Vitamin C Is Taking The Fight To The Big "C" – Dr. Ron Hunninghake - #379

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Today's cool fact of the day is that since 2,500 years ago, Hippocrates knew that food was medicine, but it wasn't until maybe the 18th century when French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, later known as the father of modern chemistry, provided the scientific foundation for the study of how the body metabolizes food to create energy. Unfortunately, as you'll find with lots of these people who break the rules in medicine, and really people who disrupt any industry get this pressure, unfortunately what happened to him is that he was branded a traitor for helping foreign scientists hold on to their freedom during the Reign of Terror. So he was convicted, and the judge said, this is a true fact, although he said it in French, so he said, the Republic has no need of scientists or chemists. And he was introduced to a form of biohacking technology that I do not support named after Madame Guillotine. In other words, he was a chemist, he figured out new stuff, so they cut his head off. This sometimes happens to people who are innovators, but not in the world we live in today. Because the world we live in today, people who innovate and get results actually get to talk about it thanks to the miracle of the internet. And shows like this, and just innovators are now connecting with other innovators. So in the case of Lavoisier, his colleagues lamented the loss by saying it took them only an instant to cut off his head, and 100 years might not suffice to reproduce its like. Today's guest is none other than Ron Hunningshake. He's the chief medical officer at the Riordan Clinic. In 2011, he was named the Orthomolecular Doc— Doctor of the Year by the International Society for Orthomolecular Medicine. And in 2013, he was inducted into their Hall of Fame. He's spent his entire career doing self-care and encouraging patients to be in charge of themselves instead of their doctors. He's one of the world leaders in IV vitamin C therapy for cancer. He's personally supervised 60,000 vitamin C IV administrations. If you've been a long-time listener, you know I've used IV vitamin C extensively when I had fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, Lyme disease, probably all precipitated by an environmental toxic mold exposure, oh, and high mercury levels, and arthritis since I was 14, all the other crap that I've been through that I'm not dealing with right now. Vitamin C was a big part of this. If you don't know the word orthomolecular, this is a word that basically ties together nutrition and vitamins and health from a medical perspective. This is one of the words that came about before anti-aging or functional medicine. It's the root of some of those ways of thinking. The anti-aging research group that I've run for almost 15 years in Silicon Valley has been talking with orthomolecular practitioners for a long time. So this is sort of like, you know, many different medical paths emerge from this line of thinking. So, Dr. Ron, welcome to the show. It's really an honor to have you on.

Thank you, Dave. Thank you so much.

Did you like my description of orthomolecular medicine there? You might have a better definition.

Please, because most people forget that that was the mothership for much of what we call nutritional medicine these days. And Dr. Abram Hoffer was a good friend of Dr. Reardon, my boss, and Hoffer was the father of orthomolecular psychiatry. And most of the early work in nutrition was done by psychiatrists out of a concern for looking for the root causes of mental illness. And as we pursued that, then we came to understand that most chronic illnesses were related to nutritional factors that had gone awry. And then we also found out that just giving RDA doses of key nutrients was not enough in people who were chronically ill or were the, the effects of the environmental toxicity epidemic that's now going on. And so we, we use high doses of vitamin C as a detoxifier, along with— we're very big on vitamin D and magnesium. And I'm lately, I've been understanding from my good friend Dr. Brownstein, iodine is an orthomolecular nutrient. So there are some of these key nutrients that unless you get the right dose, you don't get the effect that you need in order to get well.

In a nutshell, a long time ago when I was living in a house that had water damage in the bedroom unbeknownst to me and had Stachybotrys growing in it, most likely, I was having all kinds of problems. And I went to my Western doctor at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. I said, I feel like I've been poisoned. I don't know what's wrong. My brain is not working. I put on 30 pounds in the last 2 months. And I didn't correlate my environment with that. And I had all kinds of pain and brain fog. And I said, the one thing that seems to help is vitamin C. And he looked at me and said, how much are you taking? And I said, I take 3 grams a day. And he looked at me and said, you have to stop, it could kill you. And I looked at him and I said, what about Linus Pauling, who I guess you could fairly say is one of the fathers of orthomolecular medicine. Pauling took 90 grams a day for much of his life and won a couple Nobel Prizes along the way. And the doctor said, "Linus who?" And I looked at him and I said, "You're fired." And I walked out of his office. I didn't know nearly as much as I know about biohacking. I just knew I found something that worked and it was clearly safe by any definition of safe. But here's a physician with a white lab coat and MD, et cetera, et cetera, at a well-respected place feeding me frankly BS. Why the divide between Western medicine and something as simple as vitamin C? Like, what happened? What— why is— why is there still this divisiveness?

Well, medical doctors travel in herds, and there's like a pack safety illusion that exists in medicine that if we just all follow the crowd, everyone's going to be okay, and it'll be the way we do things. And so it's a kind of let's stick together. But the word vitamin itself is part of the problem because vitamin implies a small amount of something in order to achieve a recommended daily allowance in order to prevent scurvy or some disease, which we now know that scurvy does not exist in isolation. You really can't get scurvy unless you've got multiple nutrients deficient. And vitamin C just happens to be one of the key ones. But there's, there's been in medicine a kind of kick-the-dog attitude regarding anyone practicing nutritional medicine. A matter of fact, anyone who prescribes vitamins was to be considered a quack. And it's only because they've never read the research. If they would take time to look at the extensive amount of research that exists around vitamin C, and look at some of the new understandings that we have that there are actually quantum benefits at higher levels. The nutrient works in a different way at high levels. Like, for example, giving it intravenously, you get completely different effects than you do giving it in small doses in food. Now, we still need it in small doses in food, but it's when we give high doses either liposomally or intravenously that we can see pro-oxidant effects of IV vitamin C. Then of course that scares them too because they're saying, oh, now it's a pro-oxidant, so that's even worse. But actually it's the proper use of these nutrients, the correct dose for the right condition in the right person. This is where the word orthomolecular really comes from, is it's, it's a correct utilization of the substance in a way to result in in better human functioning.

