Andrew Saul PhD – Can You Boost Your Immune System Against Coronavirus (COVID19)? (Part 2) Introduction

Now we’re still visiting the pandemic, the current pandemic. And in these episodes, what I’ve tried to do is focus on solutions. And today is very much about that. My guest today is Dr Andrew Saul. Andrew is an educator and nutritionist and an educator, and he also has a website called the Orthomolecular News Service, where he has collated research.

Now I’m sharing with you the website from the Government and where they ask the question, can you boost the immune system? I’ve shared this website with you before.

If you feel I’m a little bit preoccupied with this, you’d be right, because I am and I make no apology for it, because irrespective of what I know about nutrition and health as a citizen, I expect more from my Government and so when I see this kind of advice upon a public health website and where it is said that it’s free health advice that you can trust and it’s supported by every state and federal government.

I am concerned, as I believe you should be, too. But more importantly, there are solutions, and that is what today’s about. So I hope you enjoyed this conversation I had with Andrew Saul.

Podcast Transcript

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:00:07] Hello and welcome to Unstress. My name is Dr Ron Ehrlich. Now we’re still visiting the pandemic, the current pandemic. And in these episodes, what I’ve tried to do is focus on solutions. And today is very much about that. My guest today is Dr Andrew Saul. Andrew is an educator and nutritionist and an educator, and he also has a website called the Orthomolecular News Service, where he has collated research.

Now I’m sharing with you the website from the Government and where they ask the question, can you boost the immune system? I’ve shared this website with you before.

If you feel I’m a little bit preoccupied with this, you’d be right, because I am and I make no apology for it, because irrespective of what I know about nutrition and health as a citizen, I expect more from my Government. And so when I see this kind of advice upon a public health website and where it is said that it’s free health advice that you can trust and it’s supported by every state and federal government.

I am concerned, as I believe you should be, too. But more importantly, there are solutions, and that is what today’s about. So I hope you enjoyed this conversation I had with Andrew Saul.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:01:31] I wanted to share with you this website firstly, which was well, let me share it with you. Here is the website. It’s we are a government-funded service providing quality approved health information and advice. And it’s federal government and state. There’s the ACT and every other state except, ironically, Victoria. And it’s got advice, you know, which draw on skills you already have. Limit your worry. Get the facts. Don’t smoke. If you have to stay at home, maintain a healthy lifestyle.

It’s normal to feel sad and stressed. And then it tells us about, you know. It gives links which I think are appropriate to mental health. To helplines because this is a serious issue. Washing your hands, of course, we know that’s important and actually cleaning your phone, wow. And then the whole importance of sleep, which we cover in this podcast many times. But it’s this aspect that I wanted to deal with.

Have a look at this. Do vitamin pills protect you from the Coronavirus? No. It’s much better to get your nutrients for a strong immune system from a balanced diet, which I think is a challenge there in itself. And with a couple of exceptions, folic acid for pregnant women, for example, most healthy people do not need expensive supplements.

Now, I think the focus here, if I’m not mistaken, is not on healthy people, but on unhealthy people or comorbidities or chronic disease. But anyway, it’s this next part, because I want to talk to you about orthomolecular medicine and “Orthomolecular News Service”. “Social media has been infiltrated by claims that megadoses of vitamin supplements such as intravenous vitamin C can treat flu-like symptoms. But there is no evidence to back this up.

Consuming high doses of certain supplements such as A&D can be toxic and vitamin C is water-soluble, which means it’s not lethal. But if you consume more than your body can store it simply removed via urine”. So excess literally goes (vitamin C) literally goes down the toilet. And that’s to answer the question, can you boost. Which I think is a pretty important question. Can you boost your immune system against the Coronavirus? This is free Australian health advice. You can trust. Now, let me stop sharing the screen. So, Andrew, welcome to the show. What’s your what do you think of that?

Andrew Saul [00:04:08] Well, we’ll note, first of all, that it’s free health advice and it’s been sat in for a long time, that free advice is worth the price. I think we should go to doctors that actually cure patients with COVID and see what they’re doing. And when we do, we find out that the Australian Government is wrong because the Australian government is scratching their heads.

They don’t know what to do. And there are medical doctors that are using high doses of vitamin C, very high doses of vitamin C, intravenous vitamin C, and they are curing COVID. Now, when I say that I’m well aware of just what a ripple that can cause and the website that you mentioned earlier said that social media has been infiltrated with claims about vitamin C, I.V., vitamin C, and I am the key infiltrator at this point. It started way back in February when it occurred to me, as it’s occurred to a lot of people that have been involved in orthomolecular medicine for a long time, that vitamin C boosts the immune system.

Vitamin C boosts the immune system

Andrew Saul [00:05:14] Now, we know that’s true because it’s in every nutrition textbook ever written. I’ve taught clinical nutrition, undergraduate and doctoral level, and I’m in a position to tell you that there isn’t a nutrition textbook out there that will not tell you that vitamin C is essential for the immune system and that after stress, such as surgery or disease, you need more of it.

This is just well known now that the arguments over the amount. And it’s been said that if you take excess vitamin C, you will lose your urine, which is technically true in the same way that when you take an antibiotic, you will lose a great deal of that in your urine.

In fact, there are many drugs that give you extremely expensive urine. Vitamin C gives you cheap urine by comparison. But the key is why are you excreting it? You’re excreting it because you don’t need it. Well, that’s good. So the trick is to take enough C to be symptom free. When you’re well, you don’t need very much. But when you’re sick, it’s a whole different ballgame. And any study or any research or any medical paper that says, well, you can only absorb a couple of hundred milligrams of vitamin C or perhaps 500 milligrams a day. And these papers are out there.

