Question from a fellow Holistic Health Coach:
We visited a functional medicine doctor today and when I mentioned we were doing high dose vitamin C (18-20 grams per day) she warned of kidney stones. Is this something we need to be concerned about?
Also is C in this high dose something we should cycle or not be doing daily long term?
Thank you
Answer:
Dr Robert Cathcart treated over 30K patients with Bowel Tolerance (high dose) vitamin C over more than 3 decades. Bowel Tolerance is definitely the way to determine your daily dosage of Vitamin C and is always recommended, life long, as that means taking all the vitamin C your body can use. Of course dosage will vary based on illness, injury, activity or stress. Going past BT means gurgling in the gut, soft stools, eventually diarrhea and dehydration. As long as your not getting gurgling in the gut and drinking plenty of water. You are not at risk.
Here’s what Dr Cathcart said about kidney stones during our OMArchives.org interviews:
Dr Robert Cathcart MD, counters the argument that too much vitamin C can cause kidney stones. In fact he uses vitamin C, B6 and Magnesium to resolve kidney stones.
TRANSCRIPT:
“The other criticism was that it would cause oxalate kidney stones.
Well, no one has ever been able to come up with a series of patients showing that it would cause oxalate kidney stones.
Believe me, that would be an easily, easily published articles if anyone would be able to do that and they have not been able to do it.
Well, but then the question is why is that ascorbate does not cause oxalate kidney stone because it is quite true that those of us who take ascorbate have high oxalic acid in our urine, like my oxalic acid in my urine is three times normal, but no kidney stones.
Well, it turns out that if you section a calcium oxalate kidney stone there is always s a nidus of infection in the middle of it. Now, they are saying it is a nano bacteria, and the stone grows around this nidus of bacteria like a pearl grows around a piece of sand in the oyster.
So the thing is that we may have the most expensive urine in town, but we also have the cleanest urine in town.
It’s that the ascorbate being spilled in the urine when you take large amount is sterilizing the urine and in fact some urologists are beginning to use this in people who have to have indwelling catheters all the time to keep them from getting infected and so anyway that seems to be the reason why we don’t get kidney stones.
I have given over 30000 people massive doses of ascorbate since 1969 and I have seen one or two cases of stones, but they really were not taking the high doses and out of 30000 I don’t think that is very many.
As a matter of fact, at least in one of them what we did was to up the vitamin C and give them B6 and magnesium
and then they didn’t have any more kidney stones.
Adel Davis, years ago had talked about how oxalate kidney stones resulted from a deficiency of B6 and magnesium
and we have found that to be true and a good treatment for these things, but I do say that people who take massive doses of ascorbate should drink a fair amount of water and you should never become dehydrated when you are taking massive doses
because you might actually get oxalate crystals in the urine, but there you wont have trouble as long as you drink a lot of water. ”