Very, very well put. Now, you don't just take vitamin C orally and don't recommend that to your patients, although you recommend that they take it, but that's not the only way you do it. You're putting it in their veins intravenously. How much do you use, and why does it work intravenously?

Okay, well, we have the Riordan protocol for cancer where we do start people out at a relatively small dose of 15,000, which for most practitioners that seems scary and they wonder if it's gonna create kidney stones. And no, it doesn't. If it did, we would be the kidney stone capital of the world in Wichita, Kansas. But what we find is that, think of it this way, the normal, let's say the reference range of vitamin C in the bloodstream is 1 milligram per deciliter. After a 15,000, gram IVC infusion, and we typically do measure people after we give them an infusion, it's about 100 milligrams per deciliter. So it's 100 times what you would normally have in your blood. Now you can take as much oral vitamin C as you can, and you might get it up from 1 to maybe 3, maybe 4, maybe 5 if you've already been taking vitamin C for a long time. But to get beyond that, is almost impossible. Now, there, there are cases where people have taken— they've built themselves up to 50,000, 60,000 milligrams of oral vitamin C a day over months and years, and they can achieve a higher blood level in the 20s, maybe the 30s. But what we're shooting for with cancer patients is 400 milligrams per deciliter. That was what Dr. Riordan found when he took over the research that Linus Pauling had started with Ewan Cameron back in the '60s, using only 10,000 milligrams of vitamin C in cancer patients and helping cancer patients live 4 times as long with much greater quality of life, less pain, better energy, better appetite, overall better functioning. And So he— so when Linus Pauling died, Dr. Reardon decided to actually do additional research, and that's where we began studying cell culture and looking at what kinds of doses were necessary to generate apoptosis in cancer cells. And it was at about 350 to 400 milligrams per deciliter that we saw almost universally all cancer cell types disintegrate, go into apoptosis, and knock themselves out.

It's, it's remarkable how the body's demand for vitamin C changes depending on what's going on inside the body. For a long time, when I hadn't tackled my systemic inflammation with nutrition and just living in an environment without things that are kryptonite for me— before I did that, I would regularly take 10 grams a day of vitamin C, and I felt really good on that. That's a pretty high dose. That's like 10 horse pills of vitamin C. In divided doses.

That's what I take.

You take 10, okay. And I got a sinus infection and I had just made a commitment to myself that I was not going to use antibiotics. I took antibiotics every month for more than 15 years for chronic strep and chronic sinusitis. That wrecks your mitochondria, it poisons them. It wrecks your gut bacteria. Like, it's just bad news. But hey, you know, I was really sick and also that's what the doctors told me would work and I didn't know any better. If someone had only written all this stuff and I knew how to find it that long ago and found it to be credible, it would have really changed the progression of my life. So I went to a guy in Palo Alto who I don't think is practicing right now, otherwise I would drop his name. And I did 150 grams of vitamin C intravenously each day for 3 days and 100 grams orally When you take too much vitamin C, you get disaster pants. So you know, it's called bowel tolerance, right? At least people listening, now they know. You clearly know this because—

Was it Robert Cathcart by any chance? No. Was it Bob Cathcart?

Bob Cathcart was a friend, and he's a member of the anti-aging group called the Silicon Valley Health Institute. But it wasn't Cathcart, it was actually Tim Guilford. But I don't believe that—

I know Tim. Tim's a good friend too, yeah.

Both of them are excellent human beings and have contributed to my knowledge greatly. And so I— in fact, I met Tim's son at the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine last week, which was kind of cool. So I did do this. And interestingly, the reason I'm bringing this up is, A, these are really big levels. Most people are like, "Your eyes bag? 100 grams? That's 100 pills worth of vitamin C in your veins." Number 1, I didn't die. Number 2, I didn't even get disaster pants. Even though I was basically fisting pills of vitamin C because my body's demand for vitamin C was so high that I used all of it that I could get. And I unfortunately, I don't think that it actually cured my sinus infection. There's an environmental component and a fungal component to that that I needed to address. This was 15 or so years ago. But just the idea here that this is possible and that people have been doing this for decades and that most people listening have never heard of this. Is, I think it's intriguing, but also that idea that the stress status of the body dictates vitamin C consumption levels is important. Now, you're curing cancer with vitamin C. Do you like it if I say curing cancer, or does that piss the FDA off and you want me to edit that out?

Well, and I think I, at— when I first started here, that was part of my— the excitement of joining Dr. Ruhren is that I was looking for something like that, you know. And I think we do— cure may be too much of a word. I mean, we actually did change our, our protocol to where we are using vitamin C as adjunctive therapy in cancer care. And even Dr. Reardon said we don't treat cancer, we treat the person who has cancer. And you say, well, is that just semantics? No, it's not just semantics, because cancer is It's a chronic illness like diabetes, like, like any other chronic inflammatory disease, and so you cannot treat it with one thing. You can certainly modify it with high doses of vitamin C, and I— and as you were speaking, I wanted to make sure that the audience understands that every creature makes their own vitamin C, with the exception of humans, guinea pigs, and fruit-eating bats and certain primates. And that when that creature is sick, injured, toxic, challenged, afraid, whatever, any kind of threat, their own adrenals, their own system starts kicking out a lot more vitamin C. We humans have lost that somewhere in evolution. The gene mutated and we can no longer do that. And my favorite thing to say is that we finally got so bad off with what we've done to the world that our, our brain finally helped us learn how to make vitamin C again. And we don't make it in our body, but we make it and we consume it in progressive doses depending upon how great the threat is to us. And cancer is obviously a life-threatening thing, so higher doses are called for in cancer care.

