Hi pgm,

I totally agree with what you say about synthetic vitamin E. It is the wrong chirality and the successful studies that have been done with it, particularly by the Shute brothers, always used the natural form. Sometimes if people are setting out to do a vitamin E study with the intention of it failing, they will use the synthetic form. Of course, all that gets reported in the media is that vitamin E is useless in orthomolecular doses.

I used to have the opinion, too, that megadosing anything can be dangerous. Once I started educating myself about vitamins, though, I found that most of them are quite safe to take in large doses, and many don't even have an established upper limit. You might be interested in having a browse of Orthomolecular.org, and a site called Doctor Yourself, run by the assistant editor of the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine.

Plant-derived vitamin C is nice, but expensive as you say, and you don't tend to get as much as one gram of ascorbic acid in a tablet; the ones I've looked at only have 250mg. The data I'm aware of shows that large doses of ascorbic acid can be beneficial for human health and healing, especially when given intravenously. Stories about it having side effects, or being dangerous in large doses, being hard on the kidneys and causing kidney stones, tend to be based on flawed data and unverified assumptions. Pauling talks in the book I mentioned about claims of ascorbic acid causing kidney stones and firmly refutes them; again, there's no data supporting the claims. Ascorbic acid, even in large doses, appears to be quite natural for the system and those who seek to claim otherwise tend to be members of the Barrett crowd who favour "safe and tested" pharmaceuticals over a diet and supplement approach to health.

I take 9g a day and my 5-year-old has 3g a day. We both have been very healthy; the last head cold she started to come down with disappeared in about 2 days. I would never be without it in the house <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />