogen atoms that require an electron to be donated to halt the destructive process called oxidation– think of spoilage like cut fruit or copper exposed to the outdoor elements).

Vitamin C: electron donor

Vitamin C is the great electron donor of the human body.  Well, at least it was up until the time a gene mutation occurred a few millennia ago. Up until that time, vitamin C was an internal hormone produced in the liver upon demand.  Most animals have the same capacity to internally secrete vitamin C except for guinea pigs, fruit bats and primate monkeys.  The human liver used to make enzymes to convert blood sugar into ascorbate – vitamin C.  But one of those enzymes (gulonolactone oxidase) is no longer made due to a defective gene.  So, humans became totally reliant upon dietary intake of vitamin C, largely from fruits, to meet daily needs.  The typical American diet provides ~110 milligrams of vitamin C.

Various studies, conjured up by modern medicine, have been designed to hide the importance of vitamin C in human health.  Animals rely on vitamin C to pour electrons on wounds, infections, burns, to heal.  But modern “electron deprived” humans now must exist on just a few electrons provided in ~90 milligrams of synthetically made vitamin C powder, because……….. (get this)……… if we took more C than public health authorities keep telling us (~60-90 mg/day) we would find we would need a lot less doctoring and medicines.  You may have to read the preceding sentence twice to let it sink in.

Yes, modern medicine wants you chronically sick, not healthy.  Modern medicine continues to treat the symptoms, not the cause.  What if so many of the symptoms people commonly experience simply emanate from a shortage of vitamin C?

The need for aspirin, ibuprofen, steroids, iron pills, oxygen tanks, red blood cell boosters (Epogen, Procrit), allergy shots and pills and nasal sprays, and yes, statin cholesterol-lowering drugs, are not something the animal world needs from a veterinarian because our pet dogs and cats and farm animals produce their own vitamin C internally.

Before that gene mutation, the human body made thousands of milligrams of vitamin C per day on an as needed basis.  How could just 60-90 milligrams/day possibly do?

While cancer is the most feared, there is nothing like the threat of a “drop-dead” heart attack that has been imbedded in American’s minds.  Defibrillators to re-start the heart are now placed in schools and airports should a “cardiac arrest” occur.  Then cholesterol drugs are automatically prescribed to prevent the recurrence of such an event should the heart need to be restarted. (?)

But sudden-death heart attacks are electrical storms in the heart created by a lack of electrolytes (conductive minerals magnesium, potassium, sodium, calcium), not caused by too much cholesterol.  How many Americans have died needlessly because of this misunderstanding, fostered by modern medicine.  And all to cover up the life-saving properties of vitamin C.

The Forerunner of Vitamin C Therapy

The forerunner of all modern vitamin C advocates, before Linus Pauling and Matthias Rath, is G.C. Willis, a Canadian doctor who wrote three papers about vitamin C’s ability to maintain healthy blood vessels in 1953, 1954, 1955.  You may have never heard of Dr. G.C. Willis.

His most notable observation was that vitamin C blood levels appear to be normal and sufficient to maintain health as long as biological stress is not added to the equation.  What Dr. Willis observed in patients wasn’t malnutrition per se (his patients had some vitamin C in their diets) but increased biological stress from infections, burns and toxins, that depleted vitamin C levels.  This is the most important point of this report.  Keep it in mind.

Dr. Willis’ lesson is that a shortage of vitamin C doesn’t appear to be a problem till some adverse event occurs.  That could even include mental stress.  So, humans are easily lulled into thinking they have enough vitamin C until they face a sudden unexpected health challenge.  The human body once had an internal mechanism to make more vitamin C in response to biological stress.

Recall now, before that gene mutation, the human body would pour millions of electrons (vitamin C) out of the liver should a heart attack occur.  Or if you were sun burned.  Or if you cut your hand.  Even if you reach for a 1000 milligram vitamin C pill when a blood clot blocks blood/oxygen circulation to your heart, it won’t be equal what your body once produced.

Willis noted that humans have the ability to recycle vitamin C which gives them a reprieve from experiencing scurvy compared to guinea pigs that do not recycle vitamin C.

More disconcerting, Willis reported that fatty deposits in the inner wall (intima) of arteries occurred with normal circulating cholesterol numbers! (Did you get that!?)