Now you've got some research that you did with Dr. Riordan for 15 years, the RECNAC, which is cancer spelled backwards. Do you say RECNAC or REECNAC? How do you pronounce How do you pronounce it? RecNAC. All right, I read it the right way. You guys figured out that in cell cultures, vitamin C was cytotoxic against cancer cells. In other words, it kills cancer cells but not normal cells. You're looking at stage 3 and stage 4 cancer patients. Tell me a little bit more about that study.

He looked at about 20 different cell culture lines, and we were able to determine that in vitro, in other words, in the petri dish, it it does induce apoptosis. Actually, what happens— and, and this, this is interesting— is that it's no longer just the Riordan Clinic. At the KU Medical Center, one of Dr. Riordan's students, Jeanne Drisko, hosted a conference of the University of Iowa, the Jefferson College in Philadelphia, and Sloan Kettering. And they now are actively involved in vitamin C research because it's the first thing that they have shown that when used in conjunction with chemotherapeutic agents actually improves longevity and reduces side effects and enhances the benefit of the, of the treatment itself. And so they're pretty enthused that— and they are— they have verified all of the research that when you give vitamin C in high doses and you create redox cycling, you are taking an antioxidant, you're reducing iron, and You're interacting that iron with the oxygen in your tissues. The oxygen then generates the hydrogen peroxide and there we have the pro-oxidant effect of vitamin C, which a lot of doctors still don't understand. I would say 99.9% of oncologists still think of vitamin C as only an antioxidant and they're missing out on the fact that it could be very beneficial to their cancer patients in terms of improving outcomes and reducing side effects along the way.

Now, most people listening have, they've heard, just like the cancer doctors, antioxidants are good for you. I have a new book about mitochondrial function and how you can actually hack your mitochondria so that they make energy and use oxygen more effectively, which makes your brain work better. It's—

Yeah, that's the basic mechanism.

Okay, cool. So you're in alignment with that. I figured you would be, because it's not like orthomolecular guys haven't known this for 20 years. It's just not common knowledge. And it's, the book is called Headstrong. The interesting thing there though is that reactive oxygen species, the things that antioxidants quench, are important signaling molecules for apoptosis, which is cell death, which is, you want apoptosis in cancer. And this is why a lot of my friends, the alternative practitioners, or orthomolecular or functional, however they call themselves, they'll use intravenous ozone followed by intravenous vitamin C on different days even. Because what they're doing is they're increasing pro-oxidant because it's a stress signal in cells that says, "Get out of here, like, malfunctioning cells," so that the properly functioning ones can take over. And there's also a case where you look at exercise and people who take antioxidants when they exercise don't get the benefits of exercise. Like weightlifting with no inflammation afterwards equals you didn't lift weights 'cause your body didn't get the signal to repair. How do you know when you're using vitamin C, and this is a question both for cancer patients and for just people listening who wanna take vitamin C at the right amount, how do you know if you're taking enough vitamin C to be pro-oxidant and healthy or enough to just screw up your exercise regimen? It seems like there's very different goals there.

Yeah, and so we're talking about hormesis, and I don't know if you're familiar with that.

Yeah, explain it for listeners for sure.

Well, hormesis is where you give something that would otherwise be thought to be a toxin to the body, and what it does is it induces a healing response. And if you give it in sequentially higher doses, the body will respond by becoming stronger. And so this is the whole basis of exercise. If you will go out there and over-exercise too much too fast, you can hurt yourself. But if you gradually increase your, your, the challenge to your body, you can become more fit. And that's part of the reason why in the Reardon Protocol, which is, by the way, there are over 1,000 Japanese doctors now using the Reardon Protocol for cancer patients in Japan. The Japanese have been, I think, the world leaders in understanding what this is all about. But part of the Reardon Protocol is to do a 15 25, 50, 75, 100 gram vitamin C sequentially looking at post-C saturation levels. So we're using a measurement guide to help us determine if we're getting the results that we really want. And so just using a few grams of vitamin C orally and you've got cancer, that's, that's not going to work. I mean, it's, it's a— there are benefits to antioxidants, obviously. A color-rich diet is— has lots of phytonutrients, and part of their benefit is that they do have antioxidant properties. But I think the concept of antioxidants has been misunderstood. And so what Dr. Tom Levy and I have introduced at our most recent conference is this concept of redox medicine, that everything in nature is redox.

Yes, explain redox for listeners. This is also in Headstrong. It's just like, define that. It's so important. You guys all have to hear this.

Yeah, well, life is redox, okay? So there's oxidation, there's reduction. So oxidation is when you lose— when, when molecules lose electrons and it causes dysfunction of some sort. Reduction is when, from some source such as vitamin C or good quality food, you are able to get electrons back in order to stabilize the molecule and to stabilize the structures that it's working within. But it's not like one or the other is good and the other one is bad. I mean, that's, that's an, that's an improper concept. It's a cycling effect, and without that cycling effect, you don't get the health that you want. And so it was a big revelation to me when I understood that oxidation is a necessary signal and as well as in your mitochondria, you've got to have oxidation. Otherwise, you're— you have no energy, you have no ability to generate ATP. And so oxidation is just as important as reduction. And so just talking about antioxidants as if that's a good thing, that's half the equation. You've got to have this balance of flow, and the flow has got to be occurring at the right membrane, at the right place in the body at the right time in the right amounts. And so this is redox medicine.

