The Vitamin C Complex
The following is a transcription of the August 1957 issue of Dr. Royal Lee’s Applied Trophology newsletter, originally published by Standard Process Laboratories.
Also in this issue:
- Sugar, Sugar Everywhere
- Balanced Diet Necessary
- Vitamin C in Heart Failure by William G. DeLamater
- Tip of the Month (Asiatic Influenza)
- Americans: “Best Fed” but “Poorly Nourished”
- High Points of Catalyn
The Vitamin C Complex
“Unfortunately, so many people are now pursuing preconceived hypotheses that sometimes nothing but confusion remains.”1 This remark was made by a reviewer of the present status of ascorbic acid information.
The preconceived idea that a vitamin can be a single substance is at the root of the confusion with respect to this remark. It is only the promoters of synthetic substitutes that must insist on this misconception. Natural food factors are groups of cooperating and related constituents. When the actual chemical reactions of normal metabolism are observed, a synthetic vitamin is found wanting; it fails to perform the function of the natural, as Williams and Spies report in their book Vitamin B1, page 348 (MacMillan, 1938). Synthetic thiamine failed to detoxify pyruvic acid, the fatigue poison, and failed to promote oxygen assimilation by tissue, while the natural B1 did.
The authors point out the difference between the vitamins: the natural vitamin is in combined forms as enzymes—an enzyme being a mechanism of the cell, not a chemical, like the synthetic B1, just as a watch is brass but organized (organic brass) to keep time.
Chemists cannot make watches, nor can they imitate plant cells and make vitamins (other than counterfeit imitations, at least). We define a watch by function; it is not a watch unless it keeps time. Vitamins are also defined by function—they are, as Williams and Spies say, “organic substances essential to animal life.” (We are in that general class, animals, as distinguished from plants.) All animal life is dependent on plant production of organic foodstuffs. Our body cannot take CO2 from the air and make sugar from it by combining it with sun-energy and water—only a plant can do that.
We break up sugar into heat to keep warm and release the water and carbon dioxide. Without the natural vitamin, Williams and Spies tell us, this cannot occur. The synthetic imitation will not serve the purpose. It may be a useful drug for the pharmacologist, but it has no place in nutritional science. The drugless physician and nutritionist have no interest in the synthetic, non-nutritional drug imitation. The confusion we quoted above is evident. It requires careful unraveling.
These authors also quote Martin (p. 328), who found that to keep depancreatized dogs alive, not only was insulin necessary, but both vitamins B1 and B2 were essential as well.
We have a similar situation in the case of the vitamin C complex.
Dr. Meiklejohn1 tells us that the first biochemical evidence of altered metabolism in scurvy was the finding in 1940 that there was an interference with normal tyrosine assimilation. In Vitamin News, March 1934, we reported the value of natural vitamin C in treating anemia.
Dr. Meiklejohn tells of anemia occurring as a part of the scurvy syndrome but is unable to find any evidence that ascorbic acid has ever been of value in correcting it.
He did not know that Dr. C. de M. Sajous, the celebrated endocrinologist, reported in 1933 in Dental Cosmos his finding that vitamin C is tyrosinase, found in all-natural sources of vitamin C as well as in the adrenal glands. Later, Sajous’s report ignored, ascorbic acid was also found in the same sources, and it was falsely set up as “vitamin C.”
Tyrosinase is organic copper and as such is the missing link between copper and anemia. It is also the missing link between ascorbic acid and the adrenal hormones. It is a partner to the B12 complex, i.e., organic cobalt, outstanding examples of how mineral elements must be processed, organized into living mechanisms for our food by plant life as parts of enzyme systems.
Copper has long been known as a preventive and remedy for anemia, but heretofore the nature of the copper compound entering into the nutritional pattern has not been identified.
