John Yudkin, Linus Pauling and the Sugar Question

“In my book I say you shouldn’t eat sweet desserts, but I also quote a professor who says that this doesn’t mean that if your hostess has made this wonderful dessert you should turn it down.  My wife used to say I always looked for that hostess.“ -Linus Pauling, 1987. Linus Pauling and John Yudkin [...]

Is Sugar a Poison?

[Ed Note: This is part one of a two part investigation into contemporary thinking on sugar.  Today's post focuses on recent discussions while part two will provide Linus Pauling's perspective as well as that of an important contemporary.] After watching Robert Lustig’s lecture “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” posted on YouTube in July 2009, viewers are [...]

Akira Murata

A year before being introduced to Fukumi Morishige‘s work, Linus Pauling was paying close attention to research being conducted by another Japanese colleague, Dr. Akira Murata, who was studying the inactivation of viruses by vitamin C.  Over the coming years, Morishige and Murata often worked together on research related to vitamin C.  And as with [...]

Fukumi Morishige

Dr. Fukumi Morishige, a chief surgeon of the Fukuoka Torikai Hospital for over thirty years, introduced himself to Linus Pauling via letter in 1975.  In this initial outreach, the Japanese physician informed Pauling of his own research on vitamin C, asking to meet with him when Pauling visited Japan later that year. Pauling did indeed [...]

Later Japan

Sixteen years passed between Linus Pauling’s participation in the 1959 Hiroshima Conference and his next visit to Japan in Fall 1975.  And while the 1975 trip largely dealt with his findings and research on Vitamin C – a common theme for many of his travels to East Asia and elsewhere – some of his time [...]

Biochemical Individuality

[Part 4 of 4 in a series on Vitamin C and the Common Cold] Toward the end of his book Vitamin C and the Common Cold, Linus Pauling included a chapter on human biochemical individuality.  In it, he addressed the fact that every human is different, and as a result, each individual has a unique [...]

Vitamin C Deficiency in Humans: An Issue of Evolution?

[Part 3 of 4 in a series on Vitamin C and the Common Cold] In the chapter “Vitamin C and Evolution” from his book Vitamin C and the Common Cold, Pauling wondered about the reasons why the rest of the animal world can synthesize vitamin C, while human beings, along with a very small group [...]

Physicians Anecdotes and the Safety of Large Doses

[Part 2 of 4 in a series on Vitamin C and the Common Cold] “The medical profession itself took a very narrow and very wrong view.  Lack of ascorbic acid caused scurvy, so if there was no scurvy there was no lack of ascorbic acid.  Nothing could be clearer than this.  The only trouble was [...]

Five Controlled Trials

[Part 1 of 4 in a series on Vitamin C and the Common Cold] Linus Pauling became interested in ascorbic acid thanks to Dr. Irwin Stone, a biochemist from New York. After meeting Pauling in 1966 and hearing Pauling speak of his desire to live for an additional fifteen or twenty years, Dr. Stone sent [...]

Casimir Funk and a Century of Vitamins

One hundred years ago, in 1911, the Polish-born biochemist Casimir Funk published his first work on vitamins, titled “Experiments on the causation of Beri-Beri,” in the British Medical Journal, The Lancet.  Curiously, the word “vitamin,” coined by Funk, was missing from this paper as the Lister Institute in London, for which Funk was working at [...]