You can imagine that you're a battery, right? And batteries only do something when electrons come out the top and come around and go back in the bottom. Literally everything alive, plants and animals, has electrons coming in— sunlight, food, air— or you can add electrons with, with vitamin C with ozone or even with electrodes. Like, I actually do that when I fly. Sometimes I stick electrodes on that, put electrons into my system, and then they leave you, right? They can go through earthing, through excreting CO2. Everything living is basically a constant flow of electrons. And like you said, redox, that is the ultimate thing for all kinds of life. So let's take that now that people have got the concept of redox. What exactly is vitamin C doing that's different than, say, a ham sandwich? Like, electrons come in that way.

And, and this is where I have to be thankful to Frank Schallenberger. I don't know if you've ever met Frank.

He's quoted in my book, and he spoke at the anti-aging group. In fact, his work on mitochondrial insufficiency is, is a core thesis. So yes, Schallenberger, all of you should know his name, by the way. So go ahead.

Right. And so as I was beginning to understand, you know, exactly how of vitamin C works, it became clear to me that we were generating a free radical, hydrogen peroxide. And I thought, oh my gosh, you know, how does the free radical itself help cancer patients? And then I got interested in cancer as a mitochondrial disease, how most of the chronic illnesses that we have nowadays are mitochondrial diseases. And so once I understood that that, that the— that this— when Frank told me NAD to NADH, you need oxidants in order to get that reaction to occur. That then will increase your production of ATP, and then ATP can help you generate intracellular antioxidants, which you need to kind of, shall we say, shepherd the fire. You know, the mitochondria is a fire within your cells, and you have to have something that shepherds that fire. Well, that's the antioxidants that your body generally increases. But if you have disruption of the mitochondria and you're unable to generate ATP and you're unable to generate intracellular antioxidants, then the whole cellular structure starts to regress. And one of the theories of cancer is that we've taken the, the, the eukaryotic cell and we've regressed it back to a prokaryotic cell. Instead of—

explain those terms. Those are super important terms. I think some listeners might not remember their, their chemistry.

So, so anyway, a eukaryotic cell can make from one molecule of glucose 38 ATPs, but a yeast cell, which is a prokaryotic cell, it can take glucose and only make 2 ATPs through fermentation. And so what we've done is we've taken a taken anaerobic metabolism and we've taken it back in terms of the— as a matter of fact, some people refer to cancer cells as the selfish cell. They're trying to survive in an environment of inflammation and injury and toxicity, and so they regress back to this fermentative state. And there's a great book that I would like all your listeners to look at, and that is Tripping Over the Truth by Christopherson. Have you ever read that?

This is not a book I know.

By who?

Chris?

Who? Christopherson. It's a fantastic book because what he says is that this is the universal characteristic of all cancers, is that they are basically anaerobic. They're anaerobic. And Warburg discovered this. Dr. Warburg discovered this, and this is the Achilles heel where we need to be attacking cancer. The genetic theory, the genetic mutation theory is failing, and we know that now that we have been able to sequence the genomes of so many cancer cells. You can have 10 lung cancer patients and they have 10 completely different genomes that these cells are working with. So this idea of finding the mutation that we can attack with a chemotherapeutic agent is losing ground very rapidly. So we're having to find a different place to attack at and it turns out that all cancer cells are anaerobic and if you deprive them of glucose, they cannot live properly, and you can then start to overcome the cancer.

[Speaker:DAVE ASPREY] So Dominic D'Agostino came on Bulletproof Radio about 3 years ago and again more recently, who's doing work with hyperbaric oxygen and ketones and very low-carb diets. Are you a proponent of adding ketones? Like, I make the top-selling exogenous ketone product. It's called Brain Octane. And when you take that, you can raise your ketones. You can do it with a ketone-inducing diet. But do you combine that with vitamin C?

Yes. Again, it's, it's, it's vitamin C is really interesting. It's made from glucose. If you look at, if you look at the glucose molecule and the dehydroascorbate molecule, they're almost identical. And so using vitamin C, you're tricking the cancer cell to take up the deoxidized form of vitamin C. And then intracellularly, it's— it will go ahead, and in a sense, that's partially how it goes ahead and induces apoptosis in the cancer cell. Now, small doses of vitamin C orally are probably not enough to do the job, even though I'm— I don't know yet, because liposomal vitamin C may be an exception, and that we're looking at that because that's taken up into cells without any energy requirement. And so We're looking that maybe we can create a big enough dose of liposomal vitamin C that it will mimic the intravenous vitamin C. Okay. There are some other doctors that have looked at depriving cancer patients of all vitamin C for periods of time and then hitting them really hard with high doses of vitamin C as a possible way of inducing apoptosis in cancer cells. So there's a lot of research in this area. And it's not like it's all worked out now. It's more like we are in the early stages of flight and we need— we need research is what we really need. And unfortunately, it's hard to come by the funding for this, for this particular area.

Yeah, vitamin C is hard to patent, that's for sure.

You can't patent it. So but, but, you know, what we could do, there are ways like the liposomal vitamin C is a— it's a proprietary way of delivering vitamin C. Yeah, matter of fact, the Reardon Clinic does have the patent on IV vitamin C. We have never forced it.

Okay, let's pause for a second there. For people listening, you need to understand that if someone patents something as profound as IV vitamin C that's done all over the place, uh, they could restrict the use of that to— basically, they could take it off the market, for lack of a better word. In fact, I imagine you've probably had pharmaceutical companies try and buy you so they could get the patent to keep it off the market. Has that ever happened?