The celebrated Dr. Jarvis of Vermont reported some years ago that the copper content of milk parallel the ascorbic acid content, higher in summer. Here is the physiological vitamin C complex. It no doubt includes, as reported in Vitamin News of April 1941, the vitamin P group and vitamin K group. (Dr. Doles’s finding that a deficiency of natural vitamin K from fresh vegetables and fruits—the vitamin lost in oxidized, frozen foods—has caused a 4500 percent increase in coronary disease in Virginia since the introduction of deep-freeze products was discussed in the last issue of Vitamin News.)
These vitamins are all of the green leaf category. (The Eskimo, without access to green plant foods, must get his vitamin K from decayed fish. He knows this and eats a regular allotment of what we would call spoiled fish. Steffansson tells how they catch fish in summer and bury them for consumption in winter.)
Another of the green leaf group is the Wulzen factor. It is a much maligned vitamin. Drs. Bicknell and Prescott in their book The Vitamins in Medicine even try to tell us that it is a phantom—nonexistent outside the imaginative minds of its promoters. But the report in Vitamins and Hormones, Vol. 8, showing that guinea pigs fed pasteurized milk for some weeks become finally stiffened up—so that they have to be hand fed with a medicine dropper—proves the true story, regardless of the frantic efforts of pasteurized milk interests to hide the truth.
These guinea pigs are the counterpart of numerous human victims we have encountered over the years, who were frozen up by the same identical process until they were so immobilized that they could only wiggle their wrists. One wheelchair victim decided to try raw milk, was completely cured in a few months, and appeared personally at a legislative committee to protest a new law requiring all milk to be pasteurized in the state of Michigan a few years ago. But it was in vain. The legislators, as usual, favored the milk monopoly, who need the law to be able to peddle dirty milk and maintain fixed prices.
The best available source of this Wulzen factor is blackstrap molasses, a food most viciously attacked, again, by the crooked pseudoscientific fronters for food monopolists. It was found ten times as active as raw cream. Raw cane juice was about a thousand times as potent as raw cream. Sugarcane juice has always been known to cure arthritis among the Negro workers in the cane fields. In Cuba it is as widely sold as soft drinks are here.
According to this report in Vitamins and Hormones, the collateral disease syndromes attending Wulzen factor deficiency are:
- Tissue edema
- Decreased oxygen uptake by kidney
- Kidney enlargement
- Anaerobic glycolysis decreased (liver)
- Respiratory rate of muscle decreased
- Excessive thirst
- Diarrhea
- Loss and roughness of hair
- Increase in blood pressure (consistent)
- Hypocythemic, macrocytic anemia
- High sedimentation rate
- Progressive trend to deafness
- Calcification of blood vessels, muscle fibers in general, stomach wall, and colon (calcium phosphate)
- Leukocytosis
- Persistent eosinophilia
- Abscesses in muscle, followed by necrosis; abscesses in cardiovascular system, gastrointestinal tract, liver, kidneys, and periarticular tissues
Here is a 54-page review of the devastating effects of milk pasteurization. It is an appropriate companion for the report by Dr. Francis M. Pottenger Jr. on his cat experiments, wherein, by feeding the animals pasteurized milk, he caused them to develop almost every disease known to chronically attack the human species, arthritis and loss of teeth in particular. (See enclosed lecture on this: “A Practical Way to Avoid Malnutrition.”) Remember Dr. Beard’s advice in our last issue of Vitamin News: “When we choose our food, we are choosing our future health or sickness.”
Reference
- Meiklejohn, A.P. “The Physiology and Biochemistry of Ascorbic Acid.” Vitamins & Hormones, Vol. XI. Academic Press, 1953.
Sugar, Sugar Everywhere
In one week, a typical urban family in the United States uses 2.75 pounds of sugar, syrups, molasses, and honey! Of this amount the consumption of white sugar is 2.66 pounds. Additional sweets are supplied by 0.59 pound of jellies, preserves, and jams. Candy amounts to 0.37 pound.
The consumption of sweets among rural families is even larger: sugar, syrups, molasses, and honey, 4.97 pounds per week for each family (4.78 pounds white sugar); 0.93 pound of jellies, jams, and preserves; 0.39 pound of candy.
