High-dose vitamin C reacts with metals in your body to create hydrogen peroxide. Cancer cells lack the enzymes to neutralize it, so they get damaged. Normal cells have plenty of those enzymes and convert it back to water, protecting themselves.
What does a high level of vitamin C do for you when it's inside of your blood? Well, the real cool thing with vitamin C is it's going to affect cancer cells and infected cells and abnormal cells differently than it affects your normal cells. So in a cancer cell or a virally infected cell or something like that, the vitamin C is going to get out, it's going to get to the cellular fluid, the extracellular fluid around your— the cells, and it's going to encounter metal mineral, usually copper or iron, and it's going to flip some electrons around and create a peroxide molecule or peroxide molecules. Peroxide then is going to go and settle outside and inside of, say, a virally infected cell or cancer cell, and if those cells are deficient in enzymes to break the peroxide down, like catalase enzyme, then the peroxide is going to cause damage to the cell, and that will cause the immune system to look at those damaged cells, and the immune system may come along and do some immune work to clean them up. And so that's the benefit of high dose for the abnormal cells, but you think, well, I don't want to oxidize all of my normal cells, which is a concern. We don't want to be oxidizing our normal cells on a regular basis. Well, the cool thing is your normal cells have, generally speaking, plenty of catalase enzyme, etc., so they will simply take the vitamin C's peroxide, they will convert it largely to water, and then they will suck up the vitamin C and recycle it and use it as an antioxidant, as a support molecule for the cell. So in So in cancer, when we give high-dose vitamin C, we've always got these 2 parallel benefits going on. One is the abnormal cells are getting assaulted, and hopefully we're calling in some immune activity against the abnormal guys, and then the normal cells are being supported, which is different than when we give somebody, say, a cytotoxic chemotherapy that goes in and is damaging to everybody because it has a cytotoxic drug effect, and it doesn't care whether it's your normal cells or your cancer cells. While that can be good, it can also be a bit damaging.