They are looking at healthy people. They are looking at vitamin C, given usually in just one or two doses. And they are not taking into account the biochemical individuality that Dr Roger J Williams talked to us about half a century ago. Williams, full professor of chemistry, president of the American Chemical Society and discoverer of one of the B vitamins, was a vitamin expert like none other. And Williams pointed out that it’s just different. Everybody is different.

In fact, you’re different on different days. So when somebody is sick, their capacity to hold vitamin C is huge. We can thank Dr Robert Fulton Cathcart, a physician in California, USA, for really taking this and running with it, starting back at the very end of the 1960s. He caught Linus Pauling attention, and Pauling praised him every chance he got because Cathcart was curing people with up to two hundred thousand milligrams of vitamin C a day intravenously or orally or a combination.

Andrew Saul [00:07:34] Now, why would he do that? Why would Dr. Cathcart risk the criticism that inevitably follows you when you use nutrition to cure disease? Why would he go through that? And the answer is very simple because he found that it worked. Dr Cathcart is following in the footsteps of Frederick Rappard Kleiner, an American physician from the 1940s, 50s and 60s, who was probably the first really high dose vitamin C pioneer. Before him. Dr William J. McCormick of Toronto, Canada, who started using gram sized doses of vitamin C back in the 1940s. And we can go back even further. Remarkably to vitamin C, first shown to be an antiviral, by Claus Washington Jungeblut.

Now Jungeblut was a full professor at Columbia University. And at the medical school, and he was a medical doctor and he used vitamin C and he used it as an antiviral. And he published in 1935. And then a series of four more papers in the next two years. What was the virus that he found vitamin C protect? It wasn’t the common cold. It wasn’t even influenza. And remember, influenza is a very serious disease. And make no mistake about it. But the virus that Jungeblut found vitamin C was effective against was polio.

Now, in the mid 19th there it is, the late 1930s and into the 1940s, the president of the United States was a man who is partially paralysed by polio. So we have here an irony that is not just now in 2020 with all this COVID stuff going on, but it started some eighty-five years ago because there’s a disconnect. And the disconnect is that somehow doctor on curing patients is considered to be poor evidence, not for the point of view, the patient.

I don’t know about you, but I’m interested in helping people get better. And I have people who will argue with me and they’ll try to argue about vitamins as therapy. And my response to them is what part of curing patients with nutrition makes you so angry? And it’s very hard to understand this, but there is a belief system in place. There’s a belief system that vitamins are simply nutrients and you need them in small amounts.

My mentor, Dr Abram Hoffer, said this is the vitamins as a prevention paradigm. But there is also the vitamins as cure paradigm. And that C word. C is for COVID, C is for cure. And if you try to say that you’re going to get into trouble, this particular video we’re making now. If it’s shared on Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, there’s a really good chance it’s going to be blocked.

I’ve been blocked from posting on Facebook entirely for a month because I simply pointed out that there is a medical doctor, Homer LeMans, his name in front of things, and he has had very good success using vitamin C and other nutrients to cure COVID. And he said mostly mild cases, but a few serious ones. He reported on that. And I reported what he said to me on Facebook. Wham! Thirty days and Facebook, Joe.

When my wife shared a post about vitamin C being useful to reduce side effects of vaccination wham 30 days and Facebook shout from my wife and all she did was share a post that somebody else had made and that somebody else was me. But still, this is how far they’re going. When Dr Richard Chang, a Chinese American currently in Shanghai, China, he’s been there for months. Richard went over there in December, I guess, or early January for Chinese New Year and moved with his family, which, of course, is a blessing. And he made very good use of his time by actively working with physicians, politicians and hospitals to encourage the Chinese to use high dose intravenous vitamin C and use very successful.

So we have Dr Lim in the Philippines using vitamin C and it’s working against COVID. And now we have Dr chang, who reported to me that Dr Enqiang Mao, now chief of critical care medicine in a large hospital in Shanghai, was using high doses of vitamin C, and he cured 50 out of 50 patients. No fatalities. And he used about 24000 milligrams of vitamin C a day intravenously. That’s actually not a lot for Dr. Cathcart, who would have used possibly five or 10 times that. But nevertheless, because it’s intravenous, the absorption is absolute.

Then we have Dr Peng in Wuhan at the actual epicentre of the COVID outbreak. And Peng, also chief of crisis care medicine, also at a very large hospital, reported that he was finding that vitamin C greatly reduced the severity and the fatality of COVID. And on top of that, we’ve had some other reports from China, we have posted this on Facebook and YouTube, and they have been taken down because they violate the policies and the community standards of Facebook and Google. And people are being told that these posts are not making these words up “cause physical harm because they are false and they are untrue”. Facebook and Google have never once checked with Dr. Chang, never once checked with Enqiang Mao, never once checked with Dr. Peng. And the other thing they said was there’s no acceptance of this in China.

We publicise that the government of Shanghai has endorsed the use of high dose vitamin C for COVID. And the so-called fact-checkers have said, “no, no, no, that’s not true”. Yes, it is. It was published in the Chinese Journal of Infectious Diseases. This is an official publication of the CMA, the Chinese Medical Association. So it’s like JMA in China. We have all of this going on and it’s never been on the news in the United States and I doubt if it’s been on the news in Australia or most other countries.

So doctors are already curing COVID using high dose vitamin C and other nutrients. In fact, the “Orthomolecular medicine news service”, of which I’m Editor, has just put out an article literally yesterday where we have 22 case histories from an American physician who is a specialist in internal medicine. And we did not use the doctor’s name because we don’t want them to be under attack and have them lose their medical licence.

