Why is this brought out in such a dismissing and ironic way? He claimed that there may be some treatments with Vitamin C, not that if you take a little a day you'll be immortal. Hell, there are so many different types of cancer, that even if megadosing C helped with one it probably wouldn't help with all.
He lived to his 90s. At that point it was either cancer or heart disease that kills people. That fact that he lived to 93 is pretty impressive in itself.
As someone who recently went on Vitamin D supplements due to low D in my bloodstream, I find it incredibly interesting how medicine is always changing. This knee-jerk skeptic idea about how everything but the current accepted status quo is "quackery" and mocking guys like Pauling is reprehensible. Just a few years ago, no one was checking Vitamin D levels. Now my depression and lethargy have been turned way down as my Vitamin D increases.
Hell, I remember being a teen with ulcers and being told to lay off the spicy foods. I tried to explain to the doctor that I never eat that and he shrugged and wrote me a script for Zantac, it being prescription-only at the time. A few years later H. pylori's role in ulcer creation was revealed and now the standard treatment isn't large doses of zantac, but two weeks of amoxicillin. My ulcers magically went away after that treatment.
Medicine is one of things that moves fast and the jury is still out on a lot of marginalized treatments, concepts, and research. I wouldn't be surprised if Pauling's research eventually fleshed out into some kind of cancer treatment, or at least as a supplemental treatment.
It’s uncomfortable to those with analytical minds to accept the fact that we know so little about the human body and how it works. Studies are always contradicting each other because the scientific method dictates that studies must be reduced to the minimum of variables. But the body is far too complex for that. Most of what I was taught nutritionally in school as a kid was wrong. Most of the health advice was wrong. We were told butter is evil and we should eat margerine. We were told fat was evil and that cholesterol causes heart disease despite no evidence other than correlation. We don’t know how or even if consumed cholesterol gets turned into cholesterol in the bloodstream. It’s virtually universally believed that salt is bad despite it being an essential nutrient. It’s universally believed that sun is bad and we must slather ourselves with sunscreen and now we all have Vitamin D deficiencies. Read the literature that comes with any prescription drug and there will be a paragraph explaining that they have no idea how the drug works. Many are no more effective than a placebo. There’s a perception that has persisted most of my life that we are always at a point where we have these things figured out, but ten years later they are proven wrong, but we don’t seem to notice that.
There is an almost religious fervor surrounding science when it comes to our health and nutrition. Lots of research in the past few years surrounds gut bacteria, something that wasn’t even on the charts even 10 years ago. Now we are realizing that we not only know nothing, we know less than nothing.
I don’t think Pauling will be vindicated on Vitamin C because this came from a time when it was universally thought that there was a pill or an injecton for anything and we just had to discover it. If you read Pauling’s books, you’ll realize that he never advocated it as a panacea, but part of a complete dietary and mental regimen. His research is compelling and it’s not hard to see how he came to the conclusions that he did.
It’s good to hear I’m not the only one learning from history and realizing the uncomfortable fact that we know so little and this treatment of ulcers is the exception rather than the rule. How did we not discover this was bacterial for so long? It’s not like this is the 19th century after all.
In a sound bite X More! vs. X Less! has a lot to do with peoples eating habits and overall health not just how good or bad X is.
Especially when it often breaks down as Benefits A, B, C vs. problems X, Y, Z. Yes, sometimes we add a benefit or risk to the list and or change the risk weights slightly, but rarely do things change all that much from one decade to the next.
Today's bread, milk, cheese, veggies, fruits are a bit different than 50 years ago - they last longer, taste different, probably because of how they're processed.
That lack of bacteria that makes things go bad faster should have a different effect on our bodies, no?
Replace "Nutrition", with "Nutrition Science" or "Our understanding of the body's need for Nutrition" in my comment.
The explanation I've read at Wikipedia is that it's an extremophile (digestive acids), so it could never be cultured until very recently.
I completely agree with you about lack of perspective in medical knowledge. Pros get all defensive instead of doing a bit of self-criticism. Fortunately the scientific method seems to be stronger that individuals' biases.
Well, he was a little too enthusiastic and quite close to claiming that.
So that he died of cancer say absolutely nothing about Vitamin C.
I don't know much about cancer biology, but what you heard sounds wrong. I don't see why, as you live longer, your body gets better at fighting cancer. If anything, the opposite sounds more likely.
One possibility is that someone is citing data with survivorship bias. That is, the people who make it past 65 have good genes that generally lower their chances of getting cancer. Even if this were the case, obviously it doesn't imply a causal relationship where passing 65 years reduces your chance of getting cancer.
This is the same as accumulating n number of modifications in a cell until it grows into and gets detected as a tumor. Instead of accumulating "tails" you are accumulating mutations or whatever it turns out to be.
#p=Prob(tails), n=# Coins, q=Prob(heads), Npop=# times to repeat
p=.5; n=5; q=1-p; Npop=1000
#Flip one Coin 100x and find first tails (probability of getting one mutation)
OneCoin=function() which(sample(0:1,100, prob=c(q,p), replace=T)==1)[1]
#Flip n coins and find last one to turn up tails (probability of accumulating n mutations)
OneSet=function() max(replicate(n,OneCoin()))
#Repeat Npop times, like different people in a population
res=replicate(Npop,OneSet())
hist(res, breaks=Npop/20)
https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/high-dose-vitamin-c-and...
He died in 1994, of cancer.