Cancer and Vitamin C
Let's Start With Vitamin C
Humans have a genetic defect due to mutations in the GLO gene which codes for the enzyme responsible for the last step of
vitamin C biosynthesis. Humans, guinea pigs, and some, bat and bird species have lost the ability to make this important antioxidant that is crucial for collagen synthesis.
We cannot make ascorbic acid out of glucose in our liver and therefore we must supplement it every
day.
What's important here is that animals can. Our dogs and our cats use glucose in the liver in order to produce vitamin C, making their own vitamin C in their livers.
Dogs and cats do not get atherosclerosis. Thickening and hardening of the arteries. Linus Pauling felt that this human affliction is caused by a Vitamin C deficiency. That would make sense and other species who can make their own Vitamin C in the liver, do not get this problem.
Many animals have the gene to produce their own Vitamin C. In humans, there is a missing part of a gene encoding vitamin C production. It's actually quite easy to manufacture ascorbic acid from glucose. This gene has become non-functional in humans and gorillas, chimps, orangutans and some monkeys have this genetic flaw, meaning the loss
of vitamin C biosynthesis has occurred first in one of our primate ancestors.
A goat makes up to 13,000 mg of vitamin C per day.
