How a crazy scientist duped America into believing vitamin C cures colds - Vox

How a crazy scientist duped America into believing vitamin C cures colds - Vox: "You wake up with a stuffy nose and your first reaction might be to down a glass of orange juice. Don't bother: everything we know about research shows that mega-doses of vitamin C are absolutely, positively useless at fighting colds. All that extra orange juice will do nothing to shorten your sniffles.

This all leads to the question: how did America get sold on a massive vitamin C myth? Is it vitamin manufacturers, trying to get us to purchase more pills? Has the orange industry tried to dupe us?

Part of it has to do with the fact that vitamin C is rarely harmful, so there's been little impetus to intervene.

"There’s a lot of misinformation out there on vitamin C because it’s safe," says Heather Mangieri, a nutritionist working with the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

And part of it traces back to one famous scientist, Linus Pauling, who came to believe that vitamin C could be a cure-all for numerous ailments — and, while he's no longer alive, he's still duping millions of people."



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