Linus Pauling: Nobel Prize Scientist

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One important point to remember about vitamin C — something I haven't mentioned so far in our discussion-is that it should be taken regularly, every day, and not stopped for a week. If you're taking large doses of vitamin C and then all of a sudden you stop taking it, the level of ascorbic acid in your blood rapidly drops within a day or two ... it drops to a very low value, and during this time you become more susceptible to infectious diseases. So it's very important for you to keep your vitamin C intake up.

PLOWBOY: You mentioned "infectious diseases" just now. Are you implying that vitamin C protects against other diseases, besides the common cold?

PAULING: The evidence is that it provides protection against all of the infectious diseases ... that is, all bacterial and viral diseases.

PLOWBOY: You mean ...

PAULING: Measles, mumps, pneumonia, meningitis, chicken pox, serum hepatitis, infectious hepatitus, influenza ... there are even published reports on the effectiveness of ascorbic acid in preventing and treating poliomyelitis.

PLOWBOY: Wow!

PAULING: One may ask how it is that vitamin C can protect a person against so many diseases. I think it probably does this largely-though perhaps not entirely — by potentiating the body's natural protective mechanisms. There is much evidence for this. One of the most interesting studies along this line was one carried out by three people — R.H. Yonemoto, P.B. Chretien, and T.F. Fehniger — at the National Cancer Institute. These workers studied the rate at which new lymphocytes — white blood cells-are produced by a person ... and they found that people who were given five grams of vitamin C per day for three days showed a doubling in their rate of lymphocyte production.

This is an important observation, because the lymphocytes can rightfully be called the "policemen" of our body: They attack invaders and destroy foreign cells. They attack viruses — for instance — and bacterial cells, which are recognized as "foreign". They also attack and destroy cancer cells, malignant host cells. The changes that take place in a normal body cell when it becomes malignant, you see, include certain changes of the cell's outer surface, so that the cancer cell becomes recognizable to lymphocytes as an "abnormal" cell.

PLOWBOY: Does this mean, then, that vitamin C can also protect a person from cancer?

PAULING: Several epidemiological studies have — in fact — shown a definite negative correlation between vitamin C intake and cancer. People who have a high intake of vitamin C have a much smaller age-corrected incidence of cancer than those persons who have a low daily intake of the vitamin. A low intake, in this case, being about 45 milligrams a day.

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