Veterinarian Jeff Rhody DVM instructs that adult guinea pigs, which weigh about 1 kilogram (2.2 lbs.) require about 20-25 milligrams of vitamin C per day or they will die of heart disease.  Scurvy-prone guinea pigs lack appetite, have dental pain, prolonged wound healing, joint aches and inability to fend off infections.

A 70-kilogram (154-lb.) human would require ~1500-1750 milligrams of vitamin C to equal what the guinea pig needs to stay healthy.  So why does the Supplement Facts box on the back of dietary supplements say 60 milligrams is 100% of your daily requirement for vitamin C?

I hope you are catching on how hard health authorities are working to keep you from recognizing nature prescribed vitamin C as an essential vitamin (hormone) by virtue of the human body’s ability to synthesize vitamin C internally.  That gene mutation took that away.  That gene mutation has never been fully compensated for.

Another finding by Willis is that vitamin C deficiency rapidly results in deposition of fats (cholesterol) in the innermost tissue layer of cells in coronary arteries that supply the heart with oxygenated blood.  In other words, without sufficient vitamin C these fatty deposits in arteries don’t take a lifetime to develop.  When humans internally made vitamin C they never had to remember to take their vitamin C pills.

Drs. Linus Pauling and Matthias Rath followed Dr. Willis and discovered that a different cholesterol particle, lipoprotein(a), takes the place of vitamin C in the inner arterial wall when C is in short supply.

Lipoprotein(a) acts as a “sticky bandage” that attracts blood platelets, which then results in a blood clot that blocks coronary arteries.  The result: a heart attack.

In 1990 Pauling and Rath reported that Lipoprotein(a) is found in the blood plasma of animal species that are unable to secrete vitamin C (guinea pigs, fruit bats, primate monkeys) but not in other species.

Furthermore, Willis showed that cholesterol-rich chow fed to guinea pigs produces fatty plaques inside coronary arteries, but that doesn’t happen when vitamin C is added to the animal chow!

Over five decades later researchers in Denmark repeated Dr. Willis’ discovery, that high-fat/cholesterol diets deplete vitamin C in the brain, irrespective of the vitamin C blood level of guinea pigs.  When arteries in the brain are deprived of vitamin C they become floppy and blood capillaries (connectors between arteries and veins) become weak and leaky, resulting in hemorrhages or formation of clots that we call strokes.  Strokes could be thwarted by vitamin C supplementation, especially when fatty-cholesterol foods are trimmed from the diet.  But ideally, if that mutated gene could be repaired, then this would happen automatically.

I won’t go into all the details of his work. Die-hard vitamin C students can examine Dr. Willis’ research in detail on their own.

An Experimental Study Of The Intimal Ground Substance In Atherosclerosis, Canadian Medical Assn. Journal, Vol 69, July 1953

Serial Arteriography in Atherosclerosis, Canadian Medical Assn. Journal, Vol. 71, 1954.

Ascorbic Acid Content Of Human Arterial Tissue.  Canadian Medical Assn. Journal Vol. 72, 1955.

But here is a snippet of what he demonstrated.

DISCOVERY BY G.C. WILLIS 1953,

Canadian Medical Assn. Journal

Guinea pigs (don’t internally produce vitamin C) NUMBER OF ANIMALS # WITH ATHEROSCLEROSIS (FATTY PLAQUE IN ARTERIES) # WITHOUT FATTY PLAQUE IN ARTERIES
Fed chronic vitamin C- deficient diet 20 9 11
Fed vitamin C-deficient diet + vitamin C supplementation 22 0 22

Fatty tumors

Another finding by Dr. Willis was that benign fatty growths on the skin, called xanthoma tuberosum, which often occur near the eyelids (xanthelasma) and around joints where weak capillaries allow circulating fat (cholesterol) to ooze into the skin, are indicative of vitamin C deficiency.  (See below). I don’t know how many people I’ve had ask me about these fatty “tumors.”  They are induced by vitamin C deficiency, I’m late to learn.

Xanthelasma

Xanthelasma

Back to cholesterol, bile flow and gallstones

It is important to understand the role vitamin C plays in the disposal of cholesterol.  It was Dr. Emil Ginter in Slovakia who demonstrated that cholesterol accumulates in the blood serum and liver of guinea pigs who don’t naturally secrete vitamin C as other animals do.  Cholesterol is converted to bile by vitamin C which is then excreted in the digestive tract, bile being excreted from the liver to dissolve fats and oils as they are ingested in the diet.  Without vitamin C bile becomes thick like motor oil and is not easily excreted by the gall bladder, which is a repository for bile.  A deficiency of vitamin C then results in cholesterol plaque building up in arteries instead of being excreted in bile flow.  Emil Ginter also demonstrated in animals that a deficiency of vitamin C hardens bile into gallstones, yet another malady that could be prevented by supplemental vitamin C.

