Nobel Prize winner or not, vitamins don’t treat common cold

DEAR DR. ROACH >> I cannot believe you would talk people out of vitamins as the flu season is approaching. You have some nerve to not quote studies to back up your false premises. Have you never heard of Dr. Linus Pauling? He got the Nobel Prize. — H.R.

DEAR READER >> Dr. Linus Pauling won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1954 for his work on the nature of the chemical bond, and his work was instrumental in understanding molecular biology. He won the Nobel Prize for Peace as well in 1962 for his work to reduce nuclear arms. (I haven’t even won one Nobel Prize, but I did study chemistry, physics and molecular biology before medical school.)

Dr. Pauling was a proponent of high-dose vitamin C as a preventive and treatment for many conditions, from colds to cancer. However, the majority of evidence has demonstrated that Dr. Pauling’s claims are not supported: Vitamin C supplementation neither prevents nor treats cancer. (Dr. Pauling felt that vitamin C didn’t “cure” cancer, only that it stopped cancer from spreading.) Further, it is generally accepted that vitamin C supplementation does not treat colds, but it may reduce cold incidence in individuals exposed to extreme physical exercise.

Vitamin C has little potential for harm. Kidney stones in people with too much oxalate is one exception. Although one study showed vitamin C increased risk of heart disease and death in women with diabetes, I think this is not likely to be a true risk.

A fair summary of vitamin C, with a hundred references, can be found at https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminCHealthProfessional/.

The data on multivitamins (as opposed to just vitamin C) are becoming irrefutable that a daily multivitamin does not confer any health advantages large enough to be seen in a population study.