|
Q:
Now you are recommending vitamin C and
lysine for the treatment of cardiovascular disease.
How exactly does lysine
help to prevent cardiovascular disease?
Many investigators contributed to showing that lipoprotein
A is what is deposited in plaques, not just LDL, but lipoprotein A. If
you have more than 20mg/dI in your blood it begins depositing plaques
and atherosclerosis so the question then is what causes lipoprotein
A to stick to the wall of the artery and cause these plaques?
Well countless biochemists and other chemists are
pretty smart people and they discovered what it is in the wall of the
artery that causes lipoprotein A to get stuck to the wall of the artery
and form atherosclerotic plaques and ultimately lead to heart disease,
strokes and peripheral arterial disease.
The answer is there is a particular amino acid in
a protein in the wall of the artery - lysine, which is one of the twenty
amino acids that binds the lipoprotein A and causes atherosclerotic plaques
to develop. I think it is a very important discovery.
Well, now, if you know that there are residues of
lysine, lysyl residues, that hold the lipoprotein A to the wall of the
artery and cause hardening of the arteries, then any chemist, any physical
chemist would say at once that the thing to do is to prevent that by puffing
the amino acid lysine in the blood to greater extent than is normally.
Of course you get lysine normally in your food. Meat
in particular contains a good bit of lysine.
And you need lysine to be alive, it is an essential
amino acid, you have to get about a
gram a day to keep in protein balance, but you can take lysine,
pure lysine, a perfectly non toxic substance in food, as 500mg tablets
and that puts extra lysine molecules in the blood. They enter into competition
with the lysyl residues on the wall of artery and accordingly count to
prevent the lipoproteinA from being deposited or even will work to pull
it loose and destroy the atherosclerotic plaques.
Q:
Do you think the treatment of lysine
and vitamin C can reverse the atherosclerotic process?
I think so. Yes. Now I've got to the point where I
think we can get almost complete control of cardiovascular disease, heart
attacks and strokes by the proper use of vitamin C and lysine. It can
prevent cardiovascular disease and even cure it.
If you are at risk of heart disease, or if there is
a history of heart disease in your family, if your father or other members
of the family died of a heart attack or stroke or whatever, or if you
have a mild heart attack yourself then you had better be taking vitamin
C and lysine.
Q
When you published 'Vitamin C and the
Common Cold' what did you expect that to do to medical thinking?
When my book was published near the end of 1970, 1
thought the medical profession and ordinary people would be pleased. They
would be pleased that they no longer were suffering the miseries of the
common cold and related diseases and the physicians would be pleased in
that they were no longer bothered by patients with the common cold for
which they didn't have any very good treatment anyway, but could concentrate
on more serious illnesses.
So I was astonished at the reception that I got when
the Professor of Medicine at Mount Sinai College of Medicine wrote to
me complaining about my statement that vitamin C, three grams a day would
provide considerable protection against the common cold.
I checked the medical literature to find what evidence
there was at that time. I found four controlled trials, recently well
conducted trials, involving what I would describe now as rather small
amounts of vitamin C per day of between 200mg and a 1,000mg per day. I
think that the best one of these four early trials was done by Dr Ritzel,
the physician for the school system in Basle, Switzerland.
He gave 270 schoolboys at a winter ski camp either
a gram of vitamin C per day, in a capsule or a placebo. It was a randomized
double-blind, controlled trial and with each boy the nurse made sure that
the boys swallowed the capsule so that he didn't have the trouble that
other investigators have of the boys, boys especially, not swallowing
the capsule.
Instead, trading them back and forth so that you,
the investigators, didn't know which one had received the vitamin C and
which the placebo.
The result was 63 per
cent less illness with the common cold for the boys who received the vitamin
C compared to those who received the placebo.
Well, this was a very good trial.
In a paper by a professor of medicine at the University
of Helsinki, Finland about vitamin C and the common cold, he mentioned
the publication of my book and said that he had decided to check the medical
literature to find out how many studies had been carried out since 1970
on the effectiveness of vitamin C against the common cold.