And yes, it’s that bad. Doctors that are speaking out about using high dose vitamin C for COVID are being threatened with the loss of their livelihood. They’re not just being locked down for a few months. They’re taking 16 years of education away from them and all that investment and all of that scale and all that dedication and that’s being taken away. So doctors are not only getting success with vitamin C.

Not only are they not being allowed to talk about that, but if they do, they actually can be punished. And there are doctors that are actually facing criminal charges for helping patients using a vitamin. Now, this is gone way, way, way too far. We are totally and utterly through the rabbit hole at this point. And we have to come back and make it simple because people are scared. People are worried. And, of course, you’re scared. And of course, you’re worried. I’m not. And the reason I’m not is because I have a certain modicum of knowledge that I have seen in my life over the last forty-five years that I’ve been involved in natural healing. Yes. The guys that old.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:15:47] That’s ok your in good company.

Andrew Saul [00:15:51] And I have seen this work. I’ve learned from Dr. Cathcart. I’ve learned from Dr. Hoffer. I’ve learned from these physicians. I’m not a physician. My background is education, not medication. But I have learnt from physicians how it’s done by looking at what they do. And when doctors report their curing COVID patients with high dose vitamin C, the world can breathe a sigh of relief. And now we can get on and do it. We can save lives.

We can save suffering. And incidentally, we can save the economy. This information is being kept out that commercial mass media will not publish on this with only the rarest of exceptions. It has popped up here and there. The British press has actually done a fairly good job.

Generally, it’s a tabloid newspaper that will publish this. And then everybody says, well, it’s invalid, really? Is it invalid if you’re reporting good news, even in a crummy newspaper? Isn’t it the news rather than the newspaper we should be looking at? People are not getting this news.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:17:00] The other one in that in this page that I shared with you was vitamin D and the fact that it focussed on vitamin D toxicity, whereas we know in the literature shows that it’s let its deficiencies much greater problem. You want to talk to that have bit.

Vitamin D and its toxicity

Andrew Saul [00:17:18] Yes. Dr Hoffer asked me to write a paper on vitamin D. For The Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine nearly 20 years ago. And at that time, vitamin D was widely appreciated for its role in preventing rickets. Of course, when I taught clinical nutrition, and that was one of the first things we talked about. But as you look at it, vitamin D is also important for preventing osteoporosis reversing it. And vitamin D seemed to start to be showing up as having other value as well.

Well, I looked into it pretty carefully. And again, this is nearly 20 years ago before it became really, really popular vitamin, which fortunately it is now. And I found that the vitamin D was good for all sorts of things. And I looked into toxicity in particular because vitamin D had a reputation of being toxic into a large amount, which is technically true.

Water is toxic in too large an amount is Dr. Hoffer used to point out. So what I found was that all of the accusations of vitamin D toxicity, normally what you hear is death. When you hear toxicity, you translate it in your head into deadly toxicity. Fatality. So we’ll put that one to rest first. I looked and looked and looked for somebody, somewhere that had died from vitamin D. And I couldn’t find anything.

Until finally, there was a woman in the Boston area who had been reported to have died from too much vitamin D. That’s because way back when there was a dairy, a large dairy that made a mistake and put eight hundred times too much vitamin D in the milk. And this had gone on for over a year.

There were about 17 hospitalizations due to vitamin D. Overdose. And this one reported death. And when I looked into it, I found out that the woman that died from the so-called vitamin D overdose had actually died from a side effect of the medication she was given to treat it. So she died from a drug side effect, not vitamin D. Then later I conferred and interview Dr. Michael Holick, who is one of the great vitamin D experts on Earth. He’s probably in the top five. And Dr. Holick explained to me that he had been personally involved in this. So he had firsthand bedside experience. And he said the treatment for vitamin D overdose is to simply don’t give him any vitamin D for a while.

There’s no other treatment necessary. So, as Abraham Hoffer said, nobody dies from vitamins. And the phrase that I’ve been using with the social media and my students is, where are the bodies? Show me the bodies of these people that have had died because of vitamin D. show me a vitamin C cause kidney stone. Come on, make my day.

Andrew Saul [00:20:24] You can show me papers that say that oxalate production goes up and people that take a lot of C. Well, that’s true. Or you can eat a lot of foods. You can eat foods that contain oxalate. Is anyone banning chocolate? I don’t think so. I hope not for everyone’s sake. And we worry about things for which there’s no grounds to worry.

Vitamin C increases oxalate production, but it stays within the normal range. It’s just high normal. And here’s the kicker, Dr Emanuel Cheraskin of the University of Alabama Medical School at Birmingham some years ago. Cherry was a friend of mine and we corresponded. Dr Cheraskin said that the fact is vitamin C actually blocks the formation of an oxalate stone. Vitamin C interferes with a calcium oxalate bond. Another thing that does vitamin B6 and other thing is magnesium. Another is plenty of water. But you find that you can have a lot more vitamin C and you will not get oxalate stones because vitamin C actually prevents them. And if you’re worried about phosphate stones, you don’t to worry about those either, because vitamin C slightly acidifies the urine, which dissolves the phosphates stone. And it also dissolves the stone, a relatively rare stone that can happen after surgery.

Even better than that is a wonderful quote I got from Dr. Cathcart. Remember him? Two hundred thousand milligrams of C day. Bob Cathcart said that by the time he had heard that vitamin C could cause the kidney stone, he had amassed clinical evidence that it did not.

