Vitamin C Reminder

Most people throughout the world suffer from a chronic condition known as hypoascorbemia which is the same as sub-clinical scurvy. The explanation is that (for genetic reasons), humans can no longer manufacture ascorbates (in the liver from glucose) putting humans in the same category as only three other animal groups: fruit bats, gorilla, and guinea pigs (in fact CVD is studied in guinea pigs by withholding ascorbates from their food). Since ascorbates are crucial to a healthy body collagen matrix, the first signs of deficiency will show up in areas of the greatest physical stress. One of these areas is the arteries around the heart. If the body has insufficient access to ascorbates (and L-Lysine, L-Proline), then direct repair of the collagen matrix making up the arteries becomes deficient. So the body uses a second line of defense - patching the cracks that form in the arteries with a "sticky" lipoprotein a (Lp(a)) that is delivered via blood cholesterol. If this deficiency in the collagen building blocks is not reversed, then the lipoprotein a continues to build, attracting debris and forming the well-known plaque, leading ultimately to CVD.

So the point of this reminder is to make sure you supplement your Vitamin C with lysine and proline - two components to the collagen matrix that the body has difficulty producing (glycine is also required, however, the body can produce ample quantities on its own). Ideally, a blend of the four mineral ascorbates (magnesium, potassium, sodium, and calcium) with healthy amounts of L-Lysine and L-Proline should be sought. The health/resilience of the entire body collagen matrix results from this regimen of supplementation.

This information is available elsewhere in this forum, but I thought it worthy of a reminder for those that are recent members or those who have not been exposed to the data. Search this forum topic for "lysine" for more info and a good paper by Pauling/Rath. Along those lines, the following is a letter from one MD to another MD:

