The antioxidant vitamin story really started with the great American chemist Linus Pauling (1901-94), who won the Nobel Prize twice and was one of the most distinguished scientists of the twentieth century. His book “The Nature of the Chemical Bond and the Structure of Molecules and Crystals” revolutionized chemistry and was described as one of the most influential science texts ever written. He played a foremost part in laying the foundations of modern chemistry, biochemistry and molecular biology. He adapted chemistry to quantum mechanics and pioneered several fundamentally new ways of working out the structure of molecules. New Scientist described him as one of the 20 greatest scientists of all time, on a part with Newton, Darwin and Einstein.

In 1970, Pauling published a book called “Vitamin C and the Common Cold” in which he expressed the opinion, based on careful observation of his own experience, that regular daily dosage of vitamin C, in amounts well in excess of the minimum required to prevent deficiency, would produce an increased feeling of well being, and especially a striking decrease in the number of colds caught, and in their severity’. Pauling was well aware that most of the previous trails of the method had produced disappointing results, but pointed out that in none of the trails had the dosage taken by the participants been nearly large enough. They were, in fact, little more than was needed to prevent vitamin C deficiency.

Pauling’s case was that vitamin C had properties over and above those of preventing scurvy, but that if these properties were to be apparent, the amounts taken had to be very large by normal nutritional standards. Pauling made the case that large doses of vitamin C were by no means abnormal. He showed conclusively that, at a time when humans were evolving and were at the hunter-gatherer stage, the amounts of vitamin C taken must often have been very large.

Assuming that early people must have eaten anything edible they could get their hands on, he decided to work out how much vitamin C they would have taken in if, as must often have happened, the total daily calorie requirement ( about 2,500 calories) was met from a single foodstuff. The results were surprising. If they had eaten enough peas and beans to get 2,500 calories, they would have taken in 1,000 mg ( 1 gram) of vitamin C. vegetables with a low vitamin C content would have provided 1,200 mg; vegetables and fruits with an intermediate content would have provided 3,400 mg; high C foods like cabbage, cauliflower, chives and mustard greens would have provided 6,000 mg per day; and very high C foods like blackcurrants, kale, parsley, peppers and broccoli would have provided no less than 12,000 mg per day.

Many people who recognized Pauling’s status and did not think that he would make foolish claims were, however, impressed. This includes the author of this book who, for the last 20 years or so has virtually reversed his previous tendency to regular severe colds by taking at least a gram of vitamin C every day. The extraordinary results of this regimen, of course, led me to take a special interest in vitamin C. So it was with considerable interest that I began to realize, some ten years ago, that something new and very important was quietly emerging in the medical literature.

This was nothing less than a body of growing evidence that the frequency of a wide range of disorders not just the common cold could be substantially reduced by taking vitamin C. What had really happened was that, for the first time, we were beginning to understand the real cause of much of the bodily damage featured in various diseases what doctors call the ‘pathology’. This was,we now learned, being caused by a process called ‘oxidation’. The point to be made, at this stage, is that vitamin C has long been known to be a powerful antioxidant a substance that prevents or controls oxidation.

The literature in the medical journals on biological oxidation and the use of antioxidants has been growing steadily for a decade. This growth has accelerated and in the last four or five years the topic has become commonplace. Many hundreds of papers have now been published in journals like the Lancet, the British Medical Journal, the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association. The interest has been so great that there has even been at least one completely new journal devoted exclusively to the subject. The general scientific journals like Nature and Science, specialized biochemical and molecular biology journals, and the popular science magazines like New Scientist and Scientific American have also published much material on this subject.