Orthomolecular Nutrition for Everyone: Megavitamins and Your Best Health Ever

Preface

Orthomolecular (nutritional) medicine prevents and treats disease. This fact has been largely ignored by our current health care system, the media, and the medical literature. Why doesn’t your doctor use nutritional therapy? Is it for lack of safety? Because it’s not effective? Because it is expensive? It happens to be none of these. Nutritional medicine is safe, effective, and remarkably inexpensive, especially when compared to drug medicine.

Most vitamin research you hear about focuses on low, and therefore, inadequate doses of vitamins. Low doses do not get clinical results. High-dose vitamin therapy does; it has for decades. Anyone who has heard otherwise has heard wrong. The evidence from nearly 80 years of research by orthomolecular physicians proves it: nutritional therapy works.

As evidence, in this book are important papers from the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine. This book intends to share a few of these remarkable papers with you. To access, for free, over 40 years of the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, please visit Orthomolecular.org.

Many articles from the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service are also included in this book. You can subscribe, free of charge, to the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service at http://orthomolecular.org/subscribe.html and you can access the article archive at http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/index.shtml. This noncommercial, peer-reviewed publication contains research, clinical experiences, and analyses by twenty-five natural-healing physicians and experts. For others who think this provides too much information, thank you for the compliment.

You will notice that I draw a great deal from my father, Andrew W. Saul. This is intentional. I think that if you are going to quote someone, you may as well pick the person who you think can say it best. After all, my father has been teaching others (that includes me) about vitamins, nutrition, and natural healing for forty years, and I happen to like his delivery. We are a father–daughter orthomolecular team. It seems only natural to me to quote the most influential person of my professional career.

PART ONE

What Is Orthomolecular Medicine (and Why Should We Care?)

What you may first have to overcome is an old assumption that anything that is cheap and safe cannot possibly be effective. Freed of that assumption, health awaits you.

—ABRAM HOFFER, MD, PHD

Orthomolecular medicine is nutritional medicine. It uses vitamin, minerals, and nutritional supplements to prevent and cure real diseases. These are the very things you have been told not to take. This is the therapeutic approach you have been told does not work. This is the approach you have been told not to do. It is time for a change.

Life is hard, and sickness makes it harder. Doing what it takes to live healthfully is no walk in the park either. It takes effort and a whole lot of it. This can feel downright overwhelming.

Speaking of overwhelming, I worked myself up again the other day prowling the Internet for safe clothing fabrics, chemical-free feminine hygiene products, sustainable paper goods, and organic baby diapers. After what seemed like hours of reading, cost comparing, deciphering what was really meant when something was labeled pure or natural, and weighing the benefits of cleaner living against inferior performance and poor reviews, I figured I’d be better off if instead I just wore nothing but an organic sheet, ditched the baby diapers altogether, and permitted my youngest child to answer nature’s call outside in nature itself.

I’m not giving up, not yet, but it can drive a sane person crazy if you really start to dig into what chemical evils could be lurking in everyday household items, let alone your air, food, and water. Those who market sanitizers have folks believing they’ll be healthier if they annihilate bacteria on every touchable surface, as if somehow the impossible task of making one’s home sterile is supposedly safer. When I think of this, I always remember when my babies’ favorite pastime was to find my shoes, suck on the soles, and chew on the tread.

Simple and natural has its advantages. There is also better living through science and innovation. But maybe things are going a bit too far.

There are two sides to everything. The natural industry has instilled as much fear in the customer as the chemical industry. There are lists of possible associations to every cancer and disease imaginable, all linked to products we use. Are they wrong? Maybe they aren’t. But in the meantime, even those of us who buy organic food, avoid pharmaceuticals, wear gloves when using cleaning products, sidestep freshly fertilized lawns, filter our drinking water, and wash our hands with plain old soap, we are becoming overwhelmed by the sheer number of hazards we feel we must avoid.

This is not to say there isn’t room for improvement. It is satisfying indeed to see companies taking steps to go green, to skip genetically modified ingredients, to harvest sustainable forests, to reduce waste in production, and to create recyclable packaging. It’s nice being able to go to my local grocery store or local farmer and buy any number of organic products. But trying to make everything we touch clean, green, and pure is practically impossible, at least for now. All we can do is move forward and take steps in the right direction. Tackle the big stuff. Integrate healthy living. But don’t let it run you over.

My dad always says, You can’t go wrong with the basics. In a world where we are constantly going to be exposed to chemicals, poisons, synthetic hormones, carcinogens, pathogens, and stress, doesn’t it make a whole lot of sense to eat right, exercise, and take our vitamins? We simply cannot avoid some exposure to any number of things deemed harmful. But we have an opportunity to take small steps and make gradual changes that bring us closer to living healthfully. And for the moment, I’m going to wear the clothing I already own, and I may even let the baby continue to wear diapers.

This is why I love orthomolecular medicine: it focuses on the basics. Nothing could be more basic than the very building blocks of life. Every single cell in your body is made out of nutrients.

Orthomolecular medicine is nutritional medicine: it is the practice of using nutrients that are normal and familiar to the body to prevent and cure disease. This may sound difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. It means we should eat right and take our vitamins.

Orthomolecular pioneer Abram Hoffer, MD, PhD, said, Anyone who wishes to become familiar with orthomolecular medicine may do so by simply beginning with a whole-foods, sugar-free diet, and a few vitamins.¹

This is something we can all do.

BUT WHY ORTHOMOLECULAR?

People get sick. It happens. The goal is to be less sick, less often. We may suffer through a cold, but we most assuredly do not want to suffer through cancer. And while an occasional cold is not overly problematic, chronic colds certainly would be.

Neither vaccination nor medication provides sufficient protection from disease. In many cases, medication also does not provide a sufficient cure. Management of disease using dangerous drugs is not a cure. For those people who take prescriptions for chronic or recurrent illness, this is not new information.

We have a choice. Sickness is inconvenient, uncomfortable, and expensive. Orthomolecular medicine provides a way out of the disease–drug–disease spin cycle. We do not have to limit ourselves to only one approach. We can do more than turn to medicines and surgery. There is another way, and in the opinion of orthomolecular doctors and specialists, a far better one.

