> Food and Nutrition > Vitamins > vitamin C

It’s one of the greatest advances in medicine of the 20th century. Research has proven that vitamin C is invaluable in the prevention and treatment of heart attack, stroke and other cardiovascular diseases.

More than a decade ago, Professor Linus Pauling, Nobel Laureate in both chemistry and in peace said:

“Heart disease is an epidemic disease caused by a single factor. The underlying cause of heart attack and stroke is an insufficient intake of vitamin C. This leads to the destabilization of the walls of the blood vessels.”

Pauling estimated that complete, correct treatment of vitamin C deficiency or congenital hypoascorbemia (which exists in everyone) would slash total hospital admissions in North America by 15 to 20 per cent within just a few years.

Congenital hypoascorbemia is the inability of human bodies to make ascorbate (usually called vitamin C). Because of this inborn error of the human metabolism, our bodies are totally dependent on the very small amount of this vitamin in our food.

Pauling reported that after our ancestors lost the ability to manufacture vitamin C, the blood vessel system became the most vulnerable site of the human body. According to Pauling and his associate, Matthias Rath, MD the stability and elasticity of the blood vessel wall is directly dependent on optimum vitamin C intake in the diet. Vitamin C stimulates the production of collagen molecules, which play the same role in the human body that iron reinforcement plays in skyscraper buildings. With optimum intake of vitamin C the blood vessel wall is protected. No atherosclerotic deposits can develop.

Insufficient intake of vitamin C over the years has disastrous effects on the blood vessel wall. It leads to:

• Decrease of stability and elasticity of the vessel wall and loss of the barrier function between the blood stream and the vessel wall.
• Increased infiltration and a massive depositing of dangerous blood elements in the vessel wall.

Total lack of vitamin C in the diet leads to scurvy, the sailor’s disease. The body breaks down and the blood vessels become leaky. Heart disease, say Pauling and Rath, is a form of prescurvy.

They go on to explain that atherosclerotic deposits develop primarily in the arteries of the heart and the brain, leading to heart attack and stroke. The local development of deposits in the wall of these arteries is the result of high blood pressure. Blood flow unmasks the underlying instability of the arterial wall, the result of ascorbate (or vitamin C) deficiency. Cholesterol and other factors in the blood are only then risk factors if the walls of the arteries are already destabilized by vitamin C deficiency.

“Our discoveries about the significance of a deficiency of vitamin C now provide us with the opportunity to greatly reduce or even abolish heart disease as a cause for human mortality,” Pauling claimed.

One study involving more than 11,000 North Americans, found that moderate supplementation of vitamin C cut the incidence of heart disease almost in half and increased life expectancy by five or six years.

Source: alive #220, February 2001