Medicine has known since the 1970s that atherosclerotic plaque forms in response to blood vessel injury. Lipoprotein(a) binds to lysine and proline residues in the collagen matrix that are exposed from injury. We now know, if arteries are strong and healthy, then regardless of serum cholesterol levels, there are few lysine binding sites and plaques won't form. The confusion in the media is cause and effect. The fallacy is that cholesterol is the cause of heart disease, but plaque build-ups are the effect of heart disease.
According to the Pauling and Rath unified theory, the root cause of heart disease is a vitamin C deficiency that limits the production of collagen. The Pauling therapy for this condition is to ingest orally large doses of two substances: vitamin C and lysine. The recent USC study that created such a firestorm actually provides important supporting evidence for the Pauling/Rath unified theory. The USC finding is convincing, almost beyond a reasonable doubt, that the elderly can not get the vitamin C they need without supplementing their diet.
The Pauling therapy is so safe, and the medical condition so grave, that there is no logical reason why any physician should resist it, especially in otherwise hopeless cases. Our experience shows that heart patients do benefit from large daily doses of vitamin C and lysine. Hundreds, if not thousands of people have already been helped. And there is new evidence that adding the amino acid proline can increase the benefit. Some of these cases are documented, yet little has been scientifically proven, for reasons that escape me. I am not a doctor. And of course, as is always true in science, Linus Pauling may have been wrong. (Pauling wasn’t often wrong. He used the words "cure" in his last published interview and "miraculous" on the video.)
Lp(a) is a sticky cholesterol-like substance similar to LDL that is only found in humans and other beings that do not make their own vitamin C. Pauling and Rath have identified Lp(a) as one of the most important blood factors in heart disease, second to low levels of vitamin C.
In theory, human cardiovascular disease (variously called CVD, atherosclerosis, plaque, narrowing, arteriosclerosis, etc.) is a natural healing process. This process by itself rarely kills people, but plaque lined arteries do make it more likely that people will suffer heart attack from a blood clot or blockage.
Vitamin C keeps vessels strong. Accordingly, strong blood vessels are less prone to injury from mechanical stresses and do not suffer plaque deposits. When the dietary intake of vitamin C is low, collagen production is limited, and arteries become thinner and weaker from wear and tear. Low vitamin C leads to increased levels of Lp(a) in the blood and plaques form that compensate by patching and strengthening the blood vessels. Dr. Rath’s apt analogy for arterial plaque is nature’s "plaster cast."
Pauling believed, and his belief is supported by a United States patent, that large megadoses of vitamin C and lysine taken orally can prevent and even dissolve existing atherosclerotic plaque build-ups. We have monitored the progress of the many people who have contacted our www.paulingtherapy.com web site and routinely tell people seeking advice to view the Linus Pauling video on heart disease. Many of these people have then reported to us their personal experiences with the Pauling therapy. These reports are universally positive and match the three case studies on the Pauling heart disease video. We have received no complaints, and so far, no deaths have been reported.
Based upon these "miraculous" anecdotal reports, on our understanding of the Pauling/Rath unified theory, and on the Lp(a) medical literature that we have reviewed via MEDLINE, we are now convinced that vitamin C and lysine work. Naturally, no self-respecting medical doctor would take my word for it. But why haven’t the necessary studies been run years ago?
Report after report provides more evidence that the Pauling therapy works in most people in as little as 14 to 30 days (depending on the daily dosage) especially when augmented by proline and antioxidant vitamins. Some have reported that the vitamin C/lysine therapy didn't change their condition, or else required much longer, sometimes over 10 months. But most people (>90%) report relief in weeks rather than months. Not every person who visits the web site and who presumably tries the Pauling therapy communicates with us. To this date more than 100,000 unique visitors have visited the web site since it was first posted in 1995.
Lp(a) levels in the blood provide additional objective evidence. People have shared their lab reports with us that document drops in serum Lp(a) between 70% to 90% down to the accepted safe range (Less than 14 mg/dl). Such drops have been reported in as little as 30 days on the Tower Laboratories Heart Technology product. We have been concerned by the lack of clinical studies, but there is now at least one independent lab thoroughly investigating the effect of the Pauling therapy (e.g., Heart Technology) on serum Lp(a).
The arterial growth was unexpected and alarmed the researchers, whose paper is in peer-review and has not yet been accepted for publication. Thickening has been tied to heart attack, but there is a difference between arteries growing thicker with and without plaque. Plaque lined arteries are less responsive to Nitric Oxide (NO) signals and can’t dilate, leading to a cardiac event. But arteries with sufficient vitamin C can grow "thicker" without plaque, and this collagen-induced thickening is exactly what you want to avoid heart disease. The USC finding is so pronounced that it can only mean one thing: All elderly people should be taking vitamin C pills.
