How Vitamin C kills Cancer, Including Cancer Stem Cells
If you’ve ever done some gardening and tried to pull up a stubborn weed, you no doubt have experienced this: you pull and pull, gently at first, but then with a bit more vigor. You start to feel some give in the soil and you give another tug, popping off the top of the weed and leaving the root embedded in the dirt. Not ideal. If you don’t go after the root, that weed will be back with a vengeance.
So it can be with treating cancer. If you just lop off the top without going after the “roots”, you’re leaving the job half done.
In May 2018, we shared a video on our YouTube channel that has largely gone unseen. (Compared to the millions of views that some of our other videos have had!) We’d like to give it a boost today and share some vital information with you. It has to do with the action of vitamin C against cancer cells.
First, let’s examine some interesting differences between normal cells and cancer cells. The following table gives some very basic, but critically-important, differences.
Basic differences between normal cells and cancer cells
Intravenous Vitamin C Kills Cancer Cells
When high doses of vitamin C enter the blood stream through an IV, this vitamin C will travel out of the blood stream and into extracellular fluid, bathing the body’s cells. Before coming into contact with the cells, this vitamin C is broken down into something called Hydrogen Peroxide (H2O2). Normal healthy cells can deal with this H2O2 with no problems whatsoever. This is because of the presence of Catalase enzyme. This enzyme converts the H2O2 into harmless water and oxygen. Since cancer cells do not have this Catalase enzyme, the H2O2 attacks the cancer cell in an oxidative assault. A peer-reviewed journal article from 2005 supports the fact that vitamin C will selectively kill cancer cells, and leave healthy cells alone.
Pharmacalogic ascorbic acid concentrations selectively kill cancer cells (source: https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.0506390102)
This is the holy grail of cancer treatment: finding an intervention that kills cancer cells but not healthy cells. In fact, your normal healthy cells love vitamin C. This is, for humans, an essential nutrient. Any time you see the word “essential” with regard to nutrition, this means the human body cannot make it on its own. Humans are unique in this way. Except for humans, monkeys, apes, guinea pigs, capybaras, and bats, all other mammals are capable of making their own vitamin C. From his book Curing the Incurable, Dr. Thomas E. Levy shares with us the following fascinating fact regarding vitamin C:
“The efficient vitamin C-producing adult goat can internally manufacture more than 13,000 mg of vitamin C daily to maintain its optimal health when not facing any significant challenges to its health. Even more amazingly, goats are also believed by some to produce as much as 100,000 mg of vitamin C daily when faced with life-threatening degrees of infectious or toxic stress!”
Now, What About Those Cancer Stem Cells
Like I mentioned earlier, if you’re pulling out weeds you have to get the whole thing! Here comes vitamin C to the rescue again. Another peer-reviewed journal article in Nature journal’s Precision Oncology, shows how vitamin C “preferentially kills cancer stem cells” in liver cancer. Through a specific cellular transporter, vitamin C is taken into the cancer cell in a highly concentrated way. Through the conversion of vitamin C to H2O2, the oxidative assault on the cancer cells takes place and reduces the population of cancer stem cells. The paper reminds readers that a risk and downfall of traditional chemotherapy is its inability to stop the formation of cancer stem cells. Cancer stem cells are, according to the author’s words, “the subpopulation responsible for tumor initiation, metastasis, recurrence, and resistance to chemotherapy.” If you don’t get the root - the weed comes back!
Vitamin C preferentially kills cancer stem cells (source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5871898/pdf/41698_2017_Article_44.pdf)
Vitamin C: The GOAT
With nearly 20 years of experience administering over 60,000 nutritional IV treatments, we truly believe that vitamin C is one of the Greatest (Treatments) Of All Time when it comes to natural cancer care. With it, we can damage the cancer cell and cancer stem cells, while preserving and enhancing the function of normal healthy cells.
Please take a few minutes and watch Dr. Huber’s original video from 2018 where she talks about all of this:
