Detox Your Life, Natural Therapies
The High Dose Oral Vitamin C Protocol for Cancer (and Nearly Every Other Ailment)
I’m really excited about this post because I’m sharing some really cool stuff about Vitamin C that many people do not know. Or maybe I’m wrong and everyone already knows this but me… We’ll see.
This is a powerful anti-cancer protocol and even if you don’t have cancer, you can use this method to determine how much toxic stress is going on inside your body and how high doses of Vitamin C could dramatically improve your health.
Ok so we all now that Vitamin C (asorbic acid) is good for you right? The body doesn’t produce it, so it has to come from food.
You’ve probably also heard that a severe Vitamin C deficiency leads to scurvy. Early symptoms of scurvy are malaise and lethargy. That’s basically a “general feeling of being unwell” along with tiredness or exhaustion. (Does this sound like you?) After a few months comes shortness of breath and bone pain. Further down the road is muscle pain, skin sores, gum disease, loose teeth, wounds not healing, dry mouth, dry eyes, and emotional problems. In the late stages comes jaundice, edema, fever, convulsions, and eventually death.
Sounds fun right? Fortunately scurvy can be CURED with lemons, limes, oranges, and any other Vitamin C containing food.
Don’t Forget to watch the video below
Here’s where it gets interesting…
The cure for scurvy was first published in 1617 in The Surgeon’s Mate by English military surgeon John Woodall. And it was completely ignored by the medical community.
In 1753 (136 years later) naval surgeon James Lind published his discovery in, A Treatise of The Scurvy, which was also ignored. The medical establishment insisted that the testimonials of eating citrus fruit to reverse scurvy were merely “anecdotal” and not based on “scientific evidence”. Sound familiar?
Fortunately James Lind persevered and about 50 years later citrus fruit was finally accepted and used for the prevention and treatment of scurvy on sailing vessels. So, in summary:
The cure for scurvy was ignored for nearly 200 years after its discovery.
Nutrition and natural therapies are still ignored modern medicine. In fact I’d be willing to bet that if you went to see a doctor with some of the symptoms of scurvy that I listed above, you be subjected to a barrage of expensive tests, misdiagnosed, prescribed pharmaceutical drugs, and subjected to treatments for some other disease. This happens all the time. Earlier this year my good friend Tony was told that he probably had cancer or AIDS, turns out it was viral pneumonia. Can you imagine?
But I digress… Let’s get back to Vitamin C.
Here are some common whole food sources of Vitamin C:
Oranges, Kiwi, Canteloupe, Papaya, Strawberries, Brussels Sprouts, Broccoli, Cauliflower, Cabbage, Kale and Peppers.
“Super foods” with the highest concentration of Vitamin C on planet earth are:
Camu Camu Fruit, Amla (Indian Gooseberry), and Acerola Cherries. In that order.
Vitamin C supports nearly every system in your body: your adrenals, your immune system, your cardiovascular system, and more. Perhaps the most important is that it is a neutralizer of free radicals.
There’s been tons of ground-breaking research on high-dose Vitamin C’s powerful healing and anti-cancer effects by the likes of Fred Klenner MD, Irwin Stone, Linus Pauling, and Ewan Cameron. I don’t have time to get into their stories but I wanted to a least give credit where it’s due. Google them in your spare time. There’s a fascinating Vitamin C phenomenon that most of us don’t know about.
The sicker and/or more toxic you are, the more free radicals you have in your body, and as a result, the more Vitamin C your body will absorb and use. The body keeps a small reserve of Vitamin C available for use when there is increased internal demand, but when you are sick this is quickly depleted.
You may have also heard (or experienced) that if you take too much Vitamin C by mouth you get the runs, aka “chach” which is our family’s abbreviation (and code word) for
“Diarrhea Cha Cha Cha”.
A healthy person can take anywhere from 4-15 grams (4,000-15,000 mg) of Vitamin C in a 24 hour period without getting the runs, but a sick person can tolerate anywhere from 10-20 times more. I’m talking even as much as 100-200 grams per day by mouth.
Have you ever taken Vitamin C when you had a cold and it didn’t help? This is probably because you didn’t take near enough.
Here’s where it gets ridiculous… If you ate something that contained “100% of the USRDA (Recommended Daily Allowance ) of Vitamin C” that seems pretty good right?
It’s not.
The USRDA for Vitamin C is only 75 mg. That’s MILLIGRAMS. A normal healthy person can absorb and use between 4,000-15,000 milligrams per day. So the USRDA is way off on this one. 75 mg is basically what someone decided is the absolute minimum amount to keep you from getting scurvy. This is not an amount that promotes health and optimal body function.
One orange has about 150mg of Vitamin C, about 2 times more than the USRDA. And 1 teaspoon of Camu Camu Powder has about 15 times the USRDA of Vitamin C!
Even though you may not have scurvy, I think it’s safe to assume that many of us may not be getting enough Vitamin C in our diets, the lack of which could be a contributor to
- a) feeling lousy or b) serious disease.
High Dose Oral Vitamin C Therapy is taking the maximum dose your body can tolerate before you get the runs. This requires finding your threshold and then backing off a little bit for your daily dose. The clinical term is “titrating to bowel tolerance”.
As some of you know, one of the therapies I used to help my body heal from cancer was Vitamin C IV Therapy, which is a common practice in the natural/alternative cancer treatment world. This involves sitting in chair in a practitioner’s office for two hours with an IV drip containing 50 grams or more of Vitamin C. And while this is a very effective method to get a massive dose of Vitamin C without reaching bowel tolerance and to promote healing in the body, it is time consuming and expensive. I was paying $120 a pop, cash money. And in order for it to be the most effective you need to do it 2-3 times per week for many weeks.