I think the pharmaceutical companies are just now starting to get interested. There's even a new term that's come out called PharmaScore, but it's still vitamin C. But it's the idea that high doses of vitamin C are having a pharmaceutical effect, which is really what orthomolecular is. But the way doctors think, this is the only way they can think that it has any value.

Well, you performed a huge act of public service for which you deserve recognition by patenting it so no big pharma company could patent it, and secondly, allowing people to do it anyway, which is kind of the opposite of what a patent troll would do. So I'm grateful that you basically allowed this to happen.

If you would have met Dr. Reardon, you would understand that he was a great humanitarian.

Well, that is profound. I did not realize that there even was a patent on that. So just—

Reardon Clinic has it.

All right.

It's going to run out We were talking about ways to extend it, and so just so that we stay in control of the application of IV vitamin C for all kinds of chronic illnesses.

To prevent it also from being taken for something else and then restricted, because if a pharmaceutical company says you can do it for one thing, they'll start whittling away at our right to do this. Now, vitamin C, 99% of it on the market comes from corn fermentation when it's manufactured. Corn is universally contaminated with two things. One is mycotoxin because there's been a change in fungal soil organisms so that they now become part of the rootstock of corn. This is the Fusarium species that makes fusaricin and the same coffee toxin that inhibits mitochondrial function called OTA and a few other toxins. And it's universally contaminated, unless it's organic, with glyphosate or Roundup. Stephanie Seneff came on the show and talked about how concerned she was about glyphosate contamination of corn-derived supplements as well as a bunch of other things. When you're pumping this much stuff into someone's veins, are you concerned about the corn source of vitamin C? Do you think it matters?

Well, we don't use corn-sourced vitamin C.

Of course you don't.

You guys are good. Yeah, so we try to avoid that. And I'm very concerned about it. I've watched her videos and I show almost every patient the charts on how autism and cancer and diabetes and obesity parallel the increased use of glyphosate in, you know, in GMO production. So, by the way, I've got a lot of farmers who are my patients and the weeds are all coming back. They are all becoming resistant to the glyphosate. So we've got this huge problem and it's not even working. Working anyway. So it's kind of like the whole antibiotic story in many ways. As a matter of fact, glyphosate was first patented as an antibiotic.

Is it antibiotic? I was going to say it if you didn't.

Right. And so it's disrupting the gut flora. I saw you had David Perlmutter on. Yeah, that's a big story. That whole thing about the gut biome is big, and, and here we are killing the gut biome, and we wonder why people are having autoimmune disease and cancer and everything else, depression.

Does vitamin C help or harm the gut biome when you take it orally?

Well, I can't see that it— I mean, I take a lot. I mean, I said I take 10 grams a day. That's, that's my minimum. I usually take more like 20 grams a day, and I've never had digestive— in fact, my health really got much better when I started taking high doses of vitamin C, including my gut health. So I guess by virtue of my personal experience, it certainly has not hurt my gut health.

One of the things that people may have picked up from the Bulletproof Diet, if they read that or if they're like really geeky biohackers, is that collagen, which is this— the lining of your arteries is made out of collagen, your connective tissues, your fascia, the scaffolding for your bones, your skin, your hair, nails. And yes, I make Bulletproof upgraded collagen. I put it in my coffee. There's my plug and all that kind of stuff. But the way your body makes collagen is it requires vitamin C, it requires proline, right, and it requires glycine and lysine. And lysine, thank you. I was like, there's one other amino acid. So if you are short on vitamin C, you won't make good connective tissue. And this is part of my new book on stretch— or my new stretch marks book that's out there on Amazon. Yeah, it's like $2 or it might even be free right now. I just wish someone had told me. I'm covered in stretch marks from when I was between like 16 and 25 when I weighed 300 pounds. I'm in really good shape now, but I still have these stretch marks. They're at least bleached and I've done all this stuff because I'm just curious on how to hack that stuff. And what I experienced as a child is I lived in a basement that had been damaged by a flood. No one knew about toxic mold back then. So I always had asthma and I was always puffy and a lot of my cognitive, like Asperger's kind of stuff came from environmental sources, but I would constantly have these bruises that no one could explain, and I would get nosebleeds.

Scurvy.

There you go.

You were scurvy.

I had scurvy, nosebleeds 10 times a day, another sign of scurvy. And it's not like I didn't eat vegetables and stuff like that. What was going on is that my liver was like, give me every ounce of vitamin C possible to make glutathione, 'cause vitamin C is required for glutathione. By the way, yes, I manufacture a glutathione supplement for a reason, But the, the glutathione was soaking it all up. So my body was, in order to save my brain as best it could from the toxins in my environment, it was taking my vitamin C instead of making healthy skin without stretch marks, with— instead of making healthy arteries that wouldn't leak blood, it was saying preferentially give it to the liver. This is one of the things that no one talks about with vitamin C that I think is fundamental. And this is why I'm like, at least take a gram a day because you're probably getting more toxins than Mother Nature intended, even if you live an allegedly clean life.

You know Dr. Tom Levy, don't you?

Yeah, he's a great guy, another supporter of the nonprofit.

He says that all inflammation is localized scurvy.

Wow, that's a hardcore perspective. I don't know that I quite— I think it's all redox problems and mitochondrial insufficiency.

What he and we— sometime we can talk further, but vitamin C is the most friendly electron donor, and it fits in. It's the ultimate antitoxin. Let's just put it that way.

Okay, I would buy that.

It's not the only one, but it's— as far as reaching different parts of the body, there are other more powerful antioxidants, but as far as an antitoxin goes, Nothing is better than vitamin C.