Our body is designed to be well. Orthomolecular describes a way of living that promotes health and discourages disease. It encompasses a way of feeding the body with the very substances it requires to live. We depend on nutrients to survive. We depend on optimal levels of these nutrients to be healthy. Adopting an orthomolecular lifestyle can help you be healthy now, help you get better if you are not, and keep you healthy in the future. Orthomolecular is a fancy term but we do not need to use it. Rather the key is to do it.

Folks who are much smarter than us have come up with all sorts of complex ways to label the contents and biological processes of the body. We do not need to understand the chemical makeup of food to know we must eat. Understanding how water or exercise or sleep impacts our brain is not as important as simply making sure we drink water, exercise, and sleep. In the same way, knowing how to define nutritional therapy is not nearly as important as doing it.

The body is dependent on nutrients. Too few impact health, as do too many. Different circumstances, such as exercise, age, pregnancy, or diet, may impact the amount of nutrients a person needs at any given time. The body always requires nutrients, but amounts will vary based on one’s biochemical individuality or one’s life circumstances. The same person could need more of certain nutrients on certain days, and less on others. For example, a human body needs more vitamins when sick. This is not conjecture. This is established nutritional fact. More vitamin C is required for wound healing. Fever increases the need for thiamine. Aging increases the need for many nutrients; older people need more and absorb less. Children need proportionally more nutrients than adults do because they are growing. More nutrients are also required for women during pregnancy.

Orthomolecular Origins

By definition, ortho- means right. Two-time Nobel Prize winner and molecular biologist Linus Pauling came up with the name orthomolecular to describe using the right molecules to heal the body and to keep it healthy in the first place. Now there was a word to describe the therapy physicians were successfully employing in their practice over three decades before there was even a name for what they were doing.²

In the late 1960s, Linus Pauling first used the word in an article titled Orthomolecular Psychiatry written for the journal Science. As explained in his book How to Live Longer and Feel Better, an orthomolecular approach promotes and maintains good health by using optimal levels of substances that are normally present in the body and required for life.³ The goal, Linus Pauling says, is to establish and maintain optimum concentrations of essential molecules.⁴ You have got to consistently feed the body nutrients it needs. This is what is necessary to be well. To be free of sickness or to heal from what currently ails you, you may require very large amounts of nutrients indeed. Time and time again, this fact was being confirmed in practice.

In the late 1940s and for the next several decades, Drs. Wilfrid and Evan Shute used large doses of vitamin E (up to 1,600 IU per day) to successfully treat some 30,000 patients for conditions including acute coronary thrombosis, acute rheumatic fever, chronic rheumatic heart disease, hypertensive heart disease, diabetes mellitus, acute and chronic nephritis, and even burns, plastic surgery and mazoplasia.⁵ Frederick R. Klenner was curing viral pneumonia and every case of polio he had the opportunity to treat and a striking variety of many other illnesses with high doses of vitamin C—to the tune of tens of thousands of milligrams per day.⁶ These, and other, doctors were successfully treating real diseases with high-dose vitamins and doing so safely.

High doses of vitamins were advocated shortly after they were first isolated. Claus Jungeblut, MD, prevented and treated polio in the mid-1930s using a vitamin. Chest specialist Frederick Klenner, MD, was curing multiple sclerosis and polio back in the 1940s using vitamins. William Kaufman, MD, cured arthritis similarly back in the 1940s. In the 1950s, Drs. Wilfrid and Evan Shute were curing various forms of cardiovascular disease with a vitamin. At the same time, psychiatrist Abram Hoffer, MD, PhD, was using niacin to cure schizophrenia, psychosis, and depression. In the late 1960s, Robert F. Cathcart, MD, cured influenza, pneumonia, and hepatitis. In the 1970s, Hugh D. Riordan, MD, was obtaining cures of cancer with intravenous vitamin C. Dr. Harold Foster and colleagues arrested and reversed full-blown AIDS with nutrient therapy, and, in just the last few years, Atsuo Yanagisawa, MD, PhD, has shown that vitamin therapy can prevent and reverse sickness caused by exposure to nuclear radiation. All of these doctors used very high doses, and consistently reported striking success rates. And all of these doctors reported great patient safety.⁷

You’ll note that their protocols did not involve massive drugging of patients. These physicians were getting success with vitamins at doses far above what the government declares adequate.

THE RECOMMENDED DIETARY ALLOWANCE (RDA)

RDA = Ridiculously Deficient Amount

—STEVEN F. HOTZE, MD

Good health requires optimal doses of nutrients. You cannot drive to Vegas on a gallon of gas, nor can you expect insufficient nutrition to keep you well. A half cup of water may help you survive, but much more is considered necessary to thrive. Similarly, If you give every homeless person you meet on the street twenty cents, you could easily prove that money will not help poverty, says Andrew W. Saul, PhD. If you give RDA levels of vitamins, do not expect therapeutic results.

There are times when the RDA may be sufficient for a healthy individual, but there are far more people who would benefit from an increased intake of essential nutrients, not merely the amounts suggested to prevent deficiency. Most vitamin research has used inadequate, low doses. Low doses do not get clinical results, says Dr. Saul. Decades of physicians’ reports and laboratory and clinical studies support the therapeutic use of large doses of vitamins and other nutrients. Effective doses are high doses, often tens or hundreds of times higher than the US Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) or Dietary Reference Intakes (DRI).⁸ Unfortunately, many of us do not even manage to obtain the low recommended amounts of vitamins every day, let alone the amounts required for the prevention and treatment of illness.

The RDA vs. Nature

"A 15-pound wild monkey takes in about 600 milligrams (mg) of vitamin C a day from its food.⁹ An average human being weighs 180 pounds. That is the weight of twelve monkeys; twelve monkeys would get 7,200 mg. But the US RDA for vitamin C for a human is 90 mg per day for adult males; only 75 mg per day for adult females. That means that your vitamin C RDA is just over 1 percent that of a monkey. Who do you suppose made the mistake?"

