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Originally Posted by chrismortimer66  Just so you know a scientist I think in the 80's got addicted to taking high strength vit c tabs, believing them to be the key to immortality, he got very sick, think he was taking 10 1000mg tabs a day or something. Anti-oxidants are important, but just as important as other nutrients. |
I think that was the godfather of vitamin C himself, Linus Pauling. He was a hugely famous and respected double Nobel prize winning scientist who began denying his scientific roots and developed a single-minded, irrational obsession with real and imaginary benefits of vitamin C. Here is an interesting article on
The Dark Side of Linus Pauling's Legacy.
THE BOTTOM LINE (paraphrased from above)
Although Pauling's claims regarding the benefits of megadose vitamin C lacked the evidence needed for acceptance by the scientific community, they have been accepted by large numbers of people who lack anything resembling the scientific expertise necessary to evaluate them. Not only were his claims of benefit increasingly and wildly irrational, he denied the results of any medical studies showing outcomes different from his expectations. He also denied any evidence of risk associated with megadose supplementation. Pauling also played a key role in the health food industry's successful campaign to actually
weaken FDA consumer protections laws and the supplement industry remains entirely unregulated even today. Thanks largely to Pauling's undeniable early prestige, annual vitamin C sales in the United States have been in the hundreds of millions of dollars for many years based largely on disproven claims. The Linus Pauling Institute that bears his name has evolved into a respectable organization and has revised his original recommendations according to actual medical evidence. But Pauling's irrational advice about supplements continues to lead people astray many years after his death. Ironically, he died of cancer, one of the many diseases he claimed could be postponed indefinitely or even cured by megadose vitamin C alone.