Linus Pauling
The Last Interview
=A9 1994 The Institute for Optimum Nutrition
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 but 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 p=3D0.001- that means 99.9 per
cent confidence 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 Tell us about the work of your associate Dr Jariwalla on HIV?
I was very pleased that Dr Jariwalla should have carried out some
work in our laboratory on vitamin C and human immunodeficiency virus.
They carried out experiments on the virus growing in cells in the
laboratory and showing that there were as much as a 99 per cent
suppression of the development of the virus in the cells when you had
high, large amounts of ascorbate, vitamin C, in the medium - amounts that
you could achieve in the bloodstream by giving a large oral intake. This
result was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences.
Long before Dr Jariwalla did this work, I had written to the president of
Wellcome, the manufacturer of AZT, saying that we had some evidence that
high dose vitamin C helped to control the disease and perhaps if it were
given along with AZT it would be more effective than AZT alone. For one
thing, we know with other chemotherapeutic agents, that high dose vitamin
C helps control the side effects.
I got no answer.
Only a small fraction of people who are HIV positive develop AIDS. I
don't know that any study has been made, such as has been made with some
other diseases, to determine whether the ones who then go on to develop
full blown AIDS are people who are low in plasma ascorbate, plasma
vitamin C. Maybe that they are. At any rate, I think that HIV positive
people should be taking vitamin C up to the bowel tolerance level and
that people who have developed AIDS, should be taking very large amounts,
again up to their bowel tolerance level. It is much cheaper, of course,
to take fifty grams a day, that's only a dollar a day, two cents a gram,
$365 dollars a year. AZT used to cost about $10,000 dollars per person.
Vitamin C costs very little in comparison with AZT.
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 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.
Transcribed by Chris Gupta
koobas.hobune.stream