I hear, I hear you there, and I think there's a lot of strength to the vitamin C story. And I, I don't take it after I work out. I don't take it before I work out. I don't usually take it if I'm doing ozone therapy, which frankly saved my brain. But I believe as a regular preventative, it's, it's super valuable. And also when I fly, I, I take a lot more. Like when I'm on a business trip, I'll triple or quadruple my dose because the biological stress and the toxin exposure is higher. So this is something you don't take the same amount every day like a robot.

Radiation exposure when you're in the plane.

Yeah, big point there.

In fact, we're talking about the trip to Mars. Really, what they've left out is the whole vitamin C story because they're worried about what's going to happen to the astronauts when they're exposed in space to that long of a period of vitamin C.

In fact, the whole redox story is missing there. And Peter Diamandis and I have become friends. He's one of the guys In fact, he's the guy who created SpaceX, or sorry, created the X Prize, which led to SpaceX, and one of the most remarkable humans I know, also a Harvard-trained physician. And I've had a chance a couple times to mention, "Hey, Peter, what about this flow of electrons? Where are we getting light, which is part of this, to make vitamin D?" So hacking the environment for our astronauts to go to Mars, I don't think that nearly enough work has been done. They kind of treat them like little robots. Like I said, more vitamin C, more environmental things would just be so important. How much vitamin C should an astronaut take?

I don't know. Dr. Yanagisawa, who's the head of the Japanese contingent, spoke on radiation sickness at our conference, and there's no question that a high-dose vitamin C will, will alleviate it. So I don't know what the dose— it depends on the radiation exposure, I assume.

You know, the other thing, since we're talking about radiation and in spaceflight and all the stuff I didn't think we'd talk about given that you're an orthomolecular physician. But that's why I love Bulletproof Radio. I love being able to chat with smart people. When I interviewed Dr. Veech, a guy who studied with Hans Krebs and has for 40 years been looking at ketone research, he was talking about the anti-radiation effects of ketones. So I always do some Brain Octane before I fly. I do have vitamin C. I have astaxanthin and other things like that because it's important. And if I fly, I'm traveling about 125 days a year. I fly at least 100 times a year. I'm planning to live to 180 plus. So I'd better be proactively managing that stuff rather than letting it accumulate and then trying to dig myself out of a hole. By the way, how old are you?

65. All right.

You look— for people on the YouTube channel, go to bulletproof.com/youtube. I think it'll take you right to our YouTube channel. And you can see, like, you are a very healthy-looking 65-year-old.

Um, I try to, I try to practice what I preach. Let's just put it—

it seems like it's working. You know, your, your hair is a little gray. Hey, so is mine. It's been great since that was—

mine was gray in my 20s, so I, that was— I missed that boat.

Yeah, mine turned gray in my 20s too. That's probably hydrogen peroxide related, we think.

I have stretch marks too, so I'm with you on that.

So yeah, do you have a history of obesity?

About 20, 30 pounds over. I used to get about 210, and I'm now 178, okay, in that range.

You're managing it well. And it— this is something I would just encourage people— I'm going to anger a few of the many physicians who listen to this. If you go into your functional medicine, or heck, even your Western medicine doctor's office, and your doctor is substantially overweight and looks unhealthy, I believe that the ethical thing to do is not to fire them for looking unhealthy, because that's ridiculous. But to look at the doctor and say, "Doctor, it doesn't look like what you're doing is working for you. Can you tell me why it's not working and what you're doing about it? Because that's gonna help me decide whether I'm going to allow you to let you help me." And if you do it respectfully, if you fat shame your doctor, I hope that they stick you with a needle full of something that hurts and they kick you out 'cause that's not cool. But you really should have the conversation that's like, "Look, if what you're telling me to do works, you should look good." not like a model, but just healthy. And especially you look at a 60-plus-year-old doctor and they look like they're 85. Don't do what they're doing. Like, I— so that's true.

That's been my motto all along. So, okay, yeah, we gotta walk the walk.

All right, why did humans lose the ability to make vitamin C?

Well, supposedly the environment at that time was lush with a lot of vitamin C-containing foods, and the spider monkey living in its in its natural environment will consume the equivalent of 7,000 milligrams a day of vitamin C containing food. And so the theory is, if you go back, let's see, there's a book called The Healing Factor, The Healing Factor, which you can get online free. And he, he covers that. And he thinks what happens is it was just trying to reduce the biochemical burden on the kidney because it was made in the kidney. And so, so now Linus Pauling says because of that, our brains became a lot more adaptive. We had to grow our brains because we could not adapt to the environment just by making more vitamin C. And we have now outgrown our brain's ability to adapt, and so we need to make the vitamin C externally and take it in higher amounts in order to survive the world that we have created.

That makes good sense to me. I have two more kind of cancer-related questions for you, three more, okay?

All right.

Let's go with the first one that's most broadly applicable for listeners. If someone doesn't wanna get cancer, that would be everyone listening, I believe, what is the right approach to vitamin C? Like how much and how often, just kind of the prophylactic dose?

Well, I'll just use an example. Dr. Yanagisawa, once again, in Tokyo, So he's one of 9 children, all of them have gotten cancer. He gets an IV vitamin C once a week, every week, and he's going on like— I've known him for over 5 years now, and he was in the— he was featured in the Time magazine— no, the Newsweek magazine for Japan talking about vitamin C. And so he's been able to prevent vitamin— or cancer in his body by using the high-dose vitamin C like that once a week. And then I think— see, I think he takes some orally as well, but that's his mainstay. I don't think everyone's going to be able to take IV vitamin C, and it costs $100.

It's $150 minimum per dose.