My friend Bill, who’s healing his prostate cancer naturally, turned me on to a simple do-it-yourself Oral Vitamin C Protocol that he was put on by an underground cancer treatment expert whose name I cannot use publicly. Bill initially reached bowel tolerance taking 60 grams per day. After two months his tolerance was down to less than 30 grams per day. That’s a very good sign.
The Vitamin C Toxicity Test & Protocol
This is something everyone should do. Now clearly no one wants diarrhea on purpose, but in this case it can give you some immediate feedback about your internal condition. And it’s super cheap to do!
The simple way to find your tolerance is to take 2-3 grams of Vitamin C powder or crystals (ascorbic acid) every two hours mixed in 8 oz of water. That will give you about 12-18 grams the first day. Make sure you keep track of your doses. Vitamin C powder is highly concentrated. 1 teaspoon is usually about 5 grams of Vitamin C.
The goal is to find your 24 hour limit, not your single dose limit.
The half-life of Vitamin C in the body is about 30 minutes. That means about an hour after you take Vitamin C, your body has used up most of it. So an important key to this protocol is to keep your body saturated with C all day. Dosing every 1-2 hours is ideal.
If you reach bowel tolerance in the first 24 hours, reduce the total dose by 20-25% and continue to take that amount every day as a maintenance dose (this may be for several days or weeks) until you reach bowel tolerance again at that level. Then reduce by 20% again and continue with that dose until you hit bowel tolerance, and so on.
It works the opposite of what you would expect because you don’t build up a tolerance. The healthier you become, the lower your bowel tolerance for Vitamin C will go.
If you reach bowel tolerance at 10-15 grams or less per day, you’re considered to be in very good shape health wise.
If you follow the steps above and do not reach bowel tolerance the first day, continue to up the dose each day until you get there. If you are seriously sick you may need to dose every hour or 1/2 hour as indicated in the chart below. As you get close to bowel tolerance you will get gassy and should have soft stool. That means you’re very close to your body’s limit and should reduce your dosage a bit.
Here’s a dosage chart from the late and legendary Dr. Robert Cathcart MD, who treated 9000+ patients with Vitamin C!
TABLE I – USUAL BOWEL TOLERANCE DOSES
CONDITION Grams Per 24 Hours Doses Per 24 Hours
normal 4 – 15 4 – 6
mild cold 30 – 60 6 – 10
severe cold 60 – 100+ 8 – 15
influenza 100 – 150 8 – 20
ECHO, coxsackievirus 100 – 150 8 – 20
mononucleosis 150 – 200+ 12 – 25
viral pneumonia 100 – 200+ 12 – 25
hay fever, asthma 15 – 50 4 – 8
environmental and
food allergy 0.5 – 50 4 – 8
burn, injury, surgery 25 – 150+ 6 – 20
anxiety, exercise and
other mild stresses 15 – 25 4 – 6
cancer 15 – 100 4 – 15
ankylosing spondylitis 15 – 100 4 – 15
Reiter’s syndrome 15 – 60 4 – 10
acute anterior uveitis 30 – 100 4 – 15
rheumatoid arthritis 15 – 100 4 – 15
bacterial infections 30 – 200+ 10 – 25
infectious hepatitis 30 – 100 6 – 15
candidiasis 15 – 200+ 6 – 25
Something else worth noting in the above chart: If you are under chronic stress or engage in athletic activities like running, weight training, etc. you are likely to have an increased need for Vitamin C and your tolerance will be higher. Even if you are healthy.
Dr. Cathcart also notes that low dose vitamin c had basically no effect, but high dose vitamin c, when taken at 80-90% of bowel tolerance, produced a significant and dramatic reduction of symptoms in his patients.
Experiments
When I first tried this protocol a couple months ago I didn’t reach bowel tolerance until I got to around 34 grams. I worked my way up to taking 12 grams three times per day. I have no idea why my tolerance was that high. I workout 3-5 days per week which would increase my tolerance but perhaps I also had something going on internally… who knows?
Earlier this morning I took 7.5 grams and it produced bowel tolerance for me a couple hours later which actually interrupted my work on this post. Clearly my tolerance is down and if Dr. Cathcart is right, my internal health has improved.
Another one: My kids came home with colds from school two weeks ago. Then my wife got it. One morning I started to feel cold symptoms as well so I took 10 grams of Vitamin c. I felt great all day. Then close to bedtime I started to feel the symptoms again so I took another 10 grams. I did this every day for about a week. I would feel the symptoms in the morning, but I quickly crushed them with 10 grams of vitamin c. Some days I would take a dose around lunch time as well if I remembered. I was taking 20-30 grams per day for most of the week, I felt good, I was close to bowel tolerance, and the cold never developed. Since then, I’ve done this more times than I can count. Works every time.
What form to take?
Vitamin C comes in several different forms: pure asorbic acid and buffered with minerals.
Buffered C contains mineral salts like calcium asorbate, magnesium asorbate, and sodium asorbate. Buffered C is more alkaline but the excess minerals could be problematic if you are taking mega doses.
I compared three different types (buffered and pure asorbic acid) to see if they had different effects but my tolerance was basically the same for all three. Having said that…
Solaray Vitamin C Powder is 100% pure asorbic acid so it’s extremely tart and citric. Vitamin Shoppe Buffered C-Complex tastes chalky, not citric.
Thompson C Buffered Crystals is buffered with calcium asorbate, it’s citric but not as strong as the pure crystals.
Dr. Cathcart recommends taking pure asorbic acid for the high dose oral protocol. Dr. Thomas Levy recommends sodium asorbate. I think it makes sense to rotate between different types.
*After writing this post it was brought to my attention that most of the asorbic acid in vitamin C powder is made in China from GMO corn. If that is a concern for you, there are several brands of non-GMO vitamin C powders.