Robert Cathcart III, MD of Palos Altos California learned about the value of vitamin C from Linus Pauling. His medical practice uses high doses and says: "My experience with 25,000 patients since 1969 indicates that this media report is ridiculous. I know that follow-up is not perfect in private practice but I have had no patient who had a good heart when I first saw them and who took massive doses of vitamin C who ever developed heart problems. I have to add that I advise all my patients to avoid sugar, chemicals, and highly processed foods, and put them on a number of other nutrients.
"If it turns out that there is thickening of the carotid, I think it is reversing the thinning that occurs with aging. It is interesting that the effect is so dramatic in the reversing of the effect on smokers. I have to congratulate you at the Vitamin C Foundation on unveiling the other two findings that could have been measured which were not reported . Probably the finding that C helped would not be publishable."
There have been careful experiments with guinea pigs, first attempted by the Canadian medical doctor Willis in the mid 1950s. The result is always the same. When guinea pigs are deprived of vitamin C they die a terrible scurvy death in a matter of weeks. When their vitamin C is limited to the U. S. RDA they live, but develop atherosclerosis. When they are fed the human equivalent of 3 to 5 gm of vitamin C, they thrive with no signs of atherosclerosis. Disease in guinea pigs occurs in weeks, the human form of the disease usually takes decades to develop. While some differences are to be expected in animal experiments, the lesions produced by these experiments in guinea pigs are remarkable for their similarity to the human lesion. Pauling waited until his own experiments were run with guinea pigs at his institute before he made his announcement that heart disease can be "completely controlled" even "cured." Pauling’s results repeated the Willis work, and also showed that Lp(a) rises when vitamin C is limited.
The Pauling/Rath vitamin C theory makes perfect sense, at least to me, I have not been through medical school.
In Pauling and Dr. Rath’s view, any competing theory must account for:
These two observations are the cornerstones of the unified vitamin C theory. The theory explains the arterial lesions as the effect of weakness in the arterial wall, not from a "poison" circulating in the blood that should affect all blood vessels equally. Thanks to Linus Pauling’s recognition that Lp(a) is acting as a surrogate for low levels of ascorbate, we human beings no longer have to fear heart disease or suffer the chest pain of Angina Pectoris or fear premature death or heart attack caused by progressive cardiovascular disease (CVD). The genius of Pauling was to recognized that blood vessels are made stronger by vitamin C, but when vitamin C is deficient, that they can also be made stronger by Lp(a) plaques. Either way they stay thick, or if they become thin, thicken. And Pauling, the master chemist, has given ordinary people a much safer way to control heart disease than to risk heart by-pass surgery or angioplasty. We don’t even have to run to a doctor for a prescription.
The Pauling invention is to increase both vitamin C and the amino acid lysine. Both substances are safe and are known to improve health well beyond what we normally consume in our diets. These substances attack the root cause of the problem, the lack of proper collagen formation, and they also work to inhibit the binding of Lp(a) to the arterial wall.
It is hard to maintain the fiction that humans require no more than 60 milligrams of vitamin C in the face of what is known about collagen . Collagen is the most abundant protein in animals. Cellulose in plants, collagen in animals, provide the organism with structural integrity. But plants do not require vitamin C to make cellulose. Thus, it is unlikely that plants will have sufficient vitamin C supply to satisfy the needs of the animals eating them. Today’s authoritative pre-med biochemistry textbooks ignore the role of vitamin C in the human body. Completely. Medical students are not taught and don’t know that vitamin C is needed and used up producing collagen. It is little wonder orthodox doctors are ignorant and can not believe a vitamin C deficiency is the cause of heart disease. (The USC scientists are not happy about this lack of information in their text books.)
What is hard to understand is why alternative medical practitioners, who presumably read Pauling, make the same mistake? The following literature presents the concepts that cement the foundation of the unified vitamin C theory. It has been taken verbatim from the books by the nutrition masters Linus Pauling and Dr. Roger J. Williams.
