Over 20 years ago, 1992 to be precise, the medical Journal “Epidemiology” published a paper by James Enstron Phd and his colleagues entitled “Vitamin C intake and mortality among a sample of the United States population”. The paper suggested that individuals who regularly supplement their diet with vitamin C have a statistically significant increase in life expectancy over those who consume lower amounts of vitamin C. But this wasn’t really anything that new. Hundreds, in fact probably thousands of books and papers were published before 1992 and many more have been published since then demonstrating the clear and indisputable benefits for immunity, anti-aging, longevity, infection control and countless other benefits again, and again, and yet again of Vitamin C. Amazingly some (though gradually less and less) sceptics still debate whether it is beneficial to supplement with vitamin C at all – on any dosage! I find this “debate” so dated, and ridiculous that I find it astonishing, that anyone would wish to take up such a position, when it is so clearly wrong. This is an argument which they have so demonstrably lost, it really is as silly as when the tobacco companies claimed up to the 1950’s that smoking was good for you, on the basis that it was relaxing.

The discovery of Vitamin C

Around 200 years ago, it was first observed that ‘limeys’ – people who consumed limes, lemons or other citrus on long sea voyages didn’t get scurvy. This is the disease caused by gross Vitamin C deficiency, eventually resulting in death. Although it soon became well known that scurvy could be prevented by consuming limes or any other citrus fruits, the specific compound responsible was not discovered until 1930. That’s when Albert Szent-Györgyi, Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Szeged in Hungary discovered vitamin C, which he orginally called hexuronic acid. Later on it became known as ascorbic acid, although today there are many ‘ascorbates’ used in food supplements which are all acceptable forms of vitamin C. In 1937 Professor Szent-Györgyi was awarded a Nobel prize for his research, apparently much to the annoyance of other academics who were doing similar research on Vitamin C at the time. One of the first important experiments was with guinea pigs who are similar to humans in that their body’s cannot produce Vitamin C and therefore must get it from diet or supplementation. Cutting a long story short, he found that guinea pigs fed a diet which was enriched with vitamin C flourished. The guinea pigs who were completely deprived of vitamin C developed scurvy-like symptoms. Then they died. 

Linus Pauling and the Vitamin C megadose

By the 1970’s Nobel Prize winning chemist Linus Pauling was the most famous (of many) scientists taking up the mantle of vitamin C. In his books “Vitamin C and the Common Cold” and “How to Live Longer and Feel Better”,  he claimed that the common cold could be almost entirely prevented by taking large dosages of Vitamin C on a daily basis. We’re talking here about dosages far higher than the feeble RDA (Recommended Daily Allowance), which is the amount described as “the level of necessary intake” – which is effectively the amount you need to take to avoid dropping dead. Of course the conventional medical profession sneered and tried to discredit him, whilst they happily slapped one another on the back. He took huge dosages himself, lived into his mid nineties, and worked until two weeks before his passing. I wonder whether the “experts” who sneered lived as long or as healthily as him? The RDA (recommended daily allowance) for Vitamin C is 60mg a day, which is enough to prevent scurvy. It’s also roughly the amount found in a medium sized orange. Unfortunately though, the amount found in an orange where weeks have gone by from being picked, to being transported to the supermarket, and from the from supermarket the shelves to your stomach typically is much lower than this. However 60mg even from a fresh orange does not provide what most nutritionists consider to be a therapeutic dosage. Linus Pauling himself started on 3000mg (3g) per day, but gradually took more and more until he was taking 18,000mg (18g), of Vitamin C per day!  Pauling believed that supplementing with megadoses of Vitamin C led to an improved resistance against essentially all diseases, and he suggested it increased life-span by up to 25 years. True he beleived in supplementing with a number of other nutrients too, but Vitamin C was very much the core nutrient. For more information, read Linus Pauling’s lovely article My Love Affair With Vitamin C (but finish reading this newsletter first!).

A few more functions of Vitamin C

(This list is not by any means comprehensive)

Anti Aging 

Vitamin C is an important antioxidant. All antioxidants, by opposing free radical damage, which is considered to be the cause of aging (though I doubt this is the only cause), also oppose aging. Vitamin C is also anti-aging both internally and cosmetically because it also…

Aids collagen synthesis

One of the best known roles of vitamin C is in the formation of collagen. Collagen is the most abundant protein in the body, and is the ‘glue’ that gives integrity to connective tissue, muscles, tendons cartilage, skin, blood vessels, bone and teeth. Obviously Vitamin C is important for all of these tissues to stay in good health. The devastating symptoms of scurvy, which eventually leads to death are mostly due to impaired collagen synthesis. Aging of the skin is in essence a deterioration of the collagen in the skin.

