Linus Pauling: Nobel Prize Scientist

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Cowan, Diehl, and Baker are just one example of investigators who have misinterpreted their own results. I quote other examples in my latest book.

PLOWBOY: It seems odd that Cowan, Diehl, and Baker refer to 200 milligrams of vitamin C as a "large" dose ... isn't that really just a fairly small amount of the vitamin to take?

PAULING: That's right. It's only a little more than four times the Recommended Dietary Allowance set down by the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Research Council. The RDA for vitamin C is now 45 milligrams. That's the amount that — if taken daily — will prevent most people from dying of scurvy.

PLOWBOY: The attitude of the National Research Council — and of the medical establishment in general — seems to be that as long as you're not dying of scurvy, you're OK ... you're getting enough vitamin C.

PAULING: That seems to be their attitude. And, of course, that attitude is wrong.

PLOWBOY: I take it, then, you share Dr. Irwin Stone's view that the human race as a whole suffers from "hypoascorbemia" . . . vitamin C deficiency. Is that true?

PAULING: Yes, I agree with him.

PLOWBOY: Many medical authorities find it hard to believe that the human race as a whole could be suffering from a vitamin C deficiency. What evidence is there for this belief?

PAULING: Well first you have to realize that only a few animals other than man are wholly dependent on diet for their vitamin C. Cats, dogs, cows, pigs, rats, snakes, and other animals make their own vitamin C ... they don't need to obtain it in their diets. Only human beings, monkeys and apes, guinea pigs, a few types of birds, and one species of Indian fruit-eating bat require ascorbic acid in their diet. And with the exception of the human beings, these animals get plenty of vitamin C every day in their food.

Take the gorilla, for instance. Back in 1949, G.H. Bournehe's the father of Peter Bourne, who's one of President Carter's appointees — pointed out that the gorilla obtains about 4.5 grams of vitamin C per day in his natural foods ... bamboo shoots and other green plants. On a body-weight basis, this corresponds to about two grams a day for humans.

Likewise, Irwin Stone has shown that rats — which, remember, do not need to ingest vitamin C — make an amount of ascorbic acid corresponding, on a body-weight basis, to between two and four grams per day for a 70-kilogram man. That's when the rat in question is not under stress. Under stress, a rat will synthesize a much larger amount of ascorbic acid,

I have checked the amounts of vitamins present in 110 raw, natural plant foods ... and I've found that an amount of these plants corresponding to one day's food — 2,500 calories — for an adult human being contains — on the average — 3.3 times the RDA of thiamine, 3.4 times the RDA of riboflavin, 2.3 times more niacin than the current RDA for that vitamin, and 51.0 times the RDA of vitamin C. In other words, if you ate 2,500 calories' worth of these 110 natural plant foods-and we can assume that our ancestors probably had a diet very much like this — you'd be ingesting 2.3 grams of vitamin C.

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