How Obvious Cures Are Overlooked

William Faloon

Seafarers were ravaged by scurvy until vitamin C was discovered to cure it.

History books imply that once sailors started consuming lemons or limes, scurvy disappeared.

That is not the way it happened.

Citrus was found to cure scurvy by Portuguese sailors in 1497. It was not until 1747 that a Scottish physician conducted a human study proving this.¹

In 1799 all Royal Navy ships on foreign service were ordered to provide lemon juice—more than 50 years after it was scientifically proven.¹

The British were in no hurry to disseminate these findings as it gave them the upper hand in sea battles. By consuming lemon juice during voyages, British sailors stayed heathy while their enemy counterparts suffered scurvy’s sickening, lethal impact.

By the 1870s, however, the “citrus cure” was discredited by British authorities for surprising reasons. For the next 60 years, scurvy continued to kill. This included men on Robert Scott’s 1911 expedition to the South Pole, and Dr. Scott was a Royal Navy surgeon!¹

Scurvy afflicted people until vitamin C was isolated in 1932.² It thus took over 400 years to be able to eliminate scurvy—long after citrus was “proven” to work in a controlled human study.

The cure for scurvy was discovered, forgotten, rediscovered, and forgotten again. This is analogous to what goes on today. Thousands of peer-reviewed published studies document how humans can protect against pathological aging.

Much of this data is ignored as if it does not exist. Our critics claim that nothing should be tried unless it’s “approved” by our bureaucratic overlords.

The 400-year delay in eradicating scurvy was ludicrous. Yet far more humans perish today because research findings are sadly overlooked.

When a news release questions the value of a particular therapy, the media rushes to create headlines that seldom reflect reality. As long as people focus on isolated opinions while ignoring the totality of evidence, medical progress will be impeded.

An example of this occurred across a 400-year span as a result of failure to use properly-stored citrus, which made it lose its vitamin C potency. This was one of several reasons why “experts” repudiated findings showing that fresh citrus cured scurvy.

The absurdity continues today. News headlines often blare that there is insufficient proof to supplement with higher-dose vitamin D.^3,4 This nutrient was long ago demonstrated to help prevent falls and fractures.^5-8 Higher blood levels of vitamin D are also associated with reduced cancer incidence.^9-19

The documentation supporting vitamin D is robust, and you’d think there would be widespread use of this low-cost nutrient.

Instead, the blood of most people today is dangerously low in vitamin D, despite compelling evidence that vitamin D insufficiency contributes to many diseases.^20-31

A correlation between scurvy and vitamin D is that there was never a downside for sailors to consume citrus, even while experts questioned its efficacy. Likewise, for vitamin D, whereby supplementing with 5,000 to 8,000 IU daily is safe for most aging individuals, yet “experts” constantly debate what the “optimal” dose is.

Scurvy and Aging

• 1497: Citrus shown to cure scurvy
• 1747: Dr. James Lind proves citrus cures scurvy
• 1870: Citrus cure officially discredited
• 1911: Dr. Robert Scott loses crew to scurvy
• 1932: Vitamin C proven to cure scurvy

Millions of Deaths After Cure Discovered

Aspirin and Cancer

 

Most cancer patients should take a low-dose aspirin tablet daily. Studies show aspirin has multiple anti-cancer properties including helping to prevent metastasis.^32-36

We long ago suggested that most cancer patients take a low-dose aspirin tablet daily based on a lot of impressive research.^35,37-40 I’ve yet to hear a cancer patient tell me their oncologist recommended aspirin. We’ve observed this same problem for other drugs such as metformin^41-53 and cimetidine.^54-56

Rather than berate overworked physicians who are inundated with bureaucracy—we advocate for patient empowerment. This was difficult in the past, but it can be easy today. If you enter terms like “metformin and cancer” into Google, you’ll see some compelling research supporting the drug’s probable efficacy. That does not equate to absolute proof, but with over 1,600 Americans dying each day of cancer,⁵⁷ potentially effective adjuvant therapies should be given more consideration.

Today’s Urgent Priority

 

Educated consumers have access to many validated methods (healthy diets, hormones, nutrients, etc.) to guard against premature aging and degenerative illness.

Today’s priority should be to rapidly initiate human age-reversal studies. Failure to recognize “aging” as a treatable disorder is the major impediment stifling meaningful medical progress.

What excites us is that systemic age reversal has been demonstrated in the laboratory animal model.^58-63 Physicians and scientists have developed protocols that translate these animal findings into clinical research protocols.