The brain

Vitamin C is involved with dopamine and serotonin production, so it is little wonder that deficiency can be linked to anxiety, an unhealthy response to stress, fatigue, and depression.

Vitamin C and healthy iron levels

Folic acid is activated by vitamin C. Iron works together with Folic acid.  It’s uptake from the gut and its utilization in the body is also dependent on vitamin C. Vitamin C deficiency impairs the effectiveness of these important nutrients.

Reduces inflammation

This is the reason high dosages can be very useful for allergy sufferers.

Blood pressure

As little as 0.5g of vitamin C taken every day lowers your blood pressure and reduces the risk of stroke. It’s especially effective in people already diagnosed with high blood pressure, or hypertension. (Source: American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2012; 95: 1079-88).

Helps with candida die-off

This is not a benefit which is seen in the medical literature, but I have seen that Vitamin C helps those going through a candida die-off phase. It’s not our core product for this problem (that would be Wild Endive Formula), but it does help.

Which Vitamin C products do I recommend?

Actually I recommend any vitamin C product as being beneficial. However our top selling one, and the one I take myself is Tapioca Vitamin C. My second favourite (which I have also taken on and off) is the extremely pleasant tasting Mixed Ascorbates. For children the most popular one is Fizzy C, although my personal view is that Mixed Ascorbates is equally acceptable for kids.  However as we sell around 30 different Vitamin C products, and they all have some unique selling point or other, it’s probably useful for anyone who isn’t sure which one to take to view them all.

Dosage of Vitamin C

Despite some of the sillier press reports that I have occasionally seen, I don’t really think you can harm yourself on any dosage. However there is a maximum beyond which there would be no additional benefit. However it should also be noted that very high dosages of most forms of vitamin C cause loose bowels in some individuals. (Calcium Ascorbate is the most notable exception, and does not seem to cause loose bowels on any dosage – even if you consumed an entire bottle in one go – not that I’d especially recommend anyone to do that).

Studies have shown as little as 500mg per day to be highly beneficial for a range of health issues. However I regard 1g per day, as a basic therapeutic dosage and as much as 15-20g spread out over the day to be useful for acute infections or wherever the immune system may be impaired. 

In regarding 1 gram a day as the starting dosage which is sufficient to benefit most people, I have been particularly influenced by the results of two double blind studies. The first in teenage school children which showed a drop of 61% in absenteeism when the pupils were given 1g of vitamin C per day compared to a placebo group, and 64% fewer symptoms in those that did get ill during the trial period. The second with Canadian soldiers, where 68% less sick days were reported compared with a placebo group, also with 1g taken per day. Would these figures be better still if the dosage had been higher?

I do not take the 18g per day suggested by Linus Pauling, but I do take Vitamin C daily and I very rarely get colds or flu’s any more. I used to get just as many as everyone else – in fact probably more for often than most people. When I do get them, which is now very rare, they seem to be very short lived and are vastly less severe (I also up my dosage of Vitamin C to ‘Linus Pauling’ type quantities at that point, and take 2-3 x the label dosage of Oxylift or Oxygen Elements Max). Here is my daily regimen, which I advocate to everyone not just for preventing colds, but for the prevention of all illness, which I take on an ongoing basis.

1) I take Vitamin C the whole year, specifically 1g of Tapioca Vitamin C. Then I get about another gram by taking 2 capsules twice a day of Antioxidant Supreme, which I think is a wonderful wide spectrum antioxidant for immunity and slowing the aging process.

2) I take two capsules a day of Vitamin D 5000iu,

3) Oxylift or the very similar Oxygen Elements Max on the label dosage,* 

* Note: ideally, any Oxgen supplement should be taken an hour or more away from taking Vitamin C.