So Cathcart was giving huge amounts of vitamin C to over 20000 patients in his professional career. And he had two or three patients that had kidney stones. And what happened was that it’s become as they had reduced their vitamin C intake, which I thought was absolutely charming, and so he was a person who can tell us with confidence that it’s a non-issue.

We are not getting the word out to the public, partly because we can’t. But your podcast is perfect because this is one more way that we can infiltrate to use the Australian government’s delightful term. We can infiltrate the system by simply telling the truth. And I smile a lot because I’m happy to be able to share this information. I’ve learned this from doctors who heal patients. And there in China, we have another doctor reporting in from Korea.

Korea had a terrible outbreak and the doctor reported then that he gave all of his patients and all of his staff vitamin C and vitamin D and quite a lot. And he simply had no cases, nothing got beyond fever or trouble with symptoms for a day or two. And this is what they’re all saying. We have physicians who are saying that if you give somewhere in the neighborhood of 25000 milligrams a day, maybe less, maybe more intravenously in three days, COVID resolves. Now, for those who are wincing at this, 25,000 or even the I.V. I.D.. I want to point out that studies have been done over the last 20 or 30 years that have shown that even small amounts of vitamin C will save lives.

Andrew Saul [00:23:57] When people get COVID, they don’t automatically turn over and die. A whole lot of people been exposed to COVID and have no symptoms at all. Quite a few people will have a light case of comfort. And a good number will have a really stinking, rotten flu. And we’ve all had the flu and it’s a miserable week, maybe two weeks, but most people will recover even from a miserable flu. The people we’re worried about with COVID are the elderly. People that are overweight, people that have pre-existing health conditions, and people that have compromised immune systems.

Of course, we’re worried about everyone. But these are the ones that are the highest risk. What we find is that high doses of vitamin C are particularly valuable to reduce trouble and speed healing and get these people out of the ICU right away and out of the hospital quite quickly, or if they’re in just the hospital. Normal hospital ward, keep them out of the ICU, which is even better, or if they can do this at home, even better still. But even small amounts of vitamin C save lives.

A number of studies in the last 20 years or so have shown that very small oral doses of vitamin C keep the elderly with pneumonia from dying. Now, pneumonia has been called the old man’s friend for generations and a whole lot of healthy people, Jackel Lane, the physical fitness gentleman died at 96. He died from pneumonia. This is common. I think Bob Hope, who lived to be nearly 100, also died of pneumonia. It’s very, very common. My own father died of pneumonia. And it is it’s still serious. But what we need to understand is in the elderly hospitalized with pneumonia, vitamin C reduces the fatality rate by 80 percent. And the dose used in this study was 200 milligrams a day.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:26:02] Wow. That is that’s a standard capsule that you’d find in any health food store. Yeah. The other thing that I thought was interesting is the ubiquitous nature of vitamin D deficiency because, you know, rather than focussing on the toxicity element of it, which, as you pointed out, is so unusual. In fact, almost not to exist.

There was as I read an article in I think it was the Journal of Endocrinology, nice light reading, which said in ICU, in ICU cases, 40 to 70 percent of ICU patients were deficient, not toxic to vitamin D, but actually deficient. And I’m not even sure whether that’s a reflection of us in the community, because I know I had been until I explored this, more deficient myself. So talk to us about how ubiquitous this actual deficiency is.

Deficiency

Andrew Saul [00:26:57] Well, I’ll give you an example. Abrams Hoffer said to start every talk with a case, history, or two. And I’ve waited a bit. But here’s one and it’s me. I started taking supplemental vitamin D when I was a little boy. My father worked at Eastman Kodak Co. and they could get multivitamins very inexpensively. So we had a multivitamin every day. Not everybody knew that. But Kodak was one of the largest manufacturers of vitamin supplements back in the 50s and 60s. Tennessee Eastman was their chemical division.

So ever since I was a kid, we were always playing outside and we went to the YMCA, went to summer camp. We were all bleached, blonde, and tanned, and we were outside all the time. My mother would say, turn off that television and get outside. And course we did. And we had her vitamin D supplement. As the years went by and I was a young adult, I started becoming more of a health nut and I started taking extra vitamin D, I started taking about two to three times the RDA every day. And I did that for probably good, solid 20 years. And then as I learned more about vitamin D, I up my vitamin D a little bit more. And I thought maybe I take a test and make sure I’m not taking too much. So I got tested and I was low and I wasn’t just low. I was really low. I was truly low.

After all that, I was low. And I’ve been taking supplemental vitamin D quite a lot of it for years. So I increased my vitamin D. I put it up to about 3000 units a day. Got tested again. I was still low, not dreadfully low, but definitely low. So now I take 5000 units of vitamin D every day, which is, by the way, what the International Society for Orthomolecular Medicine recommends that you take to prevent COVID. A

nd actually, you can scale that down to about 2000, says Dr Yanagisawa the president of ISOM. After about a week, you can just take the 2000. But this is far more than most people will get in their multivitamins if it’s just an RDA vitamin. And that’s more than a lot of people of color will get even if they’re out in the sun. Because when you have skin with pigment in it, you don’t manufacture vitamin D nearly as well. So there’s a reason why equatorial people with darker skin have that.

It’s to protect them from the effects of the sun. And then, of course, if you go up to the Scandinavian and the Nordic northern countries, you have a lot more of a pale complexion because they need all the vitamin D they can possibly get. I asked Dr. Hollick, the vitamin D expert I mentioned earlier.