He decided that he would accept only studies in which
at least 1 gram a day of vitamin C was given, some of the studies involved
2 grams, perhaps one involved 3 grams a day but mostly they were 1 gram
a day of vitamin C in which a placebo was given to half of the subjects
and the studies that were randomized and double-blind so that neither
the physicians nor the subjects knew which persons were getting the vitamin
C.
He found 38 clinical trials had been carried out since
1970 satisfying these requirements. 37
of the 38 trials lead to the conclusion that vitamin C had a protective
effect greater than the placebo and a number of these, a dozen
of these clinical trials had high statistical significance at 99.9 per
cent confidence level and that the result wasn't just a statistical fluctuation,
a chance result.
There is no doubt now
that vitamin C in large doses has value against the common cold.
My recommendation is not 1 gram a day, or 2 grams
a day of vitamin C but at the first sign of a cold, take a gram of vitamin
C or 2 grams and then an hour later, if the symptoms still exist - if
you're still sneezing, or your nose is running or feel shivery, take another
1 or 2 grams of vitamin C. Keep doing that until you forget because the
symptoms have gone away and this will stop a cold in almost every person
who follows the regimen.
Q:
What do you feel about the major criticism
that anything over 100mg of vitamin C is a waste of money and goes down
the drain because It's eliminated by the body?
The evidence shows that this is just not true. I myself,
twenty years ago or more, read this statement, probably made by Fred Stare,
professor then at Harvard School of Public Health, and I decided to check.
I was taking 10 grams per day of vitamin C. I collected my urine for 24
hours and analyzed it myself for the vitamin C content.
Instead of nearly 10,000mg being eliminated in the
urine, 9850mg, I found only 1,500mg, 15 per cent of the dose that I was
taking during this trial, so the statement
just is not true. Of course, some of the ingested ascorbate
remains in the intestinal contents and doesn't get into the blood stream.
It may be as much as a third.
Some evidence indicates that perhaps as much as a
third remains in the intestinal contents. Well, this does good, protecting
the lower bowel against cancer by destroying carcinogens that are present
in the fecal material and also does good because of the laxative effect
of bringing water into the bowel so that the volume of the waste material
is larger.
There's also a smaller surface area which helps speed
up the process of elimination of this material. The rest of it, two thirds
perhaps 6.5 grams when I was taking 10 grams a day, gets into the blood
stream but only 1.5 grams is eliminated in the urine.
So we can ask what happens to the other 5 grams? The
answer I'm sure, in fact we have direct experimental evidence for it,
is that vitamin C is rapidly converted into other substances, oxidation
products and these other substances, these oxidation products have been
shown to have greater value against cancer than vitamin C itself.
So if you take large doses of vitamin C you produce
large amounts of these other substances, the value of which is still under
investigation. We have been studying it for fifteen years.
Q:
Why has your work on nutrients been
countered? Is It ignorance, is It prestige, is It money interests? Why
Is It being suppressed?
Well I have thought about that a great deal. Most
scientists in general have accepted my idea and ideas of other pioneers.
Of course I took over my ideas mainly from Irwin Stone and other early
investigators of vitamin C. So scientists have said usually "Well
Linus Pauling has been right so often in the past, he's probably right
about this too".
But then an ordinary physician, has the duty of dividing
his time and energy for the proper care of his patients. He doesn't have
time to read the literature, the scientific and medical literature, and
think about a question such as whether there is something new and significant
that has been discovered. He has to rely on medical and nutritional authorities
and I blame them for having been lazy and biased, and not really willing
to keep up with new developments.
But why are they biased?
Well I decided, 40 or 50 years ago, that when they
were trying to understand the action of drugs and also of nutrients, they
realized that you give a drug in the amount as large as possible so that
its toxicity does not kill a patient in the hope that it will save the
patient's life. And there are certain drugs that have great value in protecting
against certain diseases.
There is no doubt that these drugs have great value.
