“Allergies were extremely common in Eugene, but I found that some people had year-round allergies and they were consistently taking all of the anti-allergy supplements, panacinic acid, vitamin A, vitamin C and so on. And I suggested that they try stopping those for a while to see what happens. And I got essentially 100% results in curing the local allergies and that was when I started doing a lot of nutrition counseling because everyone was so surprised to see that they had been allergic to the supplement. And ascorbic acid, that caused me to investigate the history of it. [Earlier] In 1953, when I worked in the woods, the word went around that you could cure poison oak with ascorbic acid. And I tried it myself and in just two or three days, I completely recovered from a horrible case of poison oak and never caught it again. At that time, it was very expensive to make and the pills on sale were only 50 milligrams. Several years later, they developed new ways of manufacturing it. One of the processes Linus Pauling described as the lead room for making sulfuric acid, which is then the sulfuric acid is slightly contaminated with lead and other heavy metals. Then the cornstarch is processed, oxidized with this industrial sulfuric acid and ends up as ascorbic acid containing quite a bit of heavy metals. And with these new methods, I found that when people were taking 500 or 1000 milligrams, they would often develop cold symptoms when they took it rather than when they didn’t take it. And it apparently is irritating enough to the intestine that it causes endotoxin absorption and inflammation of the nose and throat and chest membranes. And citric acid is manufactured by very similar methods to ascorbic acid. And they really shouldn’t be considered to have anything to do with the natural ascorbic acid or citric acid. A person who can get very sick on 2 milligrams of synthetic ascorbic acid can eat 4000 milligrams of natural ascorbic acid with no reaction at all. I think that’s a very important point. Actually, even though they might call it the same product, the industrial manufacture of it produces a very different effect.” -Ray Peat
Author
Cari