Well, how do you know if you need extra vitamin D? And he said, well if you live in a Northern climate, you should just take it. And I said, would you describe a northern climate for me? And he said, yes. Anything north of Atlanta, Georgia. Now, in the United States, Georgia is on the Gulf Coast. It’s at the actual bottom of the country. So that would be like saying in Australia, anybody south of Darwin should take vitamin D.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:30:11] You mention gee, I tell you what, you’ve mentioned names that I mean, I’ve been studying nutrition for 30, 40 years and Abram Hoffer and Linus Paul and Cheraskin. These are really legends in the field. There are two things. I wanted to take a step back here for a moment. You’ve mentioned Orthomolecular Medicine. The word of orthomolecular, and I know what you mean, but I wondered if you might share that with our listener. Let’s get back two basics and then ask you two basic orthomolecular and you’ve mentioned RDA because that is often a very important point of contention.

Basic Orthomolecular

Andrew Saul [00:30:50] All right. Well, orthomolecular means the right molecule. And it was given to the profession by Linus Pauling himself in a 1968 paper that he wrote in Science and the Adherence of Orthomolecular Medicine. Very much enjoy that name. I find it cumbersome because I’ve never done an interview yet where I wasn’t asked the question, what does orthomolecular mean? And it simply means nutrition therapy.

You might call it megavitamins therapy, but that’s actually not as accurate as personalized nutrition therapy. It is varying the concentration of substances that are natural to the human body. Technically, insulin would be an orthomolecular therapy, but for the public, we’re looking at this from the point of view of nutrients. So unlike drugs, which are not common to the body, they’re not natural to the body, varying the concentration of nutrients is a safe way to approach this.

There are very few side effects with things that your body actually wants to notice what it’s doing with. Whereas with drugs, it’s remarkable how small an amount of a drug can cause side effects and issues. So vitamins have a margin of safety that is unequaled. In fact, the American Association of Poison Control Centres every year publishes who died from what. And this is in the Journal Clinical Toxicology Reports, usually a couple of one hundred pages long.

So we’ve been looking at this for a number of years because every time somebody claims that vitamins are killing someone, we go to the AARP, CSC reports, and we go to the very last three pages of this 200 page paper and we find out that nobody’s dying from vitamins. There have been occasional accusations, 13, I think, in the last 30 years. And when we looked closely, none of them were substantiated. Now the RDA is the recommended..

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:33:08] Andrew. Andrew, let me just add a point here because to put Australian context to this, I actually through our committee at the Australasian College of Nutritional Environmental Medicine (ACNEM), we looked at this issue and you can go to what’s called the TGA, the Therapeutic Goods Association, and find out how many people have died from 1971 to today from vitamins.

And the answer is zero. And then. Yes. And then I looked and then we looked up fish oils. One person has died of fish oils because they choked on a large tablet. And then I went and looked. We looked at what I. We looked at something fairly innocuous, like paracetamol as an example of pharmaceutical intervention. And when you can buy these over the counter and you give it to kids and it’s kind of ubiquitous, it’s everywhere. Paracetamol, I think there’s been somewhere between 200 and 400 deaths from paracetamol alone. So just to put it into an Australian context and reinforce your message that in Australia they’re quite safe too go on RDA?

Andrew Saul [00:34:19] Recommended dietary allowance or RDA is the standard that’s supposed to be a generous amount to maintain good health in most people. It’s certainly better than nothing, but some people call it the ridiculous dietary allowance. And I think that you could make a very good case for remaking, remodeling and revising it as soon as possible.

The RDA for vitamin C, for example, in the United States is ninety-nine zero milligrams. For a long time. It was less than that for smokers it’s a whopping great 125 milligrams a day and for other vitamins, the RDA is generally considered to be pretty well. What we need to do is understand something. The reason the RDA is not being made any higher is because you won’t be able to get it from food.

You see, the belief system is that supplements are not necessary, therefore don’t raise the bridge over the river. So we have nutritional communism here. That’s really what the RDA is. It’s a minimum wage for everyone. Now, maybe you can get by on minimum wage. I wouldn’t want to try to raise a family on minimum wage even if both parents were working. Maybe you can get by on the idea. But who would want to? You don’t want to have the bare minimum to struggle through one.

You want to have enough vitamins so you actually can excrete the excess in the earth, having some B vitamins in the urine. Vitamin B6, for example, reduces your risk of bladder cancer. Well, that’s good. Having vitamin C in the urine keeps you from getting urinary tract infections. Ask the women who use it because a whole lot of are nurses and they know that vitamin C gently acidifies the urine.

These are just two examples. So if we change the RDA to reflect what people should really take. We would have to change the way people eat and we’re not going to be able to do that because people are eating a lot of junk. There was a time when we could just blame the Yankees for that. But that’s not true anymore. Australians and Chinese and people in Colombia. I’ve been all around the world and everywhere people are eating bad food. And of course, this makes them sitting ducks for any pandemic. Why? Because being overweight and undernourished, overfed but malnourished is a sure way to set yourself up for disease. What we need to do is change the way we eat. Well, how much should we do that with supplements?

Andrew Saul [00:37:01] The answer is let’s look at animals. Let’s look at the animal kingdom and see what they do. Most animals make their own vitamin C. The apes, the primates, humans cannot. Guinea pigs cannot. Fruit bats cannot. Course, they don’t need to, but we cannot make vitamin C.

Whereas fleas and worms and whales and sharks and dogs and cats and rats and goats and cows and pigs and horses all make their own vitamin C. How much do they make? This has been studied when we take a look at this, we find out all through the animal kingdom. Animals manufacture vitamin C somewhere in the range per human body weight equivalent of one thousand to ten thousand milligrams a day.