An Email From One Medical Doctor To Another Medical Doctor
(Note: This is an email from Dr. William Wassell, M.D., to a fellow radiologist who had published an article in a medical journal. It details the sad state of affairs in the medical community. Dr. Wassell has kindly allowed CancerTutor to publish it online.)
Doc,
This may be a long letter but it should be informative and worth your time. Your comments in [Name of Medical Journal] about alcoholism and obesity and disability are the stimulus. From the article I can see that you are having some of the same questions about medicine today that I do.
I finished Diagnostic Radiology Residency in 1980 and about 10 years later I started having doubts about where we were going as a profession. I had seen the technology side make light-years of advancements while the treatment of disease had gone nowhere.
All medicine was about was parts replacement and symptoms management. Prevention and medical indication were being removed from the lexicon. Nutrition was becoming the "N" word of medicine. I started wondering where in the world I would go if I should need medical care?
For the next 10 years I only saw it get worse and began feeling that it was bordering on evil to continue to make advances in technology while ignoring cause and prevention. When articles would express concern over mammographic exposures I would think - where is the concern for chest CT which goes unregulated giving many young women the equivalent of 18 screening mammograms with each pass! By the time most women reach 40 they have already had breast exposures equivalent to 100's of screening mammograms.
Then around 2000 a friend got renal cell and I started looking on the Internet for potential new cures and things began to unravel. I found out for true that medicine is a business and industry and lags behind Science anywhere from 50 to 200 years.
The first bomb that went off was when I found out that vitamin c is not a vitamin but a liver metabolite that is made in large quantities (50 - 200mg/kg) daily in the livers of all animals except for man, the Guinea pig, and a fruit eating bat. This has been known by biochemists since the late 40's.
In the early 50's it was shown in the guinea pig, who gets atherosclerosis like man, that no amount of cholesterol feeding would produce it if the animal was supplemented with vitamin c at levels produced daily by the animals that retain the ability to make it in their livers from glucose.
This is an inborn error of carbohydrate metabolism that has gone totally untreated for over 50 years now. It is also a disruptive Science that destroys many medical industries built upon this error. [Nobel Prize winner] Linus Pauling repeated the experiment and presented it to a society of cardiologists in the early 90's. He also discovered that lipoprotein-a, which only occurs in the blood of non-ascorbate producing animals, is what starts the process.
Lack of vitamin c results in collagen fibers not being cross-linked with lysine and proline and weakens our connective tissue throughout the body. At areas of stress the intima cracks and these cracks are sealed by lipoprotein-a which had proline and lysine binding sites. Since this is a faction of blood cholesterol, lowering cholesterol levels too low predisposes one to hemorrhage when these cracks are not sealed--thus the hemorrhagic strokes it produces.
Researchers had known for years that vitamin c lowered cholesterol and in 1986 an article published in The Journal of Biological Chemistry showed how--by inhibiting HMG-CoA reductase activity. About 2 years later statins came out inhibiting the same enzyme. I wonder where the drug companies got the idea? Even I can see a certain chemical bond in both molecules that is peculiar and I bet it is what binds the enzyme rendering it inactive.
Vitamin c however does not inhibit the enzyme for CoQ10 synthesis which statins do. CoQ10 is in highest concentration in heart muscle and is very important in cellular energy production in muscle. You know what lack of it does to skeletal muscle and Merck even applied for a patent to include it with their statins in early 90's but has never exercised it.
Canada, by law, warns takers of statins to supplement CoQ10. The heart failure epidemic that has been a puzzle to the internists and written about in many medical journals is very simple to understand when you pay attention to the biochemists!! The only branch of medicine today that doesn't know this is the one we're in. Now, doesn't that make you proud? Let me touch on a few other things before I get to the obesity and alcoholism.
We give H2 antagonists and proton pump inhibitors to people for peptic disease and reflux. I even learned in med school that H+ was necessary for digestion and to activate gastric enzymes. Malnutrition from malabsorption eventually results, and also it allows bacteria and yeast to colonize the upper small bowel. Start taking a closer look at these on CT and go back to older text books to see what they should look like and you will find that what you have been calling normal is really abnormal in many people.
Malabsorption results in so many deficiencies that it produces a hay day for the doctor with his drugs to quell the symptoms while never addressing the underlying cause. This involves discussion using the "N" word which in now medically incorrect. I made a gastroenterologist mad by bringing this up.
Let us go on to type II diabetes. They say it's cellular resistance, well what is the cell wall made of? Fatty acids. Could that be the problem? Lets see, since 1900 omega-3 oils have been nearly eliminated [from our diets] while omega-6, trans fats, and hydrogenated fats have come to dominate. The biochemists know these fats become incorporated in the cell wall making the cell wall stiff and resistant to the passage of molecules in and out of the cell.
It was recently discovered that glucose happens to be one of the victims. When this occurs the pancreas puts out more and more insulin and compensates for a while but the insulin causes the body to store glucose as triglycerides and inhibits the release of fats for energy. Guess what, the person gets fat and sluggish and we have syndrome-X which later becomes type II diabetes.
Now I finally figured out why all or most adult onset diabetics were fat. This is text book biochemistry and metabolism, I am not making this up. So if a person is lucky enough to have grandma around still cooking real food he looks normal like you. If he doesn't and is lazy then he balloons up depending on his individual biochemistry as to how much. In other words it depends more on the source of the food rather than the amount that determines how much of a balloon you turn into.
Let¢s go to alcoholism. I only know the answer to this because of personal experience. I thought like you that this was obviously self inflicted and optional. I never could though understand why alcohol was so important to me and not to everyone else who drank. I could never accept the disease concept until I started doing my own research on it.
First, it is not the alcohol but the first breakdown product acetaldehyde that is the culprit. It has to leak into the blood in just the right quantities to not make you sick but enough to cross the blood-brain barrier. At this point it still may not work since not all people have the same brain chemistry. If you do then it condenses with dopamine to form THIQ (tetrahydroiodoquinolone) which is a substance more addictive than morphine. It was synthesized in the 40's as a cure for morphine addition but was found to be even more addictive.
From my own experience I had known that whenever I was taking narcotic pain killers I lost my desire to drink but I had never paid much attention to this because I knew this was no solution to a drinking problem. However, it did make me realize that only some people with the right chemistry could get this high from alcohol. This is obviously a genetically determined thing and thus a disease.
You know how people get addicted to any activity that increases brain endorphins. Well, if drinking alcohol is the activity that does it, then you drink more than others and more often. When I understood that I was getting a completely different high than others from drinking alcohol, it all made sense and the cure was simple--don't drink alcohol.
There was no more of this stupid character [nonsense] and self control issues to make up and try to deal with. I would say that this fact is less well known than the causes of atherosclerosis and type II diabetes.
It has taken me 3 years of research to compile the above to my satisfaction with references to many different scientific journal articles that back up the scientific facts that support my assertions. For myself I don't intend to wait or have the time left to wait for them to eventually make it into mainstream medicine.
Beyond the scientific ignorance there is the business and industrial end of medicine to correct and I'm not sure that can ever be done. The beast will eventually die from its own medicine--I just don't want to be taken down prematurely with it.
One thing before I go. You know the vaccines we learned about in med school that were suppose to contain a viral protein to which your immune system would respond by making antibodies and thus immunity to the virus. Well, what they didn't know was that many of the cell culture proteins and even unknown viral proteins are never filtered out of the final product.
These antibodies formed to these proteins circulate in the body and if they find similar proteins and respond by attacking, then you have the explanation for the autoimmune epidemic. As long as the profits roll in the drug companies will do nothing until they're caught. Vioxx is testimonial to this attitude.
Cancer is another big area where effective therapies are known but not used and even actively suppressed. This is the area originally that got my concern since I noticed without any outside input that nothing had changed in the 25 years since I had graduated from med school. The same barbaric treatments were still being applied. Nothing was being done to answer the question as to why the cancer rate had gone from about 1 in 50 lifetime occurrence in 1900 to 1 in 3 today.
The answer is obviously in something we breath, eat, or drink that differs today from 1900. Nobody even is considering this, they are looking instead for more deadly poisons to kill cancer rather than to prevent it.
The smoking thing they harp on is [nonsense] and just a smoke screen. If it is bad then it has to be something added to tobacco. People have smoked for centuries and lung cancer was rare in 1900. Any effort here is misguided to focus on tobacco, the focus needs to be on what chemicals tobacco companies are adding to it. I have heard that the companies have figured out a chemical formula to actually cause the nicotine to free base when smoked for quicker high and addiction. This seems to apply only to cigarettes since cigars when inhaled do not produce the same effect as cigarettes.
Medicines marriage to the chemical industry will insure that both suffer the same fate. Because of their money and control of politics and research funds you can just expect more of the same in the future. Turning hospitals into businesses for profit, and all the wasted time and energy going into satisfying JCAH requirements has put patient care in the sewer. All of the skills and talents we have learned in radiology today are simply being wasted. To me today the whole industry is just one big living joke.
I hope I have been helpful.
With kind regards,
WM Wassell, MD
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