But I do think, you know, this is where you can use it in conjunction with all the, the health strategies that we now have in terms of— that you feature in your books and stuff, and that we, we try to promote here at the Riran Clinic. And so, but periodic use of IV vitamin C when you're sick is probably a good idea.

So just when you're sick, not like a couple grams a day for—

that's what people will normally shell out the dollars is when they're not feeling good, they'll come and do IV vitamin C. Lipo-C is very good because it— you get 100% absorption, no, no irritation to the gut. So, but I use vitamin C powder as well. So I think there's— I No one really knows what the actual preventive dose is.

I, I have some concerns about the liposomal vitamin C just because you're getting so much omega-6. If you want to take 10 grams of liposomal vitamin C, you're gonna get a lot of the fats that can oxidize. So there's like a dose limit that's driven by the amount of fat you can take from the—

talking about the phospholipids.

Yeah, because if you take too many of those phospholipids, it actually disrupts cell membrane integrity. So like, you can get a couple grams of liposomal vitamin C or glutathione, like the kind of stuff that I do. But when you want to go above that, you start like getting too many phospholipids and you mismatch the ratios. You come across anything like that? I don't know.

I was just thinking it was phosphatidylcholine, and I wasn't aware that phosphatidylcholine would cause a mismatch in the cell membrane, but I'll look into that. Thank you.

And the reference there is some guys who wrote a book called The Detox Protocol with a lot of reference about— there's two Xs in it— about the ratio of different lipids in the cell membranes for optimal mitochondrial function. So it turns out you take too much omega-6, even in the form of phospholipids, especially some of the stuff that's actually sold as a supplement, like the GPC form, sometimes that does unintended things that aren't good in the long term, especially for people with type toxins. So we're getting pretty geeky there, but still, some people appreciate it, other people are going, "What the hell did these guys just say?" So just pretend you didn't hear the last minute if you're not that geeky. Now, the next question is my friend Hal Elrod, author of Miracle Morning, has a form of very aggressive leukemia that strikes young men. He's been very public about this, which is why I can talk about it. And I believe he is going to a clinic that offers IV vitamin C. The question for you is, does vitamin C work better or worse for leukemia versus other kinds of cancer? Or is it pretty much if it's cancer, it kills it?

It's not that cut and dried. Uh, I— that we did have an oncologist that spent about 2 years here who did see the value of vitamin C, and he went back to Korea, and I think he's still giving high-dose vitamin C for myelogenous leukemia, but he really wanted big doses like 75 to 100 grams every day continuously. I actually don't know what is— we don't— we haven't seen a lot of leukemia patients here, so I can't really answer from a— from an experiential point of view. I know that he was big into it and thought it was beneficial. He's the one that thought maybe there should also be periods of time where you eliminate vitamin C, you know, in order to get some kind of a redox effect in that regard. And so, but I think that's, that's another area that probably needs a lot more research. We've mostly treated solid tumor cancers.

Okay, mostly solid tumor. The next question from an orthomolecular perspective about, about cancer is Doug Kaufman and another guy called A.V. Constantini Constantini, who wrote a book called Fungal Bionics. I bought this years ago. You've read it, okay. You're one of the few people. I bought it from his daughter. They had to mail it from Germany when it first came out because it was just unavailable in the US.

Was it called The Germ That Causes Cancer?

Constantini wrote a series called Fungal Bionics about how mold toxins, mycotoxins trigger cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, and breast cancer, and prostate cancer, a bunch of other things with tens of thousands of references, like unimaginable amount of work saying here's the smoking gun. Not that all cancer is caused by this, but between Constantini's work and Doug Coffin's work where he wrote a book, Cancer Is a Fungus, some of these hard tumors, or some of them actually, you talk about yeast metabolism, are some of them actually just like fungal infections that respond to vitamin C?

You know what, when you look at lung cancer chest X-rays, they look like fungal balls.

They do.

Their metastases. And, and I've had several patients who were diagnosed as lung cancer, and we've put them on IV vitamin C, and their cancer has gotten better. And maybe it wasn't even cancer in the first place. It may have just been fungal infections. So I—

if I had cancer right now, I would do all the diagnostic work and all that, but one of the things I would strongly consider would be a course of aggressive antifungals, just in case. Because there's, there's a link there. I would also be doing IV vitamin C the whole time unless I was doing IV ozone, which would be the other primary thing.

Well, I don't know if you're aware of it, but Dr. Levy and I have developed a sequence called a Scorbazone. Oh, you tell where we do ultraviolet bladder radiation with ozone in the morning, and then in the afternoon we do IV vitamin C, and then after that we do IV glutathione. So it's— we're using it mostly with Lyme disease patients, but I think it could be applicable to any chronic illness. It's early stage using this sequence of redox bombardments to try to help reset the body. Wow.

I am truly blown away. That sequence sounds like the right thing to do. For people listening, when you can increase the amount of stress on a cell for a little while with these oxidative molecules— remember, oxidation and reducing, they're opposite sides of the battery. You need them both or it doesn't work. It's like intermittent fasting or high-intensity training, but it's on a cellular level. So the ones who can't hang, they die. And the ones who can't hang, those are the cancer cells, those are the pre-cancer cells. And then when you bring all these amazing antioxidants in, like the glutathione, like the vitamin C, well, what happens then is the ones who got weak become stronger. So this is classical hormesis, what doesn't kill me makes me stronger. And it— that's a brilliant therapy, man. If I was dealing with some chronic stuff right now, I would be signing up for that because it, on its face, it looks like it should work.

And the other thing that we do with the IV vitamin C, we try to get them up to 75 grams. We do the first half fast, which is more of a pro-oxidant effect, second half slow, which is more of the antioxidant. So we're kind of getting that up and down redoxing in order to get the body to heal.