Now, this means if you take the low figure, the RDA is 1/11th of what it should be. Now let’s take a look at primates, monkeys, for instance. A 25-pound monkey in the course of a normal day will eat quite a lot of fruit. Monkey’s like fruit. And they’re not very selective.

They’ll eat fruit that’s fallen to the ground, which means it’s super ripe, very unlike the food that we get in supermarkets, which is picked before it’s ripe. So it will keep. It will transport. It will have a shelf life. Monkeys don’t care if it’s a little bit bunk beaten up or a little bit bruised or even a little bit fermented. That’s fine with them. So monkeys actually consume a great deal of vitamin C and a twenty-five-pound monkey will consume around six hundred milligrams of vitamin C a day for a twenty-five-pound monkey.

Now, if you do the maths on that, that’s thousands and thousands of milligrams for human body weight equivalent. If you keep animals, if you keep monkeys, if you keep guinea pigs in your laboratory as a scientist or researcher, you have to meet standards in the United States from the United States Department of Agriculture and the vitamin C standards per human body weight equivalent for guinea pigs and monkeys are 10 times higher than they are for people.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:39:12] Oh my God. Just that that is just that’s gold. So when you keep these research animals, you know, the humane thing to do is give you have to, in fact, by law, give them 10 times higher the Vitamin C, that is the recommended idea. I think that’s worth repeating. That’s it’s almost like if you don’t I mean, when I look at those RDA figures, I think, okay, this is setting the bar so that we don’t get scurvy.

For example, if you in fact, if you don’t have scurvy, according to the RDA, you probably don’t need supplements. So that’s almost where we’re at. Isn’t it? I mean, we’re not many people get scurvy nowadays, but.

Andrew Saul [00:39:55] There’s such a thing as acute induced scurvy. And this is what happens when someone has a virus. When someone has influenza when someone has pneumonia. Most people who die from COVID are dying of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, SARS, and or pneumonia. This is what kills people. It isn’t the virus, per se.

Lots of people have been exposed to COVID and don’t even know it. Lots of people have had mild cases and don’t even know it. Lots of people have had nasty flu and they do know it. And then there’s the people that are in danger and they’re in danger if they have pneumonia or SARS.

So what happens is when people have more vitamin C, they have greater resilience here. And you have to understand that the progress of these diseases often shows symptoms. Hemorrhaging is a perfect example. Now, how does your dentist know that you have poor gums and need vitamin C because your gums will bleed?

You have spontaneous pinpoint hemorrhaging. Smokers have strokes because the into the inside of the arteries becomes weak and the arteries’ own blood supply to its own cells will cause leakage and the intimate will bleed into the artery. Kind of ironic to think that an artery can bleed, but it can.

Well, nature won’t allow that. So, of course, that will clot over. And then that clot can break loose and you have a cerebral vascular accident and possibly paralysis or death. So when we have blood vessels that are, we have a porosity. We have a permeability that’s not normal. We have leakage and this is because vitamin C builds collagen. Collagen is the connective tissue or the glue that holds you together. It’s like mortar and a brick wall. The strength of the brick wall is not the bricks. You can stack up bricks and your little five-year-old grandson can push him right over. But if you have mortar, you can’t do that.

Andrew Saul [00:42:09] So collagen in is the mortar that holds your cells together, that holds connective tissue together. And that’s your very body because that’s everywhere when you can see the weakness in the collagen. That indicates scurvy. And you can see your gums.

You can’t see, unfortunately, inside your arteries. But it’s the same problem. You have a loosening of the connective tissue. You have an actual loss and breakdown because the hydroxylation of proline will not occur without vitamin C. It’s a simple biochemistry. You’ve got to have vitamin C to build collagen.

Without it, you don’t. And over time, it just gets weaker and weaker. Now, when someone has reduced immune strength, their white blood cells are not working as well. Why? Because white blood cells accumulate vitamin C. 80, eight zero times more than plasma. So they feed on this stuff. They love it. Vitamin C for your white blood cells is sort of like ammunition for a soldier’s rifle.

You have to have it or it’s not going to work. So now you have two problems. A weak immune system that’s a sitting duck for a virus. And hyperpermeability and weakness in blood vessels. Now, where you’re going to see that? How about where you have the most blood vessels and the thinnest walls? Now, where would that be? Where are the cells? Only one cell thick. That separates blood from air. And you get bigger lumps.

Therefore, when the risk is pneumonia, the answer is to get a very large amount of vitamin C in there. This is so important. And again, again, again, I have the references to back this up at orthomolecular.org, which is the home of the “Orthomolecular Medicine News Service”, a peer-reviewed, non-commercial, and totally free news feed that’s been published now for 16 years.

Our entire archive is online at Orthomolecular.org, and you can read this. And we have about nine languages now, Norwegian, French, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, German, Spanish, all ready to go. And you can read the articles with the references, including the one on the two hundred milligrams of vitamin C for the elderly, reducing deaths by 80 percent. There is another one that was done with children with pneumonia.

Now there is a nightmare for you. Children between zero and five years of age, with pneumonia in the hospital now. They gave them vitamin C. And what did they find? Mortality rate dramatically went down. Oxygen levels went up within 24 hours. Now, if you’re a parent or grandparent or a physician, you know exactly what I’m talking about. That’s the thing they’re watching like a hawk, right? They’re watching that. The child’s on the monitor and they see that percent oxygen come down and they get really worried. Vitamin C brings it right up.

Andrew Saul [00:45:20] How much did they give these children? 200 milligrams of C a day. That was enough to raise their oxygen levels in 24 hours. So there is an alternative to ventilation. I think ventilation is very harsh. I think it’s like putting a milking machine on a cow with an injured udder. I don’t think it’s a good idea. It’s too rough.