Doctors and investigators have worked hard to determine what the proper
dose of a drug is. Now with vitamin C for example, I am sure they said
we know what vitamin C does. It keeps people from dying from scurvy and
investigators have studied human beings enough to know how much vitamin
C they need to give in order to prevent the development of scurvy.
It isn't much, just a little pinch each day so they
say we know the answer with vitamins just as with drugs. And the answers
are the RDAs, 60 mg a day of vitamin C to prevent scurvy, and 2mg of a
day of thiamin, vitamin B1, to prevent beriberi and so on. What they did
not do was to ask this question: here is a substance which has no known
toxicity, which can be taken in 1000 times the RDA, the amount that stops
people developing scurvy, without causing harm to a person.
Is there a possibility
that very large doses of vitamin C and the B vitamins and vitamin A, beta
carotene and vitamin E, would have much additional value in improving
the health of the people?
Twenty five years ago, when I became interested in
vitamins, it was just that question that interested me. I looked in the
medical and nutritional literature to find out how much vitamin C a person
should take in order to be in the best health, perhaps to control diseases
other than scurvy.
I couldn't find anything and the result, of course,
is for 25 years I have devoted much of my life and time and energy trying
to find the answer to the. question - how much of these very powerful
and important substances should we take to be in the best of health?
Q:
How would you compare your vision of orthomolecular medicine and conventional
medicine?
One of my colleagues in the field of orthomolecular
medicine invented the word 'toximolecular' medicine to describe conventional
medicine and this seems to me to be good in that conventional medical
practice relies heavily on drugs, all of which essentially are toxic substances.
It's hard for me to think of an example of a drug
that is like the vitamins in having nearly zero toxicity. With aspirin,
some patients with severe arthritis are advised by the physician to take
as much as 10 grams of aspirin a day and it's my memory that the LD50,
the amount that would kill 50 per cent of patients, is 28 grams of aspirin
and that's why many people commit suicide by taking an overdose, a whole
bottle full aspirin tablets. So I think that's a good description of conventional
medicine.
I'm not against drugs
when they are properly used and have said so over and over again.
We advocate for every patient with cancer taking high
doses of vitamin C as an adjunct to appropriate conventional therapy and
I agree with Dr Cameron that surgery - he was a surgeon - surgery is often
the best treatment for a malignant condition if the malignant tumor can
be removed and sometimes, for a few kinds of cancer, chemotherapy is known
to have much value and, for some kinds, high energy radiation has value
even though chemotherapy and high energy radiation have pretty serious
side effects, are damaging to the body as a whole, nevertheless, the benefit
may outweigh the disadvantages.
Q: How
do you decide how much vitamin C Is right for you and, If you take 3 grams
should It be split throughout the day?
In my opinion adults should be taking at least 2 grams
a day. There is much evidence about increased health with 2 grams a day,
and of course even more with 4 or 6 grams a day. Even an extra 60mg had
been shown to add value in cutting down the death rate from heart disease,
cancer and other diseases. Now my feeling is as people grow older they
ought to be increasing their vitamin C and perhaps they should follow
the policy that I have followed of increasing the intake.
It can be either one chunk, one dose in the morning,
or even better three doses throughout the day, increasing the intake until
a laxative effect is observed, speeding up the rate of elimination of
waste material from the bowel. So my suggestion is every person who wants
to have the best of health should increase the intake of vitamin C to
somewhat less than the amount that causes significant looseness of the
bowel.
Q:
How do you think your opponents will
remember you?
Molecular biologists will of course remember me as
one of the founders of molecular biology, and chemists in general will
remember me as one of the founders of modern chemistry, changing it from
a pretty descriptive to a far more rational sort of science, and physicians
will remember me as having been at least in part, responsible for the
revolution in medicine in which there is a great improvement in human
health and in control of disease through the use of vitamin C and other
vitamins. This will include my opponents, although the opponents may have
died off by that time.
Excerpts from interviews with
Tony Edwards for QED BBC Television, and with Patrick Holford at the Power
of Prevention conference.
www.internetwks.com
| 