—ANDREW W. SAUL, The Orthomolecular Treatment of Chronic Disease

People may be deterred from taking larger doses of vitamins due to the alleged tolerable upper intake levels arbitrarily set by our government. These intake levels are presented as safety limits. However, such safety limits are believed by many nutritionists to be too conservative and largely theoretical. In his paper ‘Safe Upper Levels’ for Nutritional Supplements: One Giant Step Backward (see introduction to Part Two), Alan R. Gaby, MD, who also has a degree in biochemistry and is an expert in nutritional medicine, says that these limits are inappropriately restrictive.¹⁰

Research that could show just how effective large-dose vitamin supplementation can be is stifled by such safety limits. Saying, for example, that a dose of vitamin C over 2,000 milligrams (mg) per day is the tolerable upper intake could make any study aiming to use higher doses to treat disease unethical.

This is wrong.

People are understandably concerned about taking amounts in excess of the supposed upper intakes. But they need not be. There’s 80 years of research to support safety and efficacy of doses far greater than those indicated in the RDA or tolerable upper intake levels.

SAY NO TO DRUGS

[E]ven after the billions of dollars of pharmaceutical-based research conducted over decades, there is little to show for it. In my opinion, no toximolecular substance will ever be a cure for anything.

—ABRAM HOFFER, MD

You will notice that drug is not part of any definition of orthomolecular. Orthomolecular physicians consider drugs to be toximolecular, that is, toxic to cells. And this makes sense. There isn’t a single cell in the human body made out of a drug. Restoring health must be done nutritionally, not pharmacologically, says Dr. Saul. All cells in all persons are made exclusively from what we drink and eat.

Drugs are not normally present in the body. Nutrients are. More and more people agree that illness is not really due to a lack of pharmaceuticals. Headaches are not caused by aspirin deficiency, nor are digestive problems due to insufficient intake of antacids, says Dr. Saul. Drugs may suppress symptoms of sickness, but they do not address the underlying cause of illness. What is worse, drugs come with a laundry list of harmful side effects. They are risky, if not downright dangerous. Vitamins, on the other hand, have an extraordinary safety record.¹¹ The safety record of pharmaceuticals, if you can call it that, is spectacularly awful.

The facts are scary. Over 100,000 people die each and every year from pharmaceutical drugs, taken as directed, as prescribed.¹² Rates of injury are mind numbing. Every year, over 1.5 million Americans will be injured due to drug errors at the doctor’s office, nursing home, and hospital.¹³ Count on errors to increase as prescriptions and prescription drug use increase. Seventy percent (70 percent) of Americans take at least one prescription medication—the majority of which are maintenance medications for long-term, chronic illnesses.¹⁴ A third of us take two or more pharmaceuticals. And one in ten of us takes five or more prescription drugs. And sadly, one in five children is taking prescription medication.¹⁵ Are children even allowed to say no?

We are inundated with drug advertisements on TV, in magazines, and online. At the same time, vitamin supplements are accused of being worthless or harmful, neither of which they are. Instead of being encouraged to take safe and essential nutrients, we are warned off the very thing that would help us get better, and would do so safely. A drug in either low or high doses cannot act as a vitamin, says Dr. Saul. However, vitamins in large doses can act as drugs, and with far greater safety.¹⁶

It should be clear to everyone that drugs are dangerous. But that doesn’t stop us from taking them. In fact, we are taking more now than ever.¹⁷

The results? Lower rates of chronic disease? People getting better? Just the opposite is true. It turns out that we are seeing increases in the number of patients with stroke, cardiovascular diseases, cancer, allergic diseases, psychiatric diseases, and various other health issues, says Atsuo Yanagisawa, MD, president of the International Society for Orthomolecular Medicine.¹⁸ And you can be sure that the pharmaceutical industry is rising to meet the demand with a plethora of costly prescriptions, many of which are intended for lifelong use. As Dr. Hoffer said:

[E]ven after the billions of dollars of pharmaceutical-based research conducted over decades, there is little to show for it. In my opinion, no toximolecular substance will ever be a cure for anything. Natural means have been almost totally ignored. The body is composed of innumerable molecules developed over the past billions of years by the toughest test of all, survival. We are finely tuned organisms, with so many different compounds and reactions and inter-reactions. Even after over 50 years of medical practice, it still surprises me that everything functions so well. So to think that one can insert a strange molecule that has never been there before, and hope to correct some malfunction, is the height of folly.¹⁹

"Thirty years ago, Henry Gadsden, the head of Merck, one of the world’s largest drug companies, told Fortune magazine that he wanted Merck to be more like chewing gum maker Wrigley’s. It had long been his dream to make drugs for healthy people so that Merck could ‘sell to everyone.’ "

—SELLING SICKNESS, 2006

If you think your doctor will prescribe a safer, cheaper, more effective, natural, orthomolecular alternative to drugs, think again. Seventy to 80 percent of the time, doctor’s office and hospital visits involve prescription drug therapy.²⁰ We cannot count on our doctors to recommend vitamins instead of medicines. We must look into this for ourselves. Many people have heard their doctors say, ‘I have never seen any evidence that nutrient therapy cures disease,’ says Dr. Saul. Those doctors are telling the truth: no, they personally have never seen the evidence. But that is not because it doesn’t exist. It does.

It bears repeating: drugs are not really the answer. Good health does not come from medication. People who take medicines and do not get better are starting to catch on. People who suffer drug-induced side effects (which lead to more drug prescriptions to manage drug side effects) are catching on, too. A drug that you are instructed to take for the rest of your life is not a cure. It is a sentence. And it is expensive.

Our perception is changing. We are getting smarter. We are learning that pharmaceuticals do not always work, and we are turning to alternatives. We do not have to rely on drugs, but we must (and do) rely on nutrients to be well.