Instead of this, there are other ways you can deliver a little more oxygen. You don’t have to pump it through like you’re trying to get your fire to start in your fireplace. Vitamin C in a manner of speaking is biochemical ventilation. So it not only strengthens your blood vessels and it not only builds your immune system, your white blood cells, but it also improves oxygenation. I can and will go on and on about this as long as I have a breath left in my body.

This information should be on television in the United States are tsar for many months was Dr Anthony Fauci at the NIH National Institutes of Health. And he was responsible for infectious diseases and was constantly on the television. Four years ago on the record in the Washingtonian magazine, which has been published for a long time, Dr Fauci said, “to make your immune system stronger, take vitamin C. I take a thousand milligrams a day”.

He said that in 2016 you can find it on the Internet or at Orthomolecular.org. I don’t know why he didn’t mention that when he was on television all those times. He personally takes a thousand milligrams a day and he’s not going to tell you.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:47:01] Andrew. Go on. Go on.

Andrew Saul [00:47:03] The US RDA is 90 milligrams. And yet you have to give 11 times more than that to monkeys and guinea pigs in your laboratory by human body weight. So we have this disconnect and that’s why people are confused. You’re scared for a reason. Of course, you’re scared anyone would be. And the way we get rid of that is we have the knowledge and the knowledge should come from physicians who are curing patients. That’s the best evidence there will ever be. A cured patient is evidence. And when you have enough doctors and enough cured patients, I think you can move forward on that.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:47:43] Another nutrient that I do see popping up and it’s kind of slipped in there when they’re talking about, for example, hydroxychloroquine, which I know is very topical in America. And but hydroxychloroquine or Ivermectin or some of these other pharmaceuticals, we always see zinc slipped in there. And zinc is another one, isn’t it? That’s important. I mean, there’s so many we picking one or two or three. But this is not what orthomolecular medicine is about. It’s much more than that. But let’s just touch on zinc for a moment.

Andrew Saul [00:48:19] It’s good to highlight zinc because it’s so easy to get enough zinc and so few people do. Zinc is important for your immune system. That should flag you right away. Men lose zinc on a regular basis in seminal fluid. Women lose iron on a regular basis in menstrual fluid. Well, you’ll see a lot of food that’s fortified with iron, but you’ll almost never see a breakfast cereal that says.

Now, with more zinc, it’s a very, very rare event. So we have zinc deficiency or zinc inadequacy. When somebody is sick, their need for zinc is probably going to go up a bit. The RDA for zinc is not very much. It’s around 12 mammograms or so. I personally recommend people take around 50 or 60 milligrams. Certainly, men should. Women could take a little bit less. Zinc has been safety tested at much higher levels. But you really don’t need a huge amount.

Remember, a milligram is the thousandth of a gram and a gram is a quarter of a teaspoon. So 50 milligrams of zinc is not really that much and it’s only around four times the RDA. But what a difference that would make four times the RDA. How would you like your tax refund to be four times larger this year for the same figures that you file? So we’re talking a very significant amount of improvement. Zinc can be found in pumpkin seeds. Zinc is found in seafood, especially things like clams and oysters. And it’s, of course, easier to take a zinc supplement.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:49:55] Now, let’s just finish up by saying we’ve touched on what is some of the things that people were suffering. But if we will if our listener was wanting to have a regime that they could easily attain, what would you recommend people should be, at least on, you know, just as a supplement, a support system to prevent.

Andrew Saul’s Recommendation

Andrew Saul [00:50:18] Well, I’ll go with the official recommendation of the International Society for Orthomolecular Medicine to prevent COVID. I think that’s probably good to prevent a lot of ailments. It calls for three thousand milligrams of vitamin C a day in three 1000 mg divided doses.

Again, a very modest amount that’s on the low side per human body weight equivalent of what most animals will make. Did you know a goat can make fifteen thousand milligrams of C, a day and a sick goat can make 50,000 five zero thousand milligrams of C. Imagine what a cow can do? So that’s vitamin C. 3000 milligrams a day.

The zinc recommendation is 50. As I mention, the International Society for Orthomolecular Medicine recommends magnesium, a very modest 400 milligrams a day, which is only slightly more than the RDA and selenium, 100 micrograms a day, which is again, a very modest amount. And Vitamin D, 5000 units of vitamin D a day for a week or two. And then you come back down to two thousand units a day on a regular basis. The total cost for this program has been checked around the world in different markets, and it’s less than one dollar a day per person.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:51:37] Yes. Andrew, finally and taking a step back from your role as a researcher, as an educator. We’re all on this health journey together through life in our modern world. What do you think the biggest challenge is for an individual on that journey?

The Biggest Health Challenge

Andrew Saul [00:51:56] Confidence. You’re being scared. I don’t watch the news anymore because it’s just too terrifying. I don’t know how people can handle it. They watch the news and the hope that they will be encouraged. And I think they’re being discouraged. We have to recognize that real knowledge is not going to be presented to you in a spectacular commercial station, advertiser-funded TV newscast. These are carefully vetted. No one wants to offend a sponsor.

You may have noticed that a lot of the sponsors are pharmaceutical companies or a large food conglomerates or our fast food companies, none of which have an interest in your being healthy and all of which have an interest in getting your money. The money is in disease. There’s no money in health. I’ve been saying for many years that good health makes a lot of sense, but it doesn’t make a lot of dollars. So what you want to do is remember the basic stuff, first of all, take enough C to be symptom-free, whatever the amount might be.

