The Nature of Vitamin C
The Perfect Food Theory versus The Orthomolecular Theory
The basis for Cowan’s, Fallon’s, and other naturalist’s arguments is that plantderived “natural” vitamins, and vitamin complexes which are obtained from foods, are more wholesome and generally better for us than individual synthetic vitamins. The naturalists argue that food complexes are preferable because groups of these substances usually appear together in healthful foods, and because individual vitamins do not work alone in the body to sustain health.
There are at least two theoretical reasons why plant food may provide perfect nutrition for humans and other animals: Either perfect foods evolved from a mutual dependency between the plants and the animals that eat them, or these perfect plant foods were created by divine intervention. Either way, plants and their contents are the model naturalists look to for the best guidance as to what constitutes proper human nutrition. This theory might be called the Theory of Divine Food Creation in Plants or the Perfect Food Theory.
The naturalists are not wrong that animals evolved to eat particular foods. It seems likely that animals and plants evolved together, and in such a way that any plants which the surviving animals generally ingest does provide some guidance as to the nutrition that the animal requires. To obtain information about the foods that are best for humans, this theory requires the study of our ancestor’s diets — what they ate, not necessarily why they ate it.
On the other side in the Pauling camp, orthomolecular nutritionists, or orthomolecularists, might argue that during the course of evolution, immovable plants had different survival issues from the evolving animals, which ate the plants.
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Three paragraphs outlining beautiful “natural” theory vs one sentence completely misstating what orthomolecular theory “might” argue.
I would suggest that the author would be better off not writing until gaining a basic understanding of the material.
The idea that the true vitamin C comes in a complex and therefore is better than ascorbic acid from a lab sounds nice, but ignores 70 years of thousands of research papers reporting positive results using ascorbic acid.