VITAMINS PREVENT AND CURE DISEASE

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

—ALDOUS HUXLEY

So what if we could use nutrition instead of drugs? We can. This is what nutritional therapy does. This is what orthomolecular medicine does. The only compounds that have been used successfully in chronic ailments are the nutrients, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, essential fatty acids, and hormones, said Dr. Hoffer. And when one tries to replace natural substances with compounds that are slightly different in order to have patent protection, the results are dismal.²¹

Orthomolecular medicine is twofold: prevention and treatment. A strong immune system fends off disease. Maintain a strong immune system, and it will work to keep you healthy. A strong immune system is key to recovering from an infection, neutralizing and eliminating a toxin, and bringing diseased cells back to a state of good health, says Thomas Levy, MD. This requires that you give your immune system the tools it needs to do its job. Good nutrition does not directly cure disease; the body does, says Dr. Saul. You provide the raw materials and the inborn wisdom of your body makes the repairs. You provide the bricks and mortar and the mason builds the wall. Without supplies, the most skilled workman on earth can build nothing. Without plenty of nutrients, the body can’t, either.

For those of us entrenched in a medical perspective, it may still be hard to believe: nutritional treatment is effective, cheap, and free of side effects.²² Some may think, Anything safe and cheap can’t possibly be effective, right? And aren’t those vitamins expensive? Not compared to medical treatment of disease, that’s for sure. The evidence shows that vitamins have been safely preventing and curing disease for decades. Just because your doctor hasn’t done it, does not mean it hasn’t been done. When it comes right down to it, if you do not spend your money on prevention and taking care of your health, you will most assuredly spend it on disease. Funerals aren’t cheap either.

VITAMINS ARE SAFE

Nobody dies of poisoning by an overdose of vitamins.

—LINUS PAULING, PHD, CHEMIST AND DOUBLE NOBEL LAUREATE

Could you hurt yourself with vitamins? You could try, but you would certainly have a hard time doing so. Of course, there is a right way and a wrong way to do anything. However, The number one side effect of vitamins is failure to take enough of them, says Dr. Saul. Vitamins are extraordinarily safe substances.

Just because it is possible that you could hurt yourself with an overdose of vitamins does not make it likely that you will. Dr. Hoffer said, Any discussion of side effects or of toxic reactions without specifying the doses is meaningless, for at zero levels nothing is toxic and at sufficiently high levels everything is toxic, including oxygen and water. Just like with oxygen and water, you require vitamins to live. Nutrients are essential. The only question, then, is dose.²³

Pay attention. This is important: injury from vitamin insufficiency and deficiency is far more likely than injury from vitamin overdose. Tens of billions of doses of vitamins are taken each year and there is not even one vitamin death per year.²⁴

Nutrients are good for you. Go ahead and get plenty. Abundance is a good thing. It is deficiency that is a problem.

Vitamins have a very large margin for error, and, therefore, for safety. Drugs do not. Vitamins are infinitely safer than drugs. Minerals are also remarkably safe, though not quite as safe as vitamins. Still, both vitamins and minerals are safer than any pharmaceutical or over-the-counter drug. Period.

Even the word overdose needs to be evaluated when it comes to vitamins. Are you overdosing because you took more than the measly RDA of vitamin C? Is 1,000 mg of vitamin C a megadose? If you are chuckling, then you too know that 1,000 mg of vitamin C a day is certainly not overdoing it. Those who choose to take orthomolecular doses of vitamin C know that sometimes the body may require 100,000 mg per day or more in times of severe illness.

As long as people have this idea that any amount over government recommendations is an overdose, we will suffer the consequences of failing to obtain what the body truly needs to keep healthy. Consider this: almost all animals make their own vitamin C. Adjusted for weight, pound for pound, animals make the human equivalent of between 1,500 and 15,000 mg per day or so of vitamin C right inside their bodies. They make even more vitamin C when they are sick or under stress. The RDA would have us believe that just 75 mg per day of vitamin C is sufficient for women, and a paltry 90 mg per day is enough for men.²⁵ Oh, please. Is all of Mother Nature wrong or, just maybe, did our government make a teensy tiny mistake?

Just because we have this preconceived notion of what is a little of a vitamin and what is a lot does not make it true. A small dose is often an ineffective dose, and doses much greater than our government recommendations can be safe and beneficial.

We should always be mindful of the supplements we take. We should still go to the doctor and discuss our health concerns. But we don’t always have to do what the doctor says. And unless you see an orthomolecular doctor, you can expect that orthomolecular will not be heard in any answer to a question posed in the exam room.

THE BALANCED DIET MYTH

Man is a food-dependent creature. If you don’t feed him, he will die. If you feed him improperly, part of him will die.

—EMANUEL CHERASKIN, MD, DMD

Prevention of disease is by far the best approach to health. But any glance at a meal on the average American dinner table will illustrate that most people are not really thinking about their health. We may simply prefer what our parents fed us, what we are used to, or what tastes good to us. I think most folks know by now that eating lots of vegetables and fruits is healthy. We just don’t want to do it. Advertisements, sensationalist media, false information, biased research, inadequate government recommendations, food pyramids, the financial interests of drug companies, and fad diets certainly cloud the judgment of well-meaning eaters everywhere. On top of it all, we go to doctors who promptly prescribe medication for our health issues and address problems with medication with more medicines. We have come to believe this is right and normal. But no matter what we are told, no matter what we hear or what we read, we have to do what is right for us and our bodies. And a balanced diet just is not going to cut it.

Eat a balanced diet and you will obtain all the vitamins and minerals you need. Yeah, right. How many times have you heard that one? Frankly, balanced is one thing our diets should not be. The scale should be tipping full over in favor of all of the vegetables and fruits we are eating. Everything else goes on the other side. In addition to that great diet, we should also take vitamins. Even if we eat right, we still won’t achieve optimal levels of certain vitamins and minerals, including vitamin C and vitamin E. Vegetables and fruits are not as nutritious as they used to be, nor are they as tasty. (Have you eaten a store-bought tomato lately?) Thanks to mineral-depleted soils and our desire for bigger, more attractive, pest- and weather-resistant produce, the vitamin and mineral content has gone down.²⁶ (Speaking of tomatoes, you may taste a delicious tomato again if you buy local and organic or grow your own.) Let’s fill in any nutritional gaps with proper supplementation. This is orthomolecular nutrition.

Some people require more nutrients than others.²⁷ While the Recommended Dietary Allowances would have you think otherwise, requirements often vary. Age, pregnancy, illness, stress, and environment all affect the quantity of nutrients a body needs. There is no dose that works for everyone, every time. Supplements should supplement a healthy diet, and if you are not eating healthy food, you need supplements all the more. If you are suffering from illness, your need is even greater. The RDA simply will not do.

