The media has attempted to place a negative spin on vitamin C. If you want to understand why this is, please review the excellent article I posted last year.

There are many reasons why this study is not supportive of the fear being suggested that vitamin C will cause cancer. They will be reviewed further down in this response.

However, recent studies show that Americans only consume about 100 milligrams of vitamin C from foods and that about 5% of Americans consume so little vitamin C that they exhibit signs of scurvy.

So some of us need to increase our vitamin C intake. The solution is to obviously increase your vegetables and fruits. If for some reason you can't do that, then you should consider a vitamin C supplement that is balanced with bioflavanoids.

However, always remember, that whole foods are nearly always a better choice than supplements.

It is interesting to note that the Linus Pauling Institute does not promote megavitamin therapy for healthy adults and they are in agreement with lower doses as mentioned in the story above.

There are conditions, such as high levels of a certain substance called Lp(a) in which megadoses of vitamin C may be useful.

They also posted a report on this study which does a wonderful job of breaking it down and providing you with the truth behind the headlines.

To learn more, try the Linus Pauling Institute's Vitamin C information page.

COMMENT FROM LINUS PAULING INSTITUTE:

Let us remember that this study is a test tube experiment. The study does not describe biochemistry or biology, and its relevance to reactions occurring in cells and tissues of the human body is unknown. Many reactions of vitamin C occur in vitro (in the test tube) that will not and cannot occur in vivo (in the living organism).

Why?

Because the physiological environment of the cell and the body contains thousands of substances that also react with vitamin C and rancid fats thus derailing the chemistry observed in a test tube system.

Rancid fats don't just wait around in vivo to bump into a vitamin C molecule, but instead are very rapidly reduced to harmless "alcohols" by a number of enzymes.

Thus, the reaction rate of rancid fats with these enzymes compared to the reaction rate of the rancid fats with vitamin C is of crucial importance and this was not measured in the Science study.

From what we know from the study, incubations were done for two hours, an eternity in biochemical terms. Enzymatic reactions as those indicated above to reduce rancid fats to harmless alcohols that do not react with vitamin C usually take a fraction of a second, not two hours!

It is interesting to note that vitamin C effectively inhibits the formation of rancid fats in the first place. Thus, when your blood is exposed to oxidizing conditions, vitamin C forms the first line of antioxidant defense, and no lipid rancid fats are formed.

Rancid fats begin to form only after vitamin C has been exhausted. Thus, in these experiments rancid fats and vitamin C did not exist simultaneously in blood, and thus never had the opportunity to react with each other.

What's more, the Science study used a concentration of rancid fats which in biochemical terms was "a ton." Studies have shown that, in blood, rancid fats exist in concentrations which are 10,000-fold lower than what was used in the Science experiment. Again, this casts serious doubt on the relevance of these results for living organisms.

To conclude from this study that vitamin C causes cancer would be as preposterous as to say that we have found a cure for cancer based on a simple test tube experiment.

In fact, many animal studies and cell culture experiments have demonstrated anticancer effects of vitamin C, and the vitamin has been used therapeutically in human cancer patients with some apparent benefit.

Abstracted from Linus Pauling Institute Release

Related Articles:

Does Vitamin C Cause or Prevent Cancer?

Linus Pauling's Unified Theory and Therapy for Heart Disease

Vitamin C Foundation Rebuttal to Science Study