"We have come upon reasons why we require for good health so much larger amounts of vitamin C than are present in the plants we use as food. It has recently been shown that one molecule of vitamin C is destroyed for each H atom replaced by OH... In the critical reactions that assemble collagen in the tissues, Vitamin C does not serve merely as a catalyst but is destroyed." Linus Pauling
Collagen is a protein, one of the thousands of different kinds of proteins in the human body. Most proteins occur in only small amounts: the various enzymes, for example, are so powerful in their ability to cause specific chemical reactions to take place rapidly that only a gram or two or even a few milligrams may be needed in the body. There are a few exceptions. There is a great amount of hemoglobin in red blood cells. There is even more collagen in the skin, bones, teeth, blood vessels, eye, heart, and, in fact, essentially all parts of the body. Collagen as strong white fibers, stronger than steel wire of the same weight, and as yellow elastic networks (called elastin), usually together with macropolysaccharides, constitutes the connective tissue that holds our bodies together.
Like other proteins, collagen consists of polypeptide chains; the long chains of this fibrous molecule contain about one thousand amino-acid residues, about sixteen thousand atoms. It differs from almost all other proteins in being substantially composed of but two amino acids, glycine and hydroxyproline. Collagen is a kind of super- molecule, however, in its three-dimensional architecture. The polypeptide chains of the two amino acids, alternating with one another and punctuated by the presence of certain other amino acids, are coiled in a left-handed helix. Three of these helical strands are twisted around on another, like strands of a rope, in a right handed super-helix, to compose the complete molecule. Understandably, the synthesis of this structure proceeds in steps. While it has been known for half a century [these words written in 1985] that vitamin C is essential to the manufacture of collagen, the process is only now yielding to inquiry. It appears that vitamin C is involved at every step.
First, a three dimensional stranded structure is assembled, with the amino acids glycine and proline as its principal components. This is not yet collagen but its precursor, procollagen. A recent study shows that vitamin C must have an important role in its synthesis. Prolonged exposure of cultures of human connective-tissue cells to ascorbate induced an eight-fold increase in the synthesis of collagen with no increase in the rate of synthesis of other proteins (Murad et al., 1981). Since the production of procollagen must precede the production of collagen, vitamin C must have a role in this step – the formation of the polypeptide chains of procollagen – along with its better understood role in the conversion of procollagen to collagen.
The conversion involves a reaction that substitutes a hydroxyl group, OH, for a hydrogen atom, H, in the proline residues at certain points in the polypeptide chains, converting those residues to hydroxyproline. This hydroxylation reaction secures the chains in the triple helix of collagen. The hydroxylation, next, of the residues of the amino acid lysine, transforming them to hydroxylysine, is then needed to permit the cross-linking of the triple helices into the fibers and networks of the tissues.
These hydroxylation reactions are catalyzed by two different enzymes: prolyl-4- hydroxylase and lysyl-hydroxylase. Vitamin C also serves with them in inducing these reactions. It has recently been shown by Myllyla and his colleagues that, in this service, one molecule of vitamin C is destroyed for each H replaced by OH. [Myllyla et al., "Ascorbate is Consumed Stoichiometrically in the Uncoupled Reactions Catalyzed by Prolyl-4-Hydroxylase and Lysyl Hydroxylase. Journal of Biological Chemistry 259:5403- 5405. 1984]
We have come upon the two big reasons why we require for good health so much larger amounts of vitamin C than are present in the plants we use as food. First, there is the bodies continuing need for the synthesis of large amounts of collagen for growth and for replacement of the collagen degraded by daily wear and tear. Second, vitamin C, in the critical reactions that assemble collagen in the tissues, does not serve merely as a catalyst but is destroyed." Linus Pauling HOW TO LIVE LONGER AND FEEL BETTER (1986) Pages 89-91
Victims of prison camps who have suffered from vitamin C deficiency have been found to have wide-spread fatty deposits (atherosclerosis) in their arteries. It is quite possible that vitamin C deficiency is directly implicated; it is unlikely that such deposits could have been due to too much fat or cholesterol in diet.
Strong evidence has recently been present that individual needs for vitamin C vary widely, and that some individuals have much higher needs than has hitherto been supposed. While the functioning of vitamin C, except for its role in building collagen, is obscure, it is quite possible that many hearts and blood vessels would be better protected if an abundant environmental supply of this vitamin were available in the circulating fluids that bathe the tissue cells. Roger J. Williams NUTRITION AGAINST DISEASE 1971) Pages 85-86
Correspondence Owen R. Fonorow Vitamin C Foundation PO Box 73172 Houston, TX 77273 Fax: 630/416-1309 fonorow@foxvalley.net
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cardiovascular disease: Its primary cause is ascorbate deficiency
leading to the deposition of lipoprotein(a) and fibrinogen/fibrin in the
vascular wall. J. Orthomolecular Medicine 6(3&4): 125-133.
3. Pauling L; Rath M (1990). Immunological evidence for the
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