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If there were a drug that worked on Ebola you should use it. There isn't. There is only vitamin C. But you must be extremely careful what you believe, because, as it ever was, the Internet is full of dangerous loonies. For almost a decade now, the OMNS has reported on nutritional therapies; we leave the medical politics to one side and work from the facts. Here are the facts about vitamin C and Ebola.
- Taking a gram or so of day of vitamin C won't protect you against anything except acute scurvy; it doesn't matter whether the vitamin is liposomal, nanoparticles, or even gold-plated. Beware of websites, companies, and YouTube clips making wild and unsubstantiated claims about the efficacy of Vitamin C.
- Clinical reports suggest that taking vitamin C almost to bowel tolerance every day (in divided doses) will help to protect you against all viruses. Reports by independent physicians have been consistent for decades. However, the doctors also stipulated most emphatically that the dose and the way you take it must be right - or it will not work. There is no direct placebo controlled "evidence" that massive doses of vitamin C will work on Ebola, and nobody would volunteer to take part in that study. But massive doses are reported to have helped against every virus it has been pitched against. This includes Polio, Dengue and AIDS, and it even makes vaccination work better. In the 1980s when no other treatment was available it was reported that full blown AIDS could be reversed and the patient brought back to reasonable health.[i,ii]
At risk or worried about Ebola? This is what you should do.
Vitamin C is the primary antioxidant in the diet. Most people do not take enough to be healthy. While this is true of many nutrients, vitamin C is a special case. Ignore governments telling you that you only need about 100 mg a day and can get this amount from food. The required amount of vitamin C varies your state of health. A normal adult in perfect health may need only a small intake, say 500 mg per day, but more is needed when someone is even slightly under the weather. Similarly, to prevent illness, the intake needs to be increased.
The intake for an otherwise healthy person to have a reasonable chance of avoiding a common cold is in the region of 8-10 grams (8,000-10,000 mg) a day. This is about ten times what corporate medicine has tested in their trials on vitamin C and the common cold. Ten grams (10,000 mg) is the minimum pharmacological intake; it may help if you have a slight sore throat but more (much more) may be needed. To get rid of a common cold, you may need anything from 20 to 60 grams (60,000 mg) a day. With influenza the need might be for 100 grams (100,000 mg) a day. Since it varies from person to person, and from illness to illness, the only way to find out is to experiment for yourself.
The problem with oral intakes is that healthy people do not absorb vitamin C well due to something Dr Robert Cathcart called bowel tolerance. [iii] Take too much of the vitamin in a single dose and it will cause loose stools. In good health, a person might be able to take a couple of grams at a time without this problem. Strangely, when a person becomes sick they can take far more without this side effect: as much as 20-100+ grams a day, in divided doses.[iv]
High dose vitamin C has a short half-life in the body. The half-life is the time for the level in the blood plasma to fall back to half its concentration. Until recently, some people claimed that the half-life of vitamin C was several weeks. We have shown that this long half-life applies only to very low doses.[v] By contrast, the half-life for high blood levels is only half an hour. This short half-life means that for high dose vitamin C the period between doses needs to be short - a few hours at most.
The aim is to achieve dynamic flow, to get vitamin C flowing continuously through the body. Dynamic flow requires multiple high doses taken throughout the day. When separated in time, each dose is absorbed independe