View all Vitamin C products here…and be well over Christmas

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Written by Mark Lester, Director, The Finchley Clinic Ltd www.thefinchleyclinic.com

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Before I was into all this stuff, I used to get 2-3 colds or flu infections per year, mostly in the winter. Now I rarely get them at all, and if I do, they are so mild I barely notice them. I don’t think there is anything especially amazing about my inherent immunity – it comes down to the products I take. I avoid milk products in the main as they are extremely mucous forming and contribute to catarrhal states, and I take quite a few supplements. But I think my rare contracting of winter viral infections primarily comes down to three core immune supporting products, and if you take them, you will get far fewer, if any winter sniffles too. So here we go with my tips for a healthy immune system all winter.

First take liquid oxygen – Vitamin ‘O’

Trying to be healthy whilst your body is improperly oxygenated is rather like trying to build a house on a swamp. In my opinion, optimal oxygenation is foundational to good health, but especially for warding off winter viruses bacterial and fungal infection. In this newsletter, I can’t go into the level of detail that Ed “Mr Oxygen” McCabe goes into in his seminal 650 page book “Flood Your Body With Oxygen” (you can buy it on Amazon though). All I will say is that taking any of our liquid oxygen products will do wonders for keeping cold’s, flu’s and other virus’s at bay, as well as help you inhibit those candida overgrowth and other dysbiotic micro-organisms that make a nuisance of themselves with so many of us. It’s impossible to say which of the four rival brands we provide is the “best” one – you might as well as ask me which is the “best” variety of apple, or which is the “prettiest” flower. Individual results do vary, and it is possible that if you try more than one, that one will work better for you than another one. However they all aim to do the same thing, which is flood the body with oxygen. Take the oxygen on ongoing basis – not just a few weeks – and countless health benefits will arise including the inhibition of winter time viremia.

A word of warning

Those that dabble do not get good results. This seems to happen particularly frequently with the liquid oxygen products for some reason. So don’t waste your time phoning us to tell us they didn’t work, only to then mention “Well actually, I kept forgetting to take it” or “I took it now and then”. It’s amazing how many people tell us it “didn’t work” when the reality was that they were messing about with it, and it never stood a chance of working.

Second, take Vitamin C – foundational immune support.

After all the the thousands of papers published on the benefits of therapeutic dosages (i.e… at least 1000mg per day) of Vitamin C over the last 50 years for a  healthy immune system, it’s quite amazing that some of the more narrow minded doctors and scientists, are still arguing with us over this one. Like the smoking question, where naturopaths were warning the public that smoking was dangerous as far back as Victorian times, while the conventional medical profession looked on and sneered for literally 100 years, it is quite obvious they have completely lost this argument. So I am going to state here very clearly that I think that more or less everyone benefits from Vitamin C supplementation – beyond what they get in their diet.

How does Vitamin C support the immune system and reduce winter colds and flu?

It does this in several ways, including the boosting of the levels and activity of interferons (antiviral proteins), B-lymphocytes (which produce antibodies), T-lymphocytes (which attack invading organisms directly), or complement it (through an enzymic system that attacks bacteria and viruses). Enhanced T-Lymphocyte function probably results at least partially from Vitamin C’s action in raising prostaglandin E1 levels.

Vitamin C is also a powerful antioxidant nutrient, which means that it can protect us against toxins produced in the body called free radicals. These are implicated as being involved in increased risks of cataracts, arthritis, atherosclerosis, premature aging, and several other more serious pathological states.

Which Vitamin C and how much?

For optimal health, I believe in taking Vitamin C the whole year, without any breaks at all. In the summer 1g (1000mg) per day is enough. In the winter, I recommend 2-3g per day for those whose immune systems are vulnerable. If you are following all the advice in this newsletter and still get a cold (which is much less probable), take 1g every couple of hours. We well quite a few Vitamin C products, and all of them will do the job, but when asked, my opinion is that the best one we provide is our Tapioca Vitamin C (formerly Ultra Pure Vitamin C) 1000mg 90 caps.

Warning

It’s best to take Vitamin C a couple of hours away from any of our liquid oxygen products for optimal results.

Third, take Vitamin D – the sunshine Vitamin

Vitamin D is a vital nutrient for optimal immune function, as shown in study after study. It is primarily sourced from the reaction between ultra violet light from the sun and cholesterol in the skin (yes, cholesterol isn’t all bad, in fact you would be dead without some presence of this substance in your body). In the days when we enjoyed outdoor agrarian or hunter gatherer lifestyles,we wouldn’t have as didn’t badly for uptake for vitamin D as today. In my opinion most people today are vitamin D deficient in winter, and research seems to be demonstrating that this is one of the big causes of increased risks of getting colds and flu’s.

