The Cambridge World History of Food - Vitamin C

asunder from the lack of passing(prenominal) establish, there argon other arguments against vitamin C megatherapy. Adverse re processs provoke by massive battery-acids of vitamin C and the whitethornhap toxic see of its breakdown products could swell up disadvantage the body. Moreover, the white plague of wide amounts of ascorbic harsh is a self-defeating exercise as the absorption of large doses is a relatively inefficient process, with less(prenominal) than one-half of a 1 g megadose being absorb from the gastrointestinal package and only twenty-five percent of a 5 g dose . And, in both case, it is worldwidely received that tissue fertilisation in gentlemans gentleman may be satisfactorily succeed by a daily intake of 100 to cl mg or even less. The organized religion of the megatherapists would have appe bed to fraud them to the normal canons of scientific assessment. \nIn the mid-1970s, Pauling espoused possibly the most moot of all his vitamin C beliefs. In collaboration with a frugal surgeon, Ewan Cameron, he began to make unnecessary extensively on the supposed antitumor activity of vitamin C; more specifically, Cameron and Pauling published the results of a clinical foot race in which it was claimed that a megadose (10 g daily) of vitamin C quadrupled the option time of terminally ill malignant neoplastic disease patients . The methodology of this trial was widely criticized, and a carefully controlled attack to repeat it at the Mayo Clinic in the United States failed to substantiate the CameronPauling claims. For the next 15 years, and in the side of growing hesitancy on the map of the scientific conjure up to publish his papers, Pauling go on to present his arguments for the capacity of vitamin C in the treatment of cancer. An answer for of this drawn-out contend between Pauling and the American scientific instauration has recently appeared (Richards 1991). \nIn more general and theoretical terms, it has been su ggested that the antioxidant and free-radical bushytail woodrat roles of vitamin C life its possible die hard in the stripe (as contrasted with the cure) of cancer. G. Block has assessed whatever 90 studies of cancer and vitamin C/ take intake kins and has reason that there is evidence that in the legal age of cancers vitamin C may have a significant preventative role (Block 1991). In this measure, the possible relationship between vitamin C and nitrosamine-induced cancers has attracted some attention. It has been speculated that endogenously start outd N-nitroso compounds may be crucial initiators of human cancers. profound in this respect is the formation of N-nitrosamines and link up compounds. Nitrosamines may be formed when nitrate, a suitable nitrosable amine, and bacteria coexist as in the gastrointestinal tract. Nitrate (the briny dietary sources of which are fish and al-Qaida vegetables) is converted by bacterial action to nitrite, which then reacts with amin es to produce carcinogenic nitrosamines. most foods, particularly older meat products, pack nitrosamines formed during processing. \n