Vitamin Supplements

Vitamin C and Viral Diseases

Vitamin C has been proposed an antiviral agent for several diseases, beginning with a report from 1935 on the nutrient's ability to inactivate polio virus in vitro. Vitamin C was also able to inactivate other viruses in vitro, including herpes simplex, rabies, and tobacco mosaic virus. Not surprisingly, massive doses of Vitamin C were used as a polio treatment, although they were ineffective. Vitamin C was also proposed as a treatment for the common cold. One investigator claimed that regular doses of Vitamin C would reduce the incidence of the common cold. This claim was later disproved. Vitamin C was also proposed as a cancer treatment, by the same investigator who suggested it could prevent colds. These results remain controversial, although studies which claim a beneficial effect suffer from serious methodological flaws. A study conducted by the Mayo Clinic found that Vitamin C was not beneficial as a cancer treatment. In fact, those who received Vitamin C had shorter survival, but not to a statistically significant level.

Vitamin C and AIDS

It should come as no surprise, perhaps, that massive doses of Vitamin C are now proposed as an AIDS treatment. There have been no clinical studies designed to address this question. Claims for the efficacy of Vitamin C in AIDS are based entirely on reports of the nutrient's ability to inactivate HIV in vitro.^[37-62]

Vitamin Discovery

Christian Eijkman, a Dutch physician, was the first to isolate a vitamin, although initially he did not understand his discovery. An advocate of the recently proposed germ theory of disease and a student of Robert Koch, the great German bacteriologist, Eijkman first believed that he had found an "antidote" to the "microbe" that causes beri-beri disease. Eijkman later realized that he had, in fact, discovered what would be known as thiamin (Vitamin B-1), the deficiency of which causes beri-beri. In 1929 Eijkman received the Nobel Prize for his discovery.

The discovery of thiamin sparked a world-wide effort that lead to further discovery of other vitamins. Casimir Funk, a Polish biochemist, is credited as the first to coin the term vitamin after he discovered that thiamin's chemical structure contains an ammonia molecule. He merged two words -- "vital" and "amine" (the chemical suffix for ammonia) -- to create the term vitamin. By 1948, all thirteen presently-recognized vitamins had been discovered.