Cholesterol is made at night

Doctors frequently suggest their patients taking statin cholesterol-lowering drugs before bedtime because of studies which show most cholesterol is produced when dietary intake is low.  While vitamin C is needed throughout the day and night, utilizing this knowledge, a good time to supplement with vitamin C is at bedtime, to limit cholesterol plaque from forming inside artery walls.  The problem is, about an hour after going to sleep, most of that vitamin C will have been shuttled to your kidneys and bladder.  Oh, to hope for the day when that mutated gene is repaired and humans once against regain internal 24-hour secretion of vitamin C again.

Scurvy takes a toll on your teeth

So, you have bad teeth.  Your dentist talks about pockets underneath your gums where bacteria thrive, a problem that threatens erosion of your teeth altogether.

The extent of attachment of the gums to the teeth correlates with blood plasma levels of vitamin C.

Gingivitis (inflammation of the gums) improves with vitamin C supplementation.  Normally healthy teeth and gums are tightly sealed to each other.  When the gums recede away from the tooth, small pockets develop where bacteria can grow and cause inflammation.  A dentist can insert a probe into the pocket to determine its depth.

Gums may overgrow around teeth.  Sailors on wind-driven ships were known to develop scurvy and the hallmark symptom was bleeding gums.  Before it was learned that vitamin C in lemons prevented scurvy, gum overgrowth was so severe that “barber surgeons were forced to cut away the dead flesh from the gums to enable sailors to chew their food.”

Even though this is an overt sign of scurvy (abject vitamin C deficiency), there is nary a word about this mentioned in the dental literature.  Dentists call this gingival hyperplasia.  Dental literature says this is due to certain medications (those that deplete vitamin C?), in particular calcium channel blockers for high blood pressure.

Gum surgery is then indicated.  I know a friend who grew up in poverty, with a very poor diet and rotting teeth.  His dentists continue to do gum surgery on him without informing him he needs to take vitamin C.

If your teeth are rotting due to a lack of vitamin C you can bet that is an indication the arteries in your heart, brain, eyes, are weak and subject to hemorrhage or blockage of circulation.

Silvery reflective arteries in the back of your eyes

In fact, when an ophthalmologist examines the arteries at the back of your eyes with an ophthalmoscope, if those arteries reflect light and appear “silvery,” that is a sure indication the arteries in your heart are diseases as well.  Research initially published in 1979 and repeated in 2005 showed that abnormal blood vessels at the back of the eyes equated with coronary artery disease 100% of the time.  That means your optometrist can detect vitamin C deficiency without a blood test.  You don’t need cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, you need vitamin C.  Even eye doctors, who are the only medical practitioners who get an internal view of the blood vessels, ignore the obvious signs of vitamin C deficiency.

So, your gums are telling your dentist you need vitamin C, and the arteries at the back of your eyes are telling your optometrist you have need for more vitamin C, and not a word is said.  That is because modern medicine is searching for more, not less disease to treat.  Modern medicine is oriented towards treatment, not prevention.

When you leave your dentist’s office you are traditionally handed a new toothbrush and toothpaste.   But when was the last time your dentist handed you a bottle of vitamin C pills?

Aneurysms and hernias

I don’t know how many people I have met who have hernias, usually abdominal.  The report of 5 cases of hernia in a family of 11 members is instructive.  The 5 with hernias had lower vitamin C blood levels.  The hernias were not genetic, they were familial.  The family diet was deficient in vitamin C.  Tobacco use is known to deplete vitamin C.  Smoking increases the risk for hernias.

In guinea pigs that must rely on dietary vitamin C like humans do, lack of vitamin C has been shown to result in loss of elasticity and strength of artery walls.   This may result in bulges or weak areas in arteries that are called aneurysms.  An aneurysm may burst and result in hemorrhage.  A hemorrhage in the brain occurs 40,000 times in America annually and in 60% of these cases the patients die before reaching the hospital.  Supplemental vitamin C decreases formation of aneurysms.  The aorta is the first blood vessel outside of the heart and is under considerable pressure from the pumping heart.  Aortic aneurysms may result when vitamin C levels are low.

Dr. John T Ely suggest supplemental vitamin C may prevent and even “cure” large aortic aneurysms.

Dr. Ely also notes that vitamin C-secreting animals on average internally produce ~50 milligrams of vitamin C per kilogram (2.2-lbs.) of body weight whereas humans only ingest ~1 milligram of vitamin C per kilogram of body weight per day.  A 70-kilogram (154-lb.) human would need to supplement ~3500 milligrams per day, taken throughout the day and night, to equal what most animals produce internally.

Modern medicine only has one option for aneurysms and hernias: surgery.  According to one study, the detection of an aortic aneurysm increases the risk for having a brain aneurysm by 5 times.  Surgeons fix the aortic aneurysm and do nothing to prevent potentially lethal brain aneurysms.  If humans could only repair that mutated gene in their liver to secrete vitamin C internally again.

Heartburn (esophageal reflux) and ascorbic acid deficiency

Many Americans use antacids, often with marginal success, to overcome their acid reflux (heartburn).  Vitamin C-deficient individuals may be averse to acidic foods of any kind.  Patients with esophageal reflux (stomach or bile acid coming up into the esophagus, resulting in distressful pain) were found to have weak blood capillaries, a test that is indicative of low vitamin C levels.  Buffered vitamin C may be required for this application. Ask a gastroenterologist if he/she ever placed a heartburn patient on vitamin C therapy?

Has the mutated gene been repaired?

Dr. Tom Levy, cardiologist and author of CURING THE INCURABLE, is a noted vitamin C investigator.  He lectures worldwide about the many applications of vitamin C therapy.  Dr. Levy was shown evidence by this author that vitamin C blood levels doubled among adults taking an extract from olives.  Dr. Levy suspected, as I did, that the mutated GULO gene that enables an enzyme to convert blood sugar (glucose) into ascorbate (vitamin C) may have been repaired.  The molecule was formulated with other important co-factors to enhance the effect and became commercially known as FORMULA-216.  The formula was first put to the test by urine testing, since vitamin C is rapidly shuttled to the kidneys and excreted.  FORMULA-216 dramatically increased vitamin C urine levels as indicated on a test strip.  Here is the pictorial evidence:

Vitamin C levels

Then five human subjects were given FORMULA-216.  Blood serum levels of vitamin C doubled without dietary or supplemental intake of vitamin C.  Compare the INITIAL VITAMIN C LEVEL on the left with the FINAL BLOOD SAMPLE on the right.

Results of 1st Human Trial

Blood levels / Vitamin C / Formula-216 / Micromole/Liter
Subject Initial C Level 1st Blood Sample (Day 1) 2nd Blood Sample (Day 2) 3rd Blood Sample (Day 14) * Final Blood Sample (Day 24)
1 34.06 39.74 73.49 73.49 62.45
2 17.03 34.06 34.06 56.77 45.42
3 51.10 73.81 90.84 62.45 56.77
4 51.10 51.10 79.49 79.49 56.77
5 45.42 68.13 73.81 56.77 51.10
* Subjects Ceased Taking Formula-216. Data ENCODE NUTRITION® 2019

Why haven’t I heard of this before?

The prevalent question from consumers who have learned about FORMULA-216 is “why haven’t I heard about this before?”  That is because modern medicine, as I have been telling you, is not in the business of prevention.  You must find preventive health measures on your own and put them into practice.  I would no more expect a mechanic at a muffler shop, after installing a new muffler, to hand me a gasoline additive that would keep me from ever having to replace a muffler again, than for a doctor to hand me vitamin C pills knowing they may keep me from ever coming back to his office.  He’s not going to put himself out of a job.  And neither is American medicine, regardless of the medical ethics involved.  It was Upton Sinclair who once said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” So, don’t wait to hear about this in Time Magazine.  News media are beholden to pharmaceutical companies for advertising dollars.  Positive reports about vitamin C generally don’t make news headlines, only null studies do.

I haven’t even touched on the use of vitamin C for wound healing, burns, immune system maintenance, or cancer.  Bottom line: don’t wait for your doctor to prescribe vitamin C, nor Medicare to pay for it. Your teeth, gums, blood vessels, heart, esophagus, gall bladder, liver, and brain are starved for it.