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Various substances are normally present in the human body and many of them required
for life and characterized by low toxicity.
I call them for orthomolecular substances.
And I thought, here we have
what the Food and Nutrition Board does, estimating the amount,
the intake needed to keep you from dying.
That's RDA.
But you can also ask the question: "What is the intake that will put you
in the best of health and be most effective against disease?"
And when I went through the medical, nutritional literature
to find out what this intake was I found there was nothing in the literature about it.
Practically nothing. Just a few
papers had been written on this subject.
Well, how do you find out?
Little hard,
when people ask me, I say, "If you still catch colds you are not taking enough vitamin C."
That's one way of finding out.
It is interesting that for most vitamins,
all animals require the substance exogenously.
With little doubt what happened was 600 million years ago,
primitive animal was running around eating plants, his ancestors, these plants.
His biochemistry was very much like theirs. Here he was able to synthesize
thiamine and riboflavin and peroxygen and vitamin A.
But he was eating the plants which synthesized and he was getting enough
in his foods so that he really didn't need this apparatus and he lost it.
And ever since then, all animals have required these various vitamins.
This didn't happen with vitamin C.
And why not?
Presumably because there isn't enough vitamin C in the foods.
And one reason that animals require more vitamin C than plants is that animals
have collagen as their principal macromolecular molecule, structural molecule,
and plants use a carbohydrate polysaccaride cellulose.
So human beings can't synthesize collagen without using up vitamin C.
They need more vitamin C than animals do so they've kept on synthesizing up.
Unfortunately the common ancestor of all of the primates some 25 million
years ago was living in the tropical valley where the food was so high in vitamin C
that when the mutant came along that had lost the ability to make the enzyme
that would produce vitamin C,
he had an advantage over the wild type, and the wild type died out, and since then
all of the primates have had to go vitamin C exogenously.
Most of them have had sense enough to stay in the tropics eating the foods that are high
in vitamin C, but man has moved out into
temperate and subarctic areas and has changed his eating habits is such a way
that practically all human beings are suffering from
a sort of subclinical scurvy
that is called "ordinary good health", but should be called "ordinary poor health".
So we can ask, how much vitamin C do these animals manufacture?
It's proportional to body weight.
70 kilograms of house flies manufactures 10 grams of vitamin C per day.
In general, animals manufacture about 10 grams per day.
It says here, 2 to 20 grams per day per 70 kilogram body weight.
That's 40 to 400 times RDA for humans.
I might as well mention now that I take 300 times RDA, 18 grams of vitamin C per day,
and 80 times RDA of vitamin E and 25 times RDA of B vitamins
Perhaps, when I start getting old I'll go up to 50 times.
Ten times RDA of vitamin A.
It's interesting that the recommended amount of vitamin C for monkeys is
70 times that for human beings. It's easy to understand that, of course.
Monkeys are expensive, propably
1000 dollars each, I dont know, maybe 2000 dollars each.
If you've been spending the last year implanting electrodes in their brains
and writing down things in a research book and then come in and the monkeys have died,
that's a real tragedies you can't publish a paper you probably won't get tenure.
So they've worked very hard to find out what
the optimum intake of vitamin C is for monkeys.