A little of a vitamin may be enough to prevent deficiency. More often, dosages of vitamins in amounts much higher than government recommended dietary allowances are required for good health. It depends on the individual. It depends on the need. A dry sponge holds more liquid. Similarly, a sick or stressed body requires more vitamins. The very idea that we can obtain all the nutrients we need through our food is substantially untrue. It’s a nice legend. Even if you eat a predominantly organic, plant-based diet, it is hard to do, let alone if you eat like most Americans.²⁸

We cannot possibly still believe that the well-balanced diet advice is working. Look at what is actually in the take-out bag. There are lots of crappy restaurants, but we can still call out the giant: McDonald’s. I couldn’t tell you the last time I grabbed a meal there, but 1 percent of the world’s population could tell you. That’s a huge number of people frequenting a restaurant notorious for non-nutritious food. Two billion dollars a year in advertising makes for colossal sales, and business owners have no intention of letting that stock go down.²⁹ We certainly do not have to eat there. I imagine most folks reading a book with the word orthomolecular in the title aren’t anyway. But I say we put these hardworking fast-food employees out of business. And before you shame me for applauding job losses, I am no more apologetic about canning fast-food restaurant workers due to lowered demand for inferior, highly processed, notoriously unhealthy food than I would be if we needed to lay off doctors or hospital staff or gravediggers because folks were living longer, dying older, and spending many more years alive and healthier. What a treat it would be if such jobs began to disappear. Imagine what other jobs might take their place.

CAN SUPPLEMENTS TAKE THE PLACE OF A BAD DIET?

by Andrew W. Saul, PhD

Excerpted from J Orthomolecular Med. 2003; 18 (3 & 4): 213–216.

Can supplements take the place of a bad diet? They’d better. In spite of decades of intense and well-funded mass education, the great majority of adults and children in the United States still do not consume the government’s recommended daily quantities of fruits and vegetables.

Vitamins Provide for Special Concerns

Traditional dieticians have set themselves the heroic but probably unattainable goal of getting every person to eat well every day. Even if obtained, such vitamin intake as good diet provides is inadequate to maintain optimum health for everyday people in real-life situations. Tens of millions of women have a special concern. Oral contraceptives lower serum levels of B vitamins, especially B6, plus niacin (B3), thiamin (B1), riboflavin (B2), folic acid, vitamin C, and B12.¹ It is uncommon, even rare, for a physician to instruct a woman to be sure to take supplemental vitamin C and B-complex vitamins as long as she is on the Pill.

Vitamins Fill in Nutritional Gaps

It is widely appreciated that at least 100 IU of vitamin E (and probably 400 IU or more) daily is required to prevent most cardiovascular and other disease. Yet it is literally impossible to obtain 100 IU of vitamin E from even the most perfectly planned diet. To demonstrate this, I’ve challenged my nutrition students to create a few days of balanced meals, using the food composition tables in any nutrition textbook, to achieve 100 IU of vitamin E per day. They could attempt their objective with any combination of foods and any plausible number of portions of each food. The only limitation was that they had to design meals that a person would actually be willing to eat.

As this ruled out prescribing whole grains by the pound and vegetable oils by the cup, they could not do it. Nor can the general public.

Supplements by definition are designed to fill nutritional gaps in a bad diet. They fill in what may be surprisingly large gaps in a good diet as well. In the case of vitamin E, doing so is likely to save millions of lives. A 1996 double-blind, placebo-controlled study of 2,002 patients with clogged arteries demonstrated a 77 percent decreased risk of heart attack in those taking 400 to 800 IU of vitamin E.² Again, such effective quantities of vitamin E positively cannot be obtained from diet alone.

To illustrate how extraordinarily important supplements are to persons with a questionable diet, consider this: children who eat hot dogs once a week double their risk of a brain tumor. Kids eating more than twelve hot dogs a month (that’s barely three hot dogs a week) have nearly ten times the risk of leukemia as children who eat none.³ However, hot-dog-eating children taking supplemental vitamins were shown to have a reduced risk of cancer.⁴ It is curious that, while theorizing many potential dangers of vitamins, the media often choose to ignore the very real cancer-prevention benefits of supplementation.

Vitamins Supply Nutrients Easily and Cheaply

Critics also fail to point out that supplements are economical. For low-income households, taking a three-cent vitamin C tablet and a five-cent multivitamin, readily obtainable from any discount store, is vastly cheaper than getting those vitamins by eating right. The uncomfortable truth is that it is often less expensive to supplement than to buy nutritious food, especially out-of-season fresh produce. Milligram per milligram, vitamin supplementation is vastly cheaper than trying to get vitamins from food.

Few people can afford to eat several dozen oranges a day. A single large orange costs at least 50 cents and may easily cost one dollar. It provides less than 100 milligrams (mg) of vitamin C. A bottle of 100 tablets of ascorbic acid vitamin C, 500 mg each, costs about five dollars. The supplement gives you 10,000 mg per dollar. In terms of vitamin C, the supplement is 50 to 100 times cheaper, costing about one or two cents for the amount of vitamin C in an orange. Those who wish to follow Linus Pauling’s perennially wise recommendation to take daily multigram doses of vitamin C can do so easily and cheaply.

Vitamins Supply Nutrients Essential to Health

Since the time of the ancient Egyptians, through the time of Hippocrates, and right up to the present, poor diet has been described and decried by physicians. Little has changed for the better, and much has changed for the worse. Though nutritionists place a nearly puritanical emphasis on food selection as our vitamin source, everyone else eats because they are hungry, because it makes them feel better, and because it gives pleasure. No one likes the food police. Telling people what they should do is rarely an unqualified success, and with something as intensely personal as food, well, good luck. We could, of course, legislate Good Food Laws and make it against the law to make, sell, or eat junk. That is as likely to work as Prohibition.

