[HN Gopher] Mega-dose vitamin C in treatment of the common cold ... ___________________________________________________________________ Mega-dose vitamin C in treatment of the common cold (2001) Author : jacquesm Score : 53 points Date : 2023-07-15 21:44 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) (TXT) w3m dump (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) | radicalace wrote: | vitamin c is overlooked. its a potent antioxidant. ingesting | enough antioxidant is going to have some of of effect | biochemically. | meepmorp wrote: | Ingesting enough of any chemical will have an effect on your | biochemistry. | DoreenMichele wrote: | Yeah, I don't even know where this "vitamin C for colds" thing | even came from. It's never made sense to me. | mihaitodor wrote: | Linus Pauling, AFAIK: | https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/07/the-vitam... | His theory has been debunked over and over... | [deleted] | hombre_fatal wrote: | Vitamin C is hard to be deficient in, so it's no surprise that | nobody needs it. It's why multivitamins look bad in research: | it's unethical to craft a study where people are deficient, so | you're just comparing cohorts of non deficient people. | LinuxBender wrote: | It probably also does not help that the studies are done using | a synthetic ascorbic acid that has the wrong pH levels. So we | need a large number of deficient people and to feed them a lot | of raw guava or raw sweet red peppers. | | I know where to find deficient people but doubt we would be | allowed to experiment on them even if it meant free food. | wswope wrote: | To give some context around the history of vitamin C research, | the whole idea of megadose vitamin C as an immune system | booster/cure for the common cold/cure for cancer was more or less | pushed by a single figure: Linus Pauling. | | He was an extremely influential and successful 20th-century | chemist, who earned both a Nobel Prize in Chemistry and a Nobel | Peace Prize. In his late 60s, he became interested in | "orthomolecular medicine" (the theory of making people thrive | through some imagined perfect balance of vitamins), and became an | advocate for megadose vitamin C therapy. | | He used his influence to set up some respectable large-scale | trials on the subject, but when they failed to find substantial | effects, Pauling basically doubled-down in his beliefs, and spent | the rest of his life regarded as a minor quack. | mjklin wrote: | Nobel disease! | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease | DoreenMichele wrote: | _It has been argued that the effect results, in part, from a | tendency for Nobel winners to feel empowered by the award to | speak on topics outside their specific area of expertise, | although it is unknown whether Nobel Prize winners are more | prone to this tendency than other individuals._ | | I moderated a list for parents of gifted kids at one time. | Bright kids tend to have bright parents, so most of these | people were used to being the smartest person in the room and | most of them defaulted to assuming that if you disagreed with | them, you were basically "just stupid." | | It was really challenging at first to get people to assume | the other person was also smart and likely had good reasons | for having drawn different conclusions. | trillic wrote: | After a long pacific crossing with no fruit onboard, I'd highly | advise all pirates to megadose Vitamin C. | worik wrote: | Look! There's a duck!! | binkHN wrote: | This is this from 2001. | foobarbecue wrote: | It seems like HN has stopped adding the year to articles | lately? Is this a change of policy? | morelisp wrote: | HN moderators too busy manning the new NW quadrasphere | Worldcoin booths. | dang wrote: | Not at all! but the years get added manually, either by | submitters or moderators. | | What submissions did you see that needed a year but didn't | get one? | dang wrote: | Added. Thanks! | NtochkaNzvanova wrote: | [flagged] | gary_0 wrote: | /newest is low-traffic enough that plenty of people hang out | there, and there are no downvotes. | DamonHD wrote: | I read it. The abstract seemed commendably clear. | | A folk rememdy doesn't pass muster, so easy to save money and | not bother for my next cold. | Netcob wrote: | I could see it being a pet peeve of many. | water9 wrote: | Next thing you know big Pharma is gonna call it horse medicine | kadoban wrote: | Considering it doesn't do shit for the intended purpose here, | seems like a good parallel I guess. | JumpCrisscross wrote: | "Doses of vitamin C in excess of 1 g daily taken shortly after | onset of a cold did not reduce the duration or severity of cold | symptoms in healthy adult volunteers when compared with a vitamin | C dose less than the minimum recommended daily intake." | | Double blind, N = 400, and the placebo came out insignificantly | ahead. | halotrope wrote: | I'm taking around 100g a week for the last month. Seems to have | helped with some things without any adverse effects | simmerup wrote: | Aside from the fact that the study showed no improvement after | Vitamin C dosage, you should be careful at that dose in regards | to kidney stone formation. Worth staying very hydrated | dehrmann wrote: | It does amazing things for scurvy. | mistrial9 wrote: | it is possible that the human body makes an adjustment to | repeated large doses of Vitamin C, and simply excretes more and | absorbs less material. If the dose stops abruptly, it would | take some days for this simple filtering to reverse itself. | IANAD | tekla wrote: | I do the same with mercury. It has been working well | DoreenMichele wrote: | I really, really hope this is sarcasm. | hombre_fatal wrote: | The RDA is 90mg and trivial to hit with fruit. If you're | getting 100g a week from supplements I'd start worrying about | contaminant/adulteration risk beyond wasting your money. | CodeBeater wrote: | If you don't mind me asking, what things did it help you with? | dingdingdang wrote: | Count me in. Additionally I don't personally approve of | commentators being downvoted for doing something that falls | outside the predominant opinion expressed within a thread. Go | ahead and post juxtapositional stuff, it's healthy! | pilotInPyjamas wrote: | I recommend that people look for a meta analysis instead of | individual trials when searching for medical research. Whilst | randomized controlled trials are excellent, the sample size is | often quite small. A meta analysis avoids this problem by | combining the results of many trials together. | | For example, this analysis: | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23440782/ finds that whilst the | general population probably finds no benefit to Vit C, people who | were "exposed to brief periods of severe physical exercise" did. | Note that this meta analysis contains 11,000 participants, far | more than the 400 in the original article. | [deleted] ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-07-15 23:00 UTC)