Vitamin D Could Cure MS
Brian
Vitamins are organic compounds that our bodies use, in very small amounts, for a variety of metabolic processes. It is best to get vitamins and minerals from eating a variety of healthy unprocessed foods.
Phytochemicals are an important component of food and are thought to reduce the incidence of heart disease and some cancers. Supplements do not provide the benefits of phytochemicals and other components found in food. Taking vitamin and mineral supplements is no substitute for a healthy diet.
Our body only needs a small amount of vitamins and minerals every dayExternal Link . A varied diet generally provides enough of each vitamin and mineral. However, some people may need supplements to correct vitamin or mineral deficiencies and this includes:
Folic acid is a B-group vitamin which can also be found in some fortified foods such as breads and breakfast cereals. Foods fortified with folic acid have the nutrient added to them during production to boost their nutritional value.
It is commonly believed that taking mega-doses of certain vitamins will act like medicine to cure or prevent certain ailments. For instance, vitamin C is suggested as a cure for the common cold, and vitamin E is widely promoted as a beneficial antioxidant to help prevent heart disease.
After extensive research, however, neither of these claims has been shown to be true. Large-scale studies have consistently shown little benefit in taking mega-doses of supplements. In fact, there is some evidence that taking high-dose supplements to prevent or cure major chronic diseases (such as heart disease and cancer), may be harmful to your health.
Popping a pill will not likely cure persistent tiredness either. If you are feeling run down, it is more likely to be due to stress, depression, insufficient sleep or other factors, rather than a vitamin deficiency. If you feel like this regularly, seek medical advice.
Vitamin E is often singled out as the potential fountain of youth. However, there is no evidence that taking large doses of any vitamin can stall or reverse the effects of ageing. Neither can one vitamin restore a flagging sex drive or cure infertility.
Proper balance and adequate levels of essential nutrients is important for a range of complex processes in our body. When vitamins are taken as supplements, they are introduced into the body at levels that could never be achieved by eating even the healthiest of diets.
If you feel that you could be lacking in certain vitamins and minerals, it may be better to look at changing your diet and lifestyle rather than reaching for supplements. If you need help, see your doctor or a dietitian.
Utilizing high doses of vitamin C as a cancer therapy is no exception to this controversy. Nearly 60 years ago Toronto physician William McCormick observed that cancer patients often presented with severely low levels of vitamin C in their blood and featured scurvy-like symptoms, leading him to postulate that vitamin C might protect against cancer by increasing collagen synthesis. In 1972, extending this theory, Ewan Cameron, a Scottish surgeon, hypothesized that ascorbate could suppress cancer development by inhibiting hyaluronidase, which otherwise weakens the extracellular matrix and enables cancer to metastasize. He began treating terminally ill cancer patients and published a case report of 50 patients in which some of the treated patients benefited from high dose vitamin C.
Vitamin C as a cancer therapy has had a controversial past. What has been intriguing are small clinical trials that suggest some responses, but with no clear rationale for why cancers should respond to vitamin C or a path forward for explaining which patients are most likely to respond. Now a growing number of preclinical studies are showing how high-dose vitamin C might benefit cancer patients. Importantly, these preclinical studies provide a clear rationale and potential biomarkers that may help personalize the therapeutic approach and identify patient populations that are likely to respond to high-dose vitamin C therapy. Since the mechanisms of action of vitamin C are becoming better defined, we can propose vitamin C combinations in a more rational, hypothesis-driven manner. In addition, given the current high financial cost of new cancer drugs, it seems rational to improve the effectiveness of current therapies by studying their clinical interactions with vitamin C. In our view, the implementation of this treatment paradigm could provide benefit to many cancer patients.
The science of nutrition was born with the discovery of vitamins, and has since become a competitive, unregulated industry, often with scientific fact competing against those spreading misinformation and looking to profit: the novel coronavirus outbreak is just the latest example.
Having said that, we can easily obtain sufficient levels of vitamin C in our diet that will keep our immune system fully functional. Vitamin C is plentiful in many fruits and vegetables, including oranges, broccoli and potatoes. And while it is relatively non-toxic, since its high water solubility makes it easy to excrete from the body, excessive doses can result in unpleasant symptoms such as diarrhoea, nausea and cramps.
Though I have said vitamin C is unlikely to be a dramatic cure for COVID-19, the fact that it can promote good immune function means it would be going too far to say there will be no effect. And although a review found that vitamin C has no effect on reducing the frequency of colds, it did find that for the average person, there was a small decrease in the duration of common cold symptoms. But for people that participate in brief periods of severe physical exercise (such as marathon runners and skiers), vitamin C halved the duration and severity of their common cold risk.
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Objectives: To find out whether vitamin C reduces the incidence, the duration or severity of the common cold when used either as a continuous regular supplementation every day or as a therapy at the onset of cold symptoms.
Main results: Twenty-nine trial comparisons involving 11,306 participants contributed to the meta-analysis on the risk ratio (RR) of developing a cold whilst taking vitamin C regularly over the study period. In the general community trials involving 10,708 participants, the pooled RR was 0.97 (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.94 to 1.00). Five trials involving a total of 598 marathon runners, skiers and soldiers on subarctic exercises yielded a pooled RR of 0.48 (95% CI 0.35 to 0.64).Thirty-one comparisons examined the effect of regular vitamin C on common cold duration (9745 episodes). In adults the duration of colds was reduced by 8% (3% to 12%) and in children by 14% (7% to 21%). In children, 1 to 2 g/day vitamin C shortened colds by 18%. The severity of colds was also reduced by regular vitamin C administration.Seven comparisons examined the effect of therapeutic vitamin C (3249 episodes). No consistent effect of vitamin C was seen on the duration or severity of colds in the therapeutic trials.The majority of included trials were randomised, double-blind trials. The exclusion of trials that were either not randomised or not double-blind had no effect on the conclusions.
Authors' conclusions: The failure of vitamin C supplementation to reduce the incidence of colds in the general population indicates that routine vitamin C supplementation is not justified, yet vitamin C may be useful for people exposed to brief periods of severe physical exercise. Regular supplementation trials have shown that vitamin C reduces the duration of colds, but this was not replicated in the few therapeutic trials that have been carried out. Nevertheless, given the consistent effect of vitamin C on the duration and severity of colds in the regular supplementation studies, and the low cost and safety, it may be worthwhile for common cold patients to test on an individual basis whether therapeutic vitamin C is beneficial for them. Further therapeutic RCTs are warranted.
Interest in using very high doses of vitamin C as a cancer treatment began as long ago as the 1970s when it was discovered that some properties of the vitamin may make it toxic to cancer cells. Initial studies in humans had promising results, but these studies were later found to be flawed.
Subsequent well-designed, randomized, controlled trials of vitamin C in pill form found no such benefits for people with cancer. Despite the lack of evidence, some alternative medicine practitioners continue to recommend high doses of vitamin C for cancer treatment.
More recently, vitamin C given through a vein (intravenously) has been found to have different effects than vitamin C taken in pill form. This has prompted renewed interest in the use of vitamin C as a cancer treatment.
There's still no evidence that vitamin C alone can cure cancer, but researchers are studying whether it might boost the effectiveness of other cancer treatments, such as chemotherapy and radiation therapy, or reduce treatment side effects.
There are still no large, controlled clinical trials that have shown a substantial effect of vitamin C on cancer, but some preliminary studies do suggest there may be a benefit to combining standard treatments with high-dose IV vitamin C. Until clinical trials are completed, it's premature to determine what role vitamin C may play in the treatment of cancer.
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