This is automatic its self-adjusting. How do you know you took too much? Dr Cathcart says you get to bowel tolerance and that means exactly what you think it means. So you’ve taken C. to be symptom-free. But not so much that it causes loose stool. If you go to my Website, DoctorYourself.com, which is peer-reviewed and free access and nothing for sale. I have no financial connection with the supplement industry whatsoever, by the way. You go DoctorYourself.com, which is searchable. And you will have these papers by Dr Cathcart, by Dr Kleiner, by Dr Hoffer. We have them all there. And they’ve been there now for 20 years, actually.

Twenty-one years I’ve been doing this. The information is very, very valuable. And if you think you can’t read it, you’re wrong, because what I found is good medical writers are just good writers. And I have interpretive articles as well to guide you along. And the use of vitamin supplementation, once again, I have no financial interest in doing that. I don’t make a dime if you buy a juicer or I have no vitamins to sell you.

We’re simply giving you the background information that somehow has not been coming through the mass media and having been a teacher and taught every grade there is from first grade to post-doctoral. I can tell you that generally, our education system is not teaching this either. It was the philosopher Joseph Campbell who said many years ago if you really want to do something. If you really want to do something for this world, teach people how to live in it.

Andrew Saul [00:54:46] And this means you have to do some reading and I assign homework. The more you read the papers by the doctors who are curing disease, the more confident you’re going to be. This is a put-up job. As one of my favorite professors used to tell me, this is a put-up job. This is a test. It’s a very severe test. This is not a drill. We are in this. People are suffering and dying. And if there’s one thing that makes me truly angry, it’s unnecessary suffering. We have to fix that and we’re going to do this one person at a time. Don’t wait to be told by the government what to do. Because unfortunately, they’re listening to people that have vested interests.

There’s an awful lot of money in control, in information flow and pharmaceuticals, in disease care. We have to do this the other way around. When I was a student during the radical 60s and 70s, the phrase was, what if they gave a war and nobody came?

Well, what if they told you that COVID is going to kill you, but instead you learned that it’s just a nasty virus? It’s no joke, but it’s just another nasty virus. It’s a particularly rotten one. True for some people it is deadly. But then influenza pneumonia kills a lot of people every year in the United States. Influenza and pneumonia will kill 60 to 80 thousand people a year, depending on which statistics you look at. That’s a lot of people COVID is worse. But one of the reasons it’s worse is because we haven’t been using vitamin therapy for the people who need it most. When they’re ICU, they need what they’re doing in China.

Now, the United States and Australia should like freedom every bit as much as China. And that means the first thing we should do is make sure that patients are given every opportunity to live. All government authorities will tell you they don’t have a specific cure for COVID. That’s all the more reason why you want to use nutrition, because in the absence of a vaccine, even if it works, you work in the absence of medication, even if it were to work. What have you got left? The only game in town is your immune system. And in every nutrition textbook ever written. Vitamin D, vitamin C, and other nutrients are known to optimize that immune system. And that’s what keeps people alive.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:57:26] Andrew, we finished where we started back on the immune system, which is everyone’s focus. Thank you so much for joining us today. We will, of course, have links to that Web site and all your knowledge and resources that you so generously sharing. Thank you so much.

Andrew Saul [00:57:44] Well, thank you, Ron. I have to give credit to those that have taught me this, and I’m very grateful that I was able to learn this. And now it’s simply a matter of passing it on. The beauty of your podcast is that we’re now speaking to thousands and thousands of people because people are going to be telling their friends and we’re going to make a difference.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:58:04] Thank you.

Conclusion

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:58:06] Now, we will, of course, have links to those Web sites that Andrew was referencing and to suggest that there is no research to support this is breathtakingly displaying an ignorance, which I think haven’t being ignorant is fine. You know, I’m ignorant of things, too.

However, being ignorant with hubris is another matter. And when that hubris informs public health policy, that’s when it becomes dangerous. So, you know, when I hear that guinea pigs and primates that are held in research institutions have to supplement their animals at levels that are 10 times higher than what is the recommended daily dose (RDA) recommended by the health authorities. I’m just a little bit concerned about that.

That’s putting it mildly. So this is continuation of that this theme. And this is very much about personal empowerment. And I think with a little bit of information that makes sense, that doesn’t cause harm, that’s accessible, that’s effective, and that is affordable. Wow. Are they appealing measures to manage any health issue, let alone a pandemic that is literally costing us billions of dollars and causing untold suffering mentally to this? This is about approaching this kind of thing, the pandemic in a holistic way.

I think it’s so interesting to see how we are approaching this pandemic. We’re approaching it as though it is a disease in isolation and it’s the way we approach chronic, preventable chronic diseases in our society, whether we’re talking about heart disease, cancer, autoimmune.

We approach them one disease at a time. And that is not the way the world works. It’s not the way the body works. It’s not the way the planet works. And I have used the term holistic throughout my professional career. And I make no apology for it because we need to think holistically and we need to go back to basics of biochemistry, physiology. This is not new.

This is in every undergraduate doctor, dentist, and health practitioner’s textbooks. So this is why I’ve been focussing on it. As I said, we’ll have links to Andrew’s website, the “Orthomolecular News Service“, something that is open to the general public. I’m very proud to have been invited on their editorial board. And there are over 50 people on that editorial board from all around the globe. And I’m very proud to be on that as well. So I hope this finds you well in these challenging times. Until next time. This is Dr Ron Ehrlich. Be well.

 

This podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine, health, and related subjects. The content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or as a substitute for care by a qualified medical practitioner. If you or any other person has a medical concern, he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experiences, and conclusions.