Our somewhat less draconian choice of noble experiment has been to educate, to implore, and to exhort the citizenry to be choosy chewers, to eat a balanced diet and to follow the food groups charts. The result? Obesity is more prevalent and cancer is no less prevalent. Cardiovascular disease is still the number-one killer of men and women. Health is the fastest growing failing business in western civilization, writes Emanuel Cheraskin, MD, in Human Health and Homeostasis.⁵ We can say with reasonable certainty that only about 6 percent of the adult population can qualify as ‘clinically’ healthy. We can try to sort out each of the many negative behavior variables (such as smoking), which certainly must be factored in. When we have done so, we are left with the completely unavoidable conclusion that our dinner tables are killing us.

Decide for Yourself

The good diet vs. supplement controversy may be reduced to four logical choices:

1. Shall we eat right and take supplements and be healthy?

2. Or, shall we eat right and take no supplements, be vitamin E and C deficient for our entire life span, and greatly increase our risk of sickness and death at any age?

3. Or, shall we eat wrong and take no supplements, and be even worse off?

4. Or, shall we eat wrong, but take daily vitamin supplements, and be a lot less sickly than if we did not take supplements?

While each of these four options constitutes a popular choice, there is one best health-promoting conclusion:

Supplements make any dietary lifestyle, whether good or bad, significantly better. Media supplement scare-stories notwithstanding, taking supplements is not the problem; it is a solution. Malnutrition is the problem. As it has for thousands of years of human history, so the malnutrition problem remains with us today. The biggest difference is that we are now malnourished even though overeating. Only in the last century have supplements even been available. Their continued use represents a true public health breakthrough on a par with clean drinking water and sanitary sewers, and can be expected to save as many lives.

REFERENCES FOR CAN SUPPLEMENTS TAKE THE PLACE OF A BAD DIET?

1. Wynn V. Vitamins and oral contraceptive use. Lancet 1975 Mar 8;1(7906):561–564.

2. Stephens NG, et al. Randomized controlled trial of vitamin E in patients with coronary artery disease: Cambridge Heart Antioxidant Study (CHAOS). Lancet 1996; 347:781–786.

3. Peters JM, et al. Processed meats and risk of childhood leukemia (California, USA). Cancer Causes Control 1994;5(2):195–202.

4. Sarasua S, Savitz DA: Cured and broiled meat consumption in relation to childhood cancer: Denver, Colorado (United States). Cancer Causes Control 1994;5(2):141–148.

5. Cheraskin E. Human Health and Homeostasis. Birmingham, AL: Natural Reader Press, 1999.

Vitamin Censorship

Withholding information from public search is wrong. Censorship at a public library is very wrong.

—ANDREW W. SAUL, PHD

The Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine (JOM) is still not adequately indexed by Medline, a public, taxpayer-funded online library. PubMed indexes three articles from JOM. Yep, just three. If you would like to circumvent the censorship and read the rest, you can access over 40 years of the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine at a Orthomolecular.org.

ORTHOMOLECULAR IS AN INDIVIDUALIZED APPROACH

Each person must take an individualized program, which they can discover if they are lucky to have a competent orthomolecular doctor. If they do not, they can read the literature and work out for themselves what is best for them. I believe the public is hungry for information. As more and more drugs drop by the wayside, the professions are going to become more and more dependent on safe ways of healing people, and using drugs is not the way to do that. Using nutrients is.

—ABRAM HOFFER, MD

The concept of biochemical individuality is that each of us has unique nutritional needs. We all require water and we all require food. How much we each require at any given time will vary. The same is true with nutrients. This is the rule rather than the exception. Orthomolecular medicine recognizes this, and can be safely tailored to fit the needs of an individual.

Good health is not one-size-fits-all. The flippant punchline of the old patient-doctor joke is: Take two aspirin and call me in the morning. This isn’t really amusing anymore. Until recently, many people were being told, and without jest, to take aspirin for its blood thinning effect. How many of their doctors recommended high-dose vitamin E to prevent clotting and heart attacks?³⁰ Based on the relentless poor press vitamin E gets, probably none of them.

Take this and let me know how it works for you is not a bad concept, but it is a bad idea when you are talking about the administration of drugs that inherently carry serious side effects. (That includes aspirin.) Patients become test subjects, and only they and their loved ones suffer the consequences if things do not go right. To think that a drug in a one-size-fits-all pill somehow addresses the needs of all folks across gender, weight, race, age, and health history is unwise and unsafe. This is no way to operate, especially when there is another way, one that is vastly safer and often more effective.

We all have to take responsibility for our own health. We cannot, and should not, rely on others to do it for us. We can choose to live a lifestyle that supports good health. We have to work at it every single day. We cannot believe, even for a second, that some pill at our doctor’s office has all the answers. It simply isn’t true. We need not and should not rely on our current disease-care system to provide us with the answers for wellness. We must look into nutritional medicine for ourselves. There is a lifestyle change that prevents, arrests, and reverses serious chronic disease, says Dr. Saul. You can be well. Ultimately, it is you, not your doctor, who must do it. Fortunately, vitamins can help.

Vitamin Pill Popper

The easiest way to cure any disease is never to get it.

—ANTON W. OELGOETZ, MD

An orthomolecular lifestyle can appear a bit strange. We take handfuls of vitamin pills every day. We will swallow a dozen or so at restaurants or pop tabs in the car. We take them before family gatherings, stressful events, or long drives. We swallow them down at breakfast, lunch, dinner, bedtime, and in-between. Vitamins are in my purse, our gym duffels, and our cars. We carry vitamins for the kids in the diaper bag. We often have a few in our pockets. They are in our fridge, basement, and bathroom. We have a three-tier kitchen cabinet stock full of vitamin bottles and a larger stash in the cellar. We travel with huge bottles of vitamin C in our suitcases. If we forget to pack any, we will make a special trip to grab what we need when we arrive. We will even ship them in advance to the homes of relatives when we intend to stay for an extended visit. Vitamins are our constant companions.

When you take as many vitamins as we do, good prices are important. We literally buy ten pounds of C powder at a time. My dad will buy twenty. In fact, I just purchased nearly a year’s supply of vitamin C capsules this morning while I was waiting at the doctor’s office. (It was a really good sale.) There I was, waiting in the exam room for my annual gynecological checkup, and I was ordering vitamin C, via a website app on my phone. Saving money on something our family uses all the time just makes sense. I’m the only person I know who took advantage of Black Friday to buy vitamins.

