Hi Dr. Fonorow,
got your email address from Mike. I'm a naturopath living in
Montreal,Canada. Getting very confused about vitamin C. would appreciate a few minutes phone conversation with you. Please email me back when would a good time be for a 15 minute talk. I'm usually more available daytimes until 2pm est. next week Tuesday or Thursday works well for me.
thanks,
S. F.
Hello,
I prefer email or our forum. What is the source of your confusion?
Remember that the "natural" form of vitamin C for almost all animals is not what they eat, but what their livers (or kidneys) make out of glucose - ascorbic acid.
Hi Owen,
Its funny. On the site I read a letter referring to Dr. Cowen and Sally Fallon. I'm following much of the school of thought of traditional eating (Weston Price), but always had a hard time accepting that acerola powder would be equivalent to therapeutic vitamin C- but what about the need for bioflavanoids with the ascorbic acid? and what about mineral ascorbates being a better way to take C?
Thanks,
S. F., Montreal
I'm with you in that Weston Price, especially in their vitamin A research, which is top notch. I'm not sure Weston Price endorses what Sally and Dr. Cowen wrote, but I give them (WP) credit for calling and speaking with me to ask for "the other side", as have you.
This "natural" vitamin C trap has snared a great many well meaning people, especially and including the USA's National Foundation for Alternative Medicine, who declined to run a study of the Pauling therapy for heart disease because we were proposing to use ascorbic acid as Pauling proposed, and not a "natural vitamin C complex." The well-meaning head of this org actually believed his daughter who told him "synthetic" vitamin C (ascorbic acid) might harm the study participants. He told me he had "implicit" faith in his daughter who as a trained nurse with an alternative bent, and it turns out she learned about the "dangers" of synthetic C and the benefits of "natural" C from a lecture given by Standard Process.
As you probably know, I didn't, SP has a spotless reputation, based > on the ideas of Royal Lee, and this lecture series is at least partially responsible for the belief in "natural vitamin C."
So I went to SP's web site and looked at some of their products, and guess what, their vitamin C in any product approaching a useful > amount uses ascorbic acid - "synthetic vitamin C." That led me to look for any evidence of the so-called "Vitamin C COmplex" and other than this rumor, there is none. There is a citrus complex, and it may have some health value, but they have tried to attach the name vitamin C to this complex to inherit (steal?) the known benefits of vitamin C.
The "natural" form of vitamin C is that which all animal livers make out of glucose. Ascorbic acid. This most animals make 24/7 except for some high order primates (and us), guinea pigs and a fruit bat. What we advocate is replacing the "natural" blood levels in all other species, or for that matter the apes in the wild, that would be there if not for the GLO defect. The health benefits of doing this are enormous, too many to list. The problem is that we as a specicies have not adapted yet to large oral intakes, so many people have a great deal of trouble replacing what their livers should be making.
We recommend either ascorbic acid or sodium ascorbate, and these are the two forms that travel within the body - ascorbic acid in the blood and sodium ascorbate through the lymphatic system. According to the leading world expert, ascorbic acid is TWICE as effective as a free radical scavenger as sodium ascorbate (or any other form) but
only sodium ascorbate can be given IV.
Re: bioflavonoids. Some benefits, but apparently these molecules, while "natural" are not orthomolecular, at least not known to be required for cellular function, and Pauling cites the early evidence in his book that placebo had no effect on colds, bioflavonoids alone had not affect on colds, but vitamin C and vitamin C with bioflavoniods had an equivalent effect suppressing the common cold.