So —That leads to a question. People are now listening to this going, "Hey, I don't have cancer, but should I get an IV vitamin C once a month prophylactically because it's probably good for me?" What do you think?

—Our— the chairman of our board, Mr. Bernd Harnisch, who's well known in entrepreneurial circles, he does that. He's been doing it for the last 20 years, and he's never sick, and he travels all over the world in the airplane. And so he has places set up wherever he goes to do IV vitamin C, and that's our goal is to create a worldwide network network of IV vitamin C providers who can— who have been trained to give it appropriately and who can give it so you don't have to go in and become a pa— you know, the whole new process of becoming a patient. So we're really trying to mimic what the Japanese have done. They've got a network all throughout Japan. So if you belong one place, you belong every place.

I— that's a really good idea. I am working on the Bulletproof Labs opening right next door to the Bulletproof Coffee Shop in Santa Monica. And we have an IV room there planned, because you don't need to be treated as a patient, although legally there's some stuff you have to do, but we're not diagnosing or treating. These are supportive therapies for people who aren't working on things like that. And if you have cancer and you want supportive therapy, we don't need to know you have cancer. You can tell us, but the idea there is that this isn't a treatment for something. It's a resilience thing that everyone can benefit from. So people are now going, God, yet another thing that costs money, How much is a typical vitamin C infusion around, around the US or around the world?

If you do a 25-gram, you're probably going to spend about $120. Okay. And if you do higher, it goes up to $150, $170. So kind of like take $100, take $100, and then however many grams you get, add that amount to the $100. So if it's a 75-gram, it's probably $175.

Okay. And that's in line with 1 or 2 massages depending on what city you live in, maybe 3 massages if you have like the cheap place in the strip mall. And compared to some— what people will spend on a nice dinner with a bottle of wine, it's not unaffordable depending on where your priorities are. Or it may be something that you only want to do if you're really sick. I can tell you I get a Myers cocktail that contains some vitamin C and intravenous vitamins probably twice a month, along with a glutathione push. And I take my own glutathione orally most days, but not every day, because I like to have some days where there's high oxidation. And this is a worthwhile thing to do if it's within reason. And we talked about dosing. You're saying if people are feeling unwell, they should take vitamin C. Question there. Steve Fowkes, the guy who wrote the book with Ward Dean, Smart Drugs and Nutrients Too, Steve's a good friend. He talks about the dose-response curve for oral vitamin C. Like if you're getting a cold, The old rumors, drink some orange juice, which is BS. But vitamin C and colds, Steve's perspective is you got to take it almost to the point where you're gonna poop yourself in order to get results for a cold when you take it orally.

True or false? True. That's Dr. Cathcart's— he's done papers on this where he, he gave it— he, like, for example, mono, he considered a 100-gram illness. A cold was a 60-gram illness orally.

60 grams or IV? Orally. Okay.

Keep in mind that when you're sick, you can take a whole lot more vitamin C. Your gut will let it be absorbed a lot better. So, you know, and so he's got a paper on that. I don't know where it is. I'm sure you can Google it. And I'm— I think the Vitamin C Foundation has his, his paper on it where you can actually figure out, depending on what illness you've got, what dose you should probably be taking orally. Okay.

Okay, I've got one more question for you, 'cause I know you've got patients waiting for you. Final question is, if someone came to you tomorrow and said, look, I wanna perform better at everything that I do in my life, so parenting, being a good human, exercising, whatever, what are the 3 most important things they need to know? Not just about vitamin C, but just based on the path you've led. 3 most important.

Well, you gotta eat the right foods, number 1. You gotta get good sleep, I think. I think sleep is very important. And then there's 5 orthomolecular nutrients. There's vitamin C, vitamin D, magnesium, iodine, and then the methylating B vitamins.

They're all on my top 10 list. Love it. All right, so good. Thank you so much, Ron. Where can people find out more about your clinic and about your books?

Riordan, riordanclinic.org is our website. You can YouTube Riordan Clinic, and we've got probably 200 videos of lectures that I've given at our conferences, they're posted there. Those are probably the best ways. And our Reardon Clinic website has about 25 years of newsletters that you can access with really good articles of what we've been talking about since the founding of the clinic in 1975. So we're 41 years old now, and I've been here 27 years.

So it's, it's really a great place. Thanks for your work. And for listeners, if you're looking for that really high-end care with an attention to oxidative therapy, it's hard to beat the Rhoden Clinic. So I, I, uh, we've talked about some of the legends in the field today. You've actually worked with them. And thanks again for the work you're doing every day with patients. I think you're making a huge difference.

Well, Dave, thank you for having me on your show. We're trying to get the word out, and we appreciate all you do to help people live a high-performance life. Awesome.

Have a great day, and I'll let you go work with your next patient. Thanks. If you enjoyed today's podcast as much as I did— it was kind of fun to talk about vitamin C— I would love it if you just took a second and went to iTunes and just leave a review. Give us 5 stars and let people know that this is worth their time. There's actionable information in every one of these episodes. I focus on interviewing these maverick scientists, these people who are doing work that you've probably never heard of. That's changing people's lives in a major way. There's tons of things you probably didn't know about something as simple as vitamin C. So now you know how to use it, how to take it, and what to do if someone you know has cancer, that vitamin C can make a difference, as well as a ton of other cool references. Links to everything you want is in the show notes. So if you could just say thanks by doing that, I'd appreciate it. And you can support the show and support the work that I do to reach out to people like Dr. Ron Hunnichek just by leaving reviews and by making sure you get the good stuff. Thank you.

The Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider, carefully read all labels, and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guests' qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.