Hi Sunflower,

No I didn't know Patrick Holford had been a student of Linus Pauling's. I hope things worked out better for him than with some others. Arthur Robinson was one; after he'd done some experiments on lab rats with vitamin C and claimed that they showed Pauling's ideas to be false, there was a major scrap and Pauling more or less threw Robinson out of the institute. Probably no one will ever know for sure the exact details of what happened. It was more ammo for the pathological skeptics to throw at me when I was debating with them, but I don't think one series of tests done on lab rats by one scientist in regards to vitamin C is going to stand on its own to overthrow all the other positive studies done on humans, past and present; nor do I think Pauling was a saint who was immune to frustration and fits of temper. It looks to me like Holford has remained rather more true to the spirit of holistic and orthomolecular medicine than Robinson, who is a pretty obscure figure now.

I also noticed that Stephen Barrett (our old friend) has devoted an entire website to "debunking" Holford. It's a puerile piece of rubbish, typical of the mentality of him and his followers. If the Quackwatch team have blacklisted them, you know they're probably good people who are worth looking into <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

I got my Linus Pauling book from Amazon.com by the way. It's a little scientific in places, the chemistry is rather beyond me, but overall it's very readable. It's probably still my favourite health book. Pauling wasn't so aware of dietary factors in health -- if he had been, he might have lived to be even older than 94 and might have died of something other than cancer, who knows.

So what's Holford's angle on things? I've had another look at his website. I was expecting to see more there; would it be useful to join up for a free newsletter, do you think?