Holding back these critical studies is a lack of funding. Once physicians are able to induce meaningful age reversal, degenerative illnesses that kill 6,000 Americans daily will be postponed, if not eliminated—just as scurvy is today.

This month’s issue describes an initiative that we call the Project to Cure Aging. It involves raising funds to identify and validate age-reversal technologies and then rapidly translating them into medical practice.

You might think that if there are “obvious” ways to reverse human aging, then these would be utilized today. Yet all one has to do is look at how long it took the medical establishment to cure scurvy to understand why technology not only moves too slow, but sometimes falls backwards.

How Scurvy Cure was Lost

A series of accidents combined with misguided theories led to citrus being discredited in the 1870s. Over the next 60 years, scurvy returned to torment not just Polar explorers, but thousands of infants born to wealthy families in Europe and America.¹

Interestingly, the reason why infantile scurvy was predominant among wealthy families is that poor families could not afford pasteurized milk. They had to rely on breast feeding.

Pasteurization (heating) destroys the vitamin C naturally contained in cow’s milk. Scurvy killed thousands of infants before vitamin C was discovered.

Vitamin C quickly breaks down in the presence of light, heat and air. It is absent from most preserved foods that have been cooked or dried. It is rapidly oxidized by copper ions, which may be one reason sailors, with their copper cooking vats, were particularly susceptible to vitamin deficiency.

Interestingly, our bodies are quite adept at conserving vitamin C in response to deficient intakes. It can take 6 months for scurvy to develop in healthy people after vitamin C is removed from the diet. It was long ago discovered that lemons and oranges were particularly effective in curing scurvy.

Confusing Limes for Lemons

 

After citrus was proven to cure scurvy and initially accepted by the medical authorities, the British mandated that sailors consume one ounce of lemon juice each day when at sea for over 2 weeks.

Back then, however, there was confusion between limes and lemons. Many thought lemon juice was the same as lime juice. There is less vitamin C in lime juice.

Scurvy had been the leading killer of sailors on long ocean voyages. By the mid-1800s, transportation advances were reducing the need for a scurvy preventative. Steam power shortened travel times, so that it was rare for sailors other than whalers to be months at sea without fresh food.

In 1860, the British began to replace lemon juice with an ineffective substitute—West Indian limes. One motive for this was political, i.e. it was better to buy from British plantations than to import lemons from Europe. There was confusion about what constituted a lemon or lime. Both “lemon” and “lime” were used interchangeably to describe “citrus.”

Delay in Curing Scurvy

Before the 1930s, physicians were stymied because they had no idea that it was the vitamin C in citrus that was responsible for its curative powers.

An erroneous theory emerged back then that it was the acidity of citrus that cured scurvy. Since limes were more acidic, limes started being used in place of lemons. It was later found that limes have only about 25% the scurvy fighting power of lemons.

The lime juice being served to sailors in the mid-1800s was not fresh. It spent long periods in tanks open to the air and was pumped through copper tubing. Both of these processing methods caused the vitamin C to oxidize. Later experiments found this oxidized lime juice had no anti-scurvy powers, which was one reason why the “citrus cure” for scurvy was erroneously discredited in the 1870s.

So by the 1870s, most British ships that sailed were without scurvy protection. Only speed and improved nutrition on land were preventing sailors from getting sick.

Human Age-Reversal Research

 

British sailors figured how to conquer scurvy, but then science went into reverse. From a medical history perspective, this is often a rule rather than the exception.

Be it cardiopulmonary resuscitation or inoculation against smallpox, effective means were discovered only to have the technology fall backwards or be seriously delayed.

One of the most intriguing possibilities for reversing human aging lies in infusing the plasma components found in young blood into older humans.^58,65-67

Animal research using a similar technique (parabiosis) has consistently demonstrated age reversal.^58,68,69 Parabiosis research peaked around 1972, but was then largely abandoned.⁷⁰ The animal research picked up again after 2010 and even more compelling findings were discovered showing system-wide reversal of biological aging.^71-78

There are physician-scientists that have ready-to-implement protocols to test if meaningful age reversal can be induced in older humans using young plasma transfer techniques. The impediment is lack of funding to launch their projects.

The article on page 32 of this month’s edition describes the Project to Cure Aging, which is the first attempt in medical history to discover a range of methods to induce biological age reversal in maturing humans.

This research should move forward without delay. We don’t want the next generation writing that scientists figured out how to reverse aging in 2016, but that delays in launching human studies caused us all to perish.

For longer life,

William Faloon

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