—U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Household Food Consumption Survey, 1955.
Balanced Diet Necessary
Scientists estimate that we Americans eat ten times as much sugar as our great grandfathers did. They also note that dental conditions have become worse as civilization has developed, and the sweet, sticky foods of today are singled out as the number one enemies of dental health.
—Monthly Bulletin, Indiana State Board of Health, February 1957.
Vitamin C in Heart Failure
By William G. DeLamater, PhG, DO
Up to the present time, not enough emphasis has been placed on the part vitamin C plays in aiding the heart to function properly. A recent news release makes it imperative that we give the matter consideration.
A California Public Health Department research team has just recently announced the findings of a seven-year study of the eating habits and health of 577 people, all of whom were 50 years of age or older.
To Live Longer
One of the essential points brought out by the study was that if the middle-aged or elderly person wants to live longer, he must keep his blood pressure and blood sugar level low and his intake of vitamin C high.
Persons participating in the California Public Health Department’s project were all from the city of San Mateo (near San Francisco). The group included 280 men and 297 women. They were given physical examinations at the beginning of the survey, and regular checkups were made during the period from 1948 through 1955. Also, records were kept of the foods they ate.
Findings of Survey
Dr. Lester Brestlow, member of the research team, said that after seven years, 68 of the men and 32 of the women had died—more of them with elevated blood pressure and blood sugar level than was expected. And, significantly, more subjects with low vitamin C intake died than was expected, Dr. Brestlow pointed out. He considered it worthy of note that overweight and high cholesterol content of the blood did not appear to be important factors in the death rate of this group.
It was reported that heart and blood vessel diseases accounted for 69 of the 100 deaths. Three and a half times more men died from disease of the heart arteries than women.
The four members of the research team emphasized that the study was to learn what the participants ate and not to educate their eating habits. However, chief dietary deficiencies were found to be lack of milk and green and yellow vegetables and less consumption of cereals than recommended.
The study merely confirms what leading nutritionists have stressed for some time: In vitamin C deficiency, the utilization of oxygen is greatly impaired, and the capacity of the blood to carry oxygen is lowered. This vitally affects the heart as well as other organs of the body.
—Reprinted in part from Let’s Live magazine, August 1957.
Tip of the Month (Asiatic Influenza)
As a preventative and to counteract the expected invasion of the Asiatic influenza virus, we suggest A-C-P Complex [Cataplex A-C-P], Calcium Lactate, and Carbamide [A-C Carbamide]. Many cold and virus remedies fail because of lack of carbamide, a deficiency that stems from low-protein diets.
Americans: “Best Fed” but “Poorly Nourished”
New York – Americans are the best-fed people in the world but the most poorly nourished, Dr. William Coda Martin of this city told the American Academy of Nutrition in a recent convention. The reasons he gave for this condition were as follows: 1) Two-thirds of the crop soil of the country are deficient in minerals and organic matter and not fertile. 2) The low quality of food this soil produces is depleted further by the processing of the food, which removes much of the essential vitamins and minerals. 3) There is a residue of toxic chemical insecticides in all vegetables not organically grown. 4) Dyes, which Dr. Martin said may be cancer causing, are in continuous, extensive use. The feeding of antibiotics and other chemicals to food animals, he said, “has not had sufficient long-range nutritional studies to determine the harm, if any.”
High Points of Standard Process Nutritional Adjuncts
Catalyn: A supplementary food concentrate in tablet form. The commonest symptom of deficiency in people requiring this product is fatigue. Why? Because they are lacking a variety of scarce nutrients, which Catalyn supplies. For instance, it contains practically every trace mineral needed in nutrition, according to spectrographic tests. These minerals are not added by us—they are present normally, as an integral part of the food concentrates, in organic combination, inseparable from the vitamins and enzyme factors of which they are activators.
Catalyn was engineered to produce results, not to exhibit a “high potency” label. We believe that, in terms of clinically demonstrable potency, it is the lowest cost nutritional supplement on the market.