This may seem a bit crazy to some folks—all the pill popping, that is. To me it is crazy not to take vitamins. We like investing in a healthy present and future. And it is working. Every day. We believe in nutritional insurance, a phrase coined by biochemist Roger J. Williams, discoverer of pantothenic acid (B5), and we happily pay for it. Each time my husband fills up his week’s supply of vitamin pill boxes, he says, I like taking vitamins.

I do too.

STEPS TO BETTER HEALTH: ARE YOU SICK OF SICKNESS?

by Helen Saul Case

From the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, October 19, 2013.

Better health? It takes effort. You have got to want it, and then you have got to work for it. There is no one-step solution. We need to eat right and drink plenty of water and take our vitamins and drink fresh, raw, vegetable juice and exercise and reduce stress. All of these things make your immune system stronger and your body inhospitable to sickness. This isn’t easy. But isn’t suffering from illness harder?

Know Your Options

I was raised in a household where instead of drugs we used vitamins. They are far safer and often more effective. When I went off to college, I thought I’d give mainstream medicine a try. Not only did drugs not cure my own feminine ailments, they actually made things worse. I went back to what I knew: vitamins and nutrition work. I’m not a doctor, but I believe you don’t have to be a doctor to help yourself. My father, orthomolecular educator Andrew W. Saul, explained that medical doctors are trained to practice medicine and prescribe medications. Natural, vitamin alternatives just aren’t visible in the medical tool bag. I sought out nutritional cures because I needed to. I go to my doctor, but I don’t always get the drugs she recommends. Using vitamins and nutrition to prevent and cure illness works better for me. Sure, we can always go to our doctors with our health problems. But wouldn’t it be nice to not need to go?

Ditch the Drugs

Adding a chemical to your body doesn’t address the underlying cause of illness. No cell in the human body is made out of a drug. You have a real choice: medication or nutrition. One of these two choices is remarkably safer, cheaper, and, in many cases, more effective than the other. Guess which one that is? People put their faith in pharmaceuticals because they are sick and they want to get well. But when drugs don’t work, which is surprisingly often, we have to make a decision. We can choose to keep returning to the disease-medicate-disease-medicate spin cycle, or we can choose to get onto excellent nutrition and a healthy lifestyle. You may find that your doctor agrees but simply needs some education about the benefits of vitamin supplements.

Take Your Vitamins

I sure do. There is no single magic bullet in the list of essential nutrients. They are all important. The right dose is crucial. High doses help the body get adequate amounts of essential nutrients when it needs them. Many people do know the value of great nutrition, but knowing how to use high doses of vitamins to treat our health issues is another story. Which vitamins should we take? How much? (Really, that much?) Do they work? Yes. Vitamins do work, and you don’t have to take my word for it. Experienced physicians Abram Hoffer, MD, Thomas Levy, MD, Carolyn Dean, MD, Ian Bright-hope, MD, Ralph Campbell, MD, Michael Janson, MD, and many others have shown time and time again the safety and efficacy of nutritional therapy. Clinical evidence is strong. Vitamins and nutrition can prevent and arrest chronic disease.

Know That You Can Do This

Learn about your options, especially those you aren’t likely to hear about in the doctor’s office. Read studies on effective vitamin therapy, and then check the references. If you don’t have time for all of that, orthomolecular books can help. You don’t need to be reliant on a drug-based medical system.

OUR HEALTH, OUR RESPONSIBILITY

Perhaps all this is not for everybody. Taking responsibility for our own health is no easy task. But it is worth it. As you keep reading, you will find out why.

PART ONE REFERENCES

1. Hoffer, A., A. W. Saul. Orthomolecular Medicine for Everyone: Megavitamin Therapeutics for Families and Physicians. Laguna Beach, CA: Basic Health Publications, 2008.

2. Saul, A. W. A Timeline of Vitamin Medicine. Orthomolecular Med News Service (Feb 15, 2014): http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v10n08.shtml (accessed May 2016).

3. Pauling, L. How to Live Longer and Feel Better. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2006.

4. Ibid.

5. Hoffer, A. The True Cost of Cynicism. J Orthomolecular Med 7(4): (1992): http://www.doctoryourself.com/hoffer_shute.html (accessed May 2016). Saul, A. W. Vitamin E: Safe, Effective, and Heart-Healthy. Orthomolecular Med News Service (Mar 23, 2005): http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v01n01.shtml (accessed May 2016). Saul, A. W. Shute Vitamin E Treatment Protocol. http://www.doctoryourself.com/shute_protocol.html (accessed May 2016).

6. Saul, A. W. Hidden in Plain Sight: The Pioneering Work of Frederick Robert Klenner, M.D. J Orthomolecular Med 22(1) (2007): 31–38.

7. Saul, A.W., ed. The Orthomolecular Treatment of Chronic Disease: 65 Experts on Therapeutic and Preventive Nutrition. Laguna Beach, CA: Basic Health Publications, 2014.

8. Ibid.

9. Milton, K. Nutritional Characteristics of Wild Primate Foods: Do the Diets of Our Closest Living Relatives Have Lessons for Us? Nutrition 15(6) (Jun 1999): 488–498. http://www.2ndchance.info/wildprimatediets.pdf (accessed May 2016).

10. Gaby, A.R. ‘Safe Upper Limits’ for Nutritional Supplements: One Giant Step Backward. J Orthomolecular Med 18(3–4) (2003): 126–130.

11. Saul, A.W., J.N. Vaman. No Deaths from Vitamins—None at All in 27 Years. Orthomolecular Medicine News Service (Jun 14, 2011): http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v07n05.shtml (accessed May 2016).

12. Starfield, B. Is US Health Really the Best in the World? JAMA 284(4) (Jul 26, 2000): 483–5.

13. Associated Press. Drug Errors Injure More Than 1.5 Million A Year: Report Calls for All Prescriptions to be Electronic by 2010. (Jul 20, 2006): http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13954142 (accessed May 2016). Saul, A.W. How to Make People Believe Any Anti-Vitamin Scare: It Just Takes Lots of Pharmaceutical Industry Cash. Orthomolecular Med News Service (Oct 20, 2011): http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v07n12.shtml (accessed May 2016).