Even conventional medicine is largely on our side on the deficency question. On the NHS web site, surprisingly, it states that ” A 2007 survey estimated that around 50% of all adults have some degree of vitamin D deficiency.” An American study reported that 32 percent of children and adults throughout the US were vitamin D deficient. However we think both of these are gross underestimates because the recommended minimal levels of Vitamin D that these surveys are based on are ludicrously low.

We think that Dr Joseph Mercola, a conventionally trained doctor who has ‘gone natural’ is getting much closer to the truth where he estimates that 95% of elderly people are vitamin D deficient “not only because they tend to spend a lot of time indoors but also because they produce less in response to sun exposure (a person over the age of 70 produces about 30 percent less vitamin D than a younger person with the same sun exposure)”. However I would go even further by saying in my opinion, if you live in northern Europe and work indoors, your vitamin D levels are probably significantly sub-optimal for ideal immune function, almost all the time but more so in winter, no matter what age you are.

Vitamin D and colds or flu

In the largest and most nationally representative studof its kind to date, involving about 19,000 Americans, people with the lowest vitamin D levels reported having significantly more recent colds or cases of the flu — and the risk was even greater for those with chronic respiratory disorders like asthma. (Reported in the The Journal Of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine February 3, 2009; 169(4) 384-390) At least five additional studies also show an inverse association between lower respiratory tract infections and vitamin D levels. Clearly Vitamin D is important for a healthy immune system.

 

Which Vitamin D product to take?

Almost any Vitamin D product would be better than nothing, and our full list of such products is found here. However vitamin D works synergistically with Vitamin K2 (this is NOT the same as Vitamin K1, which is derived from green leafy vegetables) for its benefits to be most efficiently realised. For this reason, of the various Vitamin D products we provide, I believe the best one, , is Vitamin D3 5,000iu with Vitamin K2 – 90 tablets. This also happens to be our highest strength one. The government RDA for Vitamin D is 200iu per day, which in my view is ridiculously low. If you are serious about boosting your immune system, rather than taking the minimum amount to avoid dropping dead, you need to take one per day of this product. (Children can take it with less frequency, to get to an equivalent amount relative to their weight compared to an adult).

Is Vitamin D safe?

It has been claimed that taking Vitamin D is potentially toxic, but is this really true?

Vitamin D is normally measured in i.u.’s which stands for International Units.

Perhaps the screen shot on the left from a lecture I watched recently on Vitamin D on YouTube will help you make up your mind. Remember our highest strength vitamin D product contains 5,000 i.u. per tablet – not 7 million i.u.!

It has also been suggested that taking over 40,000 units per day for more than three months is potentially toxic, but even this seems to be an exaggeration. I have seen other research showing that Vitamin D was not shown to be toxic even on as high a dosage as 75,000iu’s taken every day on a long term basis. It also seems illogical because the body can naturally produce up to 30,000i.u’s in the summer just from 30 minutes of sunbathing!In the winter time in the UK, the sun’s angle to the horizon is too low to produce Vitamin D even if you were outside all day and the sunning is shining. Nonetheless I do not recommend taking amounts higher than 5-000 to 10,000i.u’s per day, which still keeps things vastly lower than any estimates of the toxicity threshold.

In another video found on YouTube, Dr. Kate Rheaume-Bleue claims that vitamin D when combined with K2 has no known toxicity on any dosage. That’s because vitamin D ‘toxicity’ is not really toxicity at all, but an increased requirement for Vitamin K2 when Vitamin D is taken. ‘Toxicity’ occurs if there isn’t enough Vitamin K2 in the body for Vitamin D to function appropriately in the body – and even then you would need to take a ludicrous dosage for this to occur.

The big three for a healthy immune system – Liquid Oxygen – Vitamin C – Vitamin D

So those are my big three. It is true that many other products can also be used to prevent or shorten a cold or flu – such Colloidal Silver, Zinc, Selenium, Cat’ Claw, Pau d’Arco (Lapacho), Echinacea Cold Flu Relief, and quite a few others, found here.  As always I have only scratched the surface of what I would like to say, but if you follow these steps, I am confident you will get a lot less colds and flu’s this winter.

The next newsletter is going to on natural pain relief…

Mark G. Lester

Director – The Finchley Clinic Ltd

www.thefinchleyclinic.com