The Vitamin Cure. Monte Lai
Esophageal Cancer
65. Exercise-Induced Bronchoconstriction
66. Fatty Liver Disease
67. Fibromyalgia
68. Gestational Diabetes
69. Glaucoma
70. Glioma
71. Gout
72. Graves’ Disease
73. Heart Attack
74. Heart Failure
75. Hemodialysis
76. Hepatitis C
77. Hypercholesterolemia (High Blood Cholesterol)
78. Hypertension (High Blood Pressure)
79. Inflammatory Bowel Disease
80. Kashin-Beck Disease
81. Liver Cancer
82. Lung Cancer
83. Lupus Erythematosus
84. Age-Related Macular Degeneration
85. Male Infertility
86. Melanoma
87. Metabolic Syndrome
88. Migraine
89. Multiple Sclerosis
90. Neural Tube Defects
91. Obesity
92. Oral Cleft
93. Orthostatic Hypotension
94. Osteoporosis
95. Pancreatic Cancer
96. Parkinson’s Disease
97. Preeclampsia
98. Premature Mortality
99. Prostate Cancer
100. Renal Cell Cancer
101. Respiratory Infections
102. Rheumatoid Arthritis
103. Rickets
104. Schizophrenia
105. Sepsis
106. Sleep Apnea
107. Stomach Cancer
108. Stroke
109. Tuberculosis
110. Venous Thrombosis
111. Vitiligo
Part Five: Summary of Recommended Daily Doses of Vitamins and Essential Elements for Prevention and Treatment of 75 Diseases and Conditions
Author’s Publications
References
Glossary
Abbreviations
Index
In the 1970s, Linus Pauling, a two-time Nobel laureate, recommended large doses of vitamin C to prevent and cure cancers. He himself was taking 8 g of vitamin C daily, and he was fit and healthy well into his 70s. Pauling’s claim received tremendous media attention; he was frequently in the news. During that time, I was a graduate student pursuing my PhD in biophysics in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Pauling’s media exposure was of particular interest to me because my dissertation investigated free radicals and antioxidants. High-dose vitamin C produces hydrogen peroxide, which kills cancer cells in the body. Recently, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) recommended intravenous high-dose vitamin C injections as a form of cancer therapy for treating certain advanced stages of cancer. Owing to my own research work, I had already become aware of the ways in which antioxidants like vitamin C and vitamin E work to scavenge harmful free radicals (molecules with unpaired electrons) in the body.
I continued my research work in the field of free radicals in biology and medicine after I joined the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee as a faculty member, devoting my research to nitric oxide, a gaseous free radical that is crucial for countless aspects of human health, ranging from the heart to the reproductive organs. In 1995, while taking a sabbatical leave, I decided to resign from my position as a full professor of biophysics at the medical school and serve as president and CEO of a new pharmaceutical company, focusing on the design and development of new drugs, in San Diego. Over the past two decades, I have acquired extensive knowledge in the pharmaceutical field by being at the forefront of the research on the pros and cons of therapeutic drugs in treating diseases and conditions.
Diseases and conditions can be divided into categories of acute and chronic. Modern medicine has done much in the field of acute conditions—such as trauma, infections, burns, bone fractures, or migraine attacks—but it has had limited success in treating chronic diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or diabetes, among others. Therapeutic drugs for chronic diseases are largely designed to treat symptoms rather than causes.
Take type 2 diabetes as an example: Most diabetes drugs can lower blood glucose. But high blood glucose is a symptom, not a cause, of type 2 diabetes. Compare this to how a fever is a symptom rather than the cause of an infection—bacteria or viruses are the causes. Antipyretic agents that prevent or reduce fever, such as naproxen or acetaminophen, may control the fever, but they cannot eradicate the pathogen that causes the infection—the agents treat only the feverish symptom, not the causative pathogen. Likewise, diabetes drugs treat only the symptom of high blood glucose, not the cause of type 2 diabetes.
At present, the root causes of most chronic diseases are still elusive. Both genetic and environmental factors are known to play pivotal roles in etiologies of chronic diseases. Chronic diseases are often related to gene mutations. A single gene mutation rarely causes chronic disease; although people who carry a hereditary mutated gene may be at an elevated risk, it does not mean that they will inevitably suffer from the disease. Environmental factors are known to affect epigenetics (how our genes interact with the environment) as well as trigger the expression of predisposed hereditary genes. A nutrient-deficient diet and an unhealthy lifestyle are by far the two most important environmental factors associated with the causes of a host of chronic diseases. Conversely, a nutrient-rich diet and a healthy lifestyle can stave off chronic diseases.
You may have browsed through the internet or read a newspaper and found an article claiming that vitamins are effective in treating diseases. Yet several months later, you may have seen another news report make the opposite claim, suggesting that vitamins are not only useless but also possibly harmful to health. You might not know what to believe anymore. I am certain many people feel this way. Nowadays, information is readily available on the internet. With just a few keystrokes, you can find ample health-related data about vitamins and essential elements. Nevertheless, it is difficult to sort through all the available findings to build a reliable knowledge base that will improve your health and that of your loved ones. The aim of this book is to provide you with easily accessible, evidence-based knowledge about vitamins and essential elements for the prevention and treatment of chronic diseases.
Before you dive into the contents of the book, you need to know how clinical data are generated. First, several kinds of clinical studies exist. Let us start with the simplest one. A doctor prescribes vitamins to treat a patient suffering from a disease, and after taking vitamins for a few months, the patient recovers from the illness. The doctor publishes his findings in a scientific journal. This is called a “case study.” If the doctor prescribes vitamins to a group of patients rather than a single patient and publishes his findings in a scientific journal, that is called an “observational study.” On the other hand, if the same doctor publishes the findings of a study in which he divides his patients into two groups, in which one group receives vitamins and the other group receives a placebo, and neither the doctor nor the patients know who is taking vitamins and who is taking the placebo, that is called a “randomized controlled trial.”
Many doctors and scientists worldwide are conducting clinical