14. Mayo Clinic News Network. Nearly 7 in 10 Americans Take Prescription Drugs, Mayo Clinic, Olmsted Medical Center Find. (Jun 19, 2013): http://newsnetwork.mayo-clinic.org/discussion/nearly-7-in-10-americans-take-prescription-drugs-mayo-clinic-olmsted-medical-center-find/.

15. Gu, Q., C. F. Dillon, V. L. Burt. Prescription Drug Use Continues to Increase: U.S. Prescription Drug Data for 2007–2008. NCHS Data Brief (42) (Sept 2010):1–8. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db42.htm (accessed May 2016).

16. Saul, A.W., ed. The Orthomolecular Treatment of Chronic Disease: 65 Experts on Therapeutic and Preventive Nutrition. Laguna Beach, CA: Basic Health Publications, 2014.

17. Kantor, E. D., C. D. Rehm, J. S. Haas, et al. Trends in Prescription Drug Use among Adults in the United States from 1999–2012. JAMA 314 (17) (Nov 3, 2015).

18. Saul, A.W., ed. The Orthomolecular Treatment of Chronic Disease: 65 Experts on Therapeutic and Preventive Nutrition. Laguna Beach, CA: Basic Health Publications, 2014.

19. Hoffer, A. Introduction to Placebo Medicine by A. W. Saul. http://www.doctoryourself.com/placebo.html (accessed May 2016).

20. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. FastStats. Last updated April 27, 2016. Therapeutic Drug Use. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/drug-use-therapeutic.htm (accessed Nov 2015). Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. National Center for Health Statistics. National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey: 2010 Summary Tables. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ahcd/namcs_summary/2010_namcs_web_tables.pdf (accessed Nov 2015).

21. Hoffer, A. Introduction to Placebo Medicine by A. W. Saul. http://www.doctoryourself.com/placebo.html (accessed May 2016).

22. Hoffer, A., A. W. Saul. Orthomolecular Medicine for Everyone: Megavitamin Therapeutics for Families and Physicians. Laguna Beach, CA: Basic Health Publications, 2008.

23. Hoffer, A. Side Effects of Over-the-Counter Drugs. J Orthomolecular Med 18(3–4) (2003): 168–172.

24. Saul, A. W. No Deaths from Vitamins. Absolutely None. 31 Years of Supplement Safety Once Again Confirmed by America’s Largest Database. Orthomolecular Med News Service (Jan 14, 2015): http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v11n01.shtml (accessed May 2016).

25. Office of Dietary Supplements. National Institutes of Health. Vitamin C: Fact Sheet for Health Professionals. https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminC-HealthProfessional/ (accessed April 2016).

26. Davis, D.R., M.D. Epp, H.D. Riordan. Changes in USDA Food Composition Data for 43 Garden Crops, 1950 to 1999. J Am Coll Nutr 23(6) (Dec 2004): 669–82.

27. Hoffer, A., A. W. Saul. Orthomolecular Medicine for Everyone: Megavitamin Therapeutics for Families and Physicians. Laguna Beach, CA: Basic Health Publications, 2008.

28. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC Newsroom. Majority of Americans Not Meeting Recommendations for Fruit and Vegetable Consumption. Press Release. (Sept 29, 2009): http://www.cdc.gov/media/pressrel/2009/r090929.htm (accessed May 2016). Casagrande, S. S., Y. Wang, C. Anderson, et al. Have Americans Increased Their Fruit and Vegetable Intake? The Trends between 1988 and 2002. Am J Prev Med 32(4) (Apr 2007): 257–63.

29. O’Brien, K. How McDonald’s Came Back Bigger than Ever. The New York Times Magazine (May 4, 2012): http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/magazine/how-mcdonalds-came-back-bigger-than-ever.html?_r=0 (accessed May 2016).

30. Saul, A.W. Orthomolecular Medicine News Service. Vitamin E: Safe, Effective and Heart-Healthy. (Mar 23, 2005): http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v01n01.shtml (accessed April 2016).

CHAPTER 1

Confessions of an Orthomolecular Lifer

When in doubt, try nutrition first.

—ROGER WILLIAMS, PHD, IN NUTRITION AGAINST DISEASE

I’ve been doing this since I was born. I’ve been doing this since before I was born. Of course, I have my mother and father to thank for that. My father has been teaching others about orthomolecular medicine for over 40 years. My mom practiced orthomolecular principles when she was pregnant with me. I have lived my entire life with access to, and guidance about how to use, a massive amount of information about the power of vitamins to cure and prevent illness. This orthomolecular stuff comes naturally to me, and not because I have an MD after my name, which I most assuredly do not. I was just born lucky.

Being lucky, though, has very little to do with how healthy anyone is. Sure, I had a great start in life. Once I had to take care of my own health, things changed. When I went to college, I thought I knew better. My parents couldn’t be right about everything, I suspected. I lived a college lifestyle that included eating and drinking unhealthy foods and staying up late, and generally ignoring all I had been taught by my parents. I went to the doctor with my health problems and took the medicines they prescribed. When another health problem surfaced, or the same ones returned, back I would go for more. I found, as many people do, that the drugs did not really help me get better. Often one illness would lead to another opportunistic infection, and one drug that did not work would lead to another, often more expensive, often stronger, more dangerous drug that also did not always work. I had to deal with the negative side effects of drug treatment, too. I was not achieving good health by taking pharmaceutical drugs. They provided a bandage only, one that needed to be changed often. And for some reason, the wound underneath just would not heal. This was unacceptable, especially since I suspected that I knew better.

I did not like suffering. I did not like all the things sickness restricted me from doing. For example, I was not going to have a whole lot of sex if I had a yeast infection. I was not going to be able to go hang out with my friends if I was coughing up a lung. And I was not going to be able to do anything at all if I was on my back with a migraine headache for a week or more out of every month. Some folks feel that all the work one has to do to keep healthy is a pain in the rear. I think dealing