[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)