How to Live Longer and Feel Better [Paperback]

Linus Pauling (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2006

How to Live Longer and Feel Better draws on two-time Nobel prize winner Linus Pauling's vast scientific knowledge--and plenty of common sense. The result is a remarkably practical plan for adding years to your life. TP: Freeman. (Nonfiction)

--This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 338 pages
• Publisher: Oregon State University Press (May 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0870710966
• ISBN-13: 978-0870710964
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #33,984 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

161 of 164 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More Quantity and Quality of Life--Guaranteed!, February 5, 2002

By 

Aaron Reed (Santa Monica, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: How to Live Longer and Feel Better (Mass Market Paperback)

I was lucky enough to be home one afternoon 15 years ago watching the Phil Donahue show. Linus Pauling was on the show promoting this book opposite Jack La Lanne (the fitness guru), who was hyping some expensive vitamin regime he was selling. I had never taken a vitamin in my life (28 years old!), but something about the sincerity and wisdom of what Linus was communicating made sense to me. I bought the book and followed the guidelines. I haven't had a serious cold or flu in 15 years. Oh yes, I feel the viruses and germs attack my system, and I will occasionally be congested or run a slight fever when a strong flu strain races through the population, but I just start taking 1000 mg of Vitamin C an hour at the first hint of illness and the symptoms never become more than a minor inconvenience.

I'm not claiming miracles, because believe me I've had my share of physical infirmities (ruptured lumbar disc, bursitis of the shoulder, vertigo) and I'm not a new age nut who completely rejects western medicine. However, the vitamin regimen that Linus outlines in this book will give you a turbo-charged immune system.

Please consult the text and learn about many other benefits of Linus' prescription for optimal health. Two teasers: First he explains why cheaper is better--don't pay a lot of money for natural, organic, bioflavinoids, etc. So even if the vitamin thing doesn't work out for you, at most you've spent 50-75 cents a day (because of inflation it may be a buck now, but I doubt it). Secondly, Vitamin C is a fantastic natural laxative. Talk about feeling good!

This sweet man with two nobel prizes has given the gift of health to humanity and it is yours for next to nothing. Don't be stubborn, be skeptical, but run a thorough trial and error test yourself. I have no doubt what the result will be.

102 of 103 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The real deal - straight from THE MAN!, April 21, 2007

By 

W. J Yates "j-b1" (Oklahoma City, OK USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: How to Live Longer and Feel Better (Paperback)

I was a CHEM major some 35+ years ago, and Dr. Pauling was sort of an icon among we BioChem wannabes - undoubtedly one of the great biochemists of the 20th century. To me the proof of the pudding is in the eating:

I cannot trace a single male member of my family, back into the early 1800s, who lived to see their 60th BD. My great grandfather died at 54, my grandfather in his early 40s, my father at 59 and my only brother of conjestive heart failure at 54. Are you impressed by now?

God willing, I will see my 70th this fall. People tell me I look like I'm in my late 50s, I haven't had a cold in at least 25 years, I've never really been seriously ill, and I feel good - thank you very much.

I first read Dr. Pauling's stuff on the wonders of Vitamin C (especially taken in conjuncton with Vitamin E) and became a devotee more than 30 years ago, based mainly on his reputation. I've been a Pauling vitamin popper for over 30 years now, although cut back to 10 grams per day, of Vitamin C years ago. I'm not sure my great health is due to the good Doctor's advice, but I'd be willing to bet the farm on it, if there was any way of knowing.

There is a lot of rather boring stuff in the book, like double-blind studies, which I place the nice-to-know category. Dr. Pauling's condensed recommendations for a healthy life, right at the start of the book, is about all you need to know IMHO. Start these straight away and read the rest of the book at your leisure is my reommendation.

Concerning this book, I believe three things:

1. Natural preventive medicine, properly applied, is the secret to a long and fruitful life, at least physically.
2. Dr. Pauling was a practical genius, and he was so far ahead of organized medicine it's amusing. They are still struggling to catch up more than 30 years later. The influence of $$$$$ perhaps?
3. Every person should buy, read and study this unbelievable little book. And if you do, you are likely to be very amazed at the results and how inexpensive the investment was.

65 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If I were to recommend just one health book, it would be this one, March 23, 2009

By 

Andrew W. Saul (Rochester, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: How to Live Longer and Feel Better (Paperback)

Reviewed by Andrew W. Saul
Assistant Editor, Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine

My Dad always said that when you want to know something, talk to the organ-grinder, not the monkey. With that epithet in mind, may I suggest that you promptly borrow or buy a copy of Linus Pauling's How to Live Longer and Feel Better, recently reissued in an updated 20th anniversary edition. Yes, this is THE Dr. Pauling: the man your chemistry teacher idolized and your family doctor tries hard to ignore. Why? Because Linus Pauling committed the cardinal sin of allopathic medicine: he, a medical outsider, dared to present, directly to the public, his insightful reviews of the scientific literature to demonstrate that high doses of vitamins cure real diseases. What's more, Pauling reassessed many supposedly open-and-thoroughly shut "vitamins-are-useless" studies and explained how the researchers had skirted the fact that their data actually demonstrated that vitamin therapy did indeed have statistical value. Again and again, Pauling criticized study authors who failed to interpret their own work fairly, or even accurately, and had passed off biased opinions as valid conclusions from their work.

When negative studies are revealed to actually be positive, organized medicine has egg on its beard. Hence, it has long been open season on Pauling, arguably the world's most qualified, and certainly the world's best known, critic of our scorbutic (vitamin C deficient) medical system. Pauling's two unshared Nobel prizes (he is the only person in history with that distinction) are no protection from ignorant critics who slam vitamins without reading the research first.

Like me, for example. I first encountered Linus Pauling's Vitamin C and the Common Cold in 1973 while I was a student at the Australian National University. In addition to being the author of my organic chemistry textbook, Pauling had also just visited our university. In the uni refectory (that's "campus dining hall" for you Yanks), I hereby confess that we privately made fun of Pauling. A physics student and I casually calculated on a serviette (that's a paper napkin, mate) that you'd have to do nothing but eat oranges all day if you wanted to consume the amount of vitamin C that Pauling recommended. Two Nobels or not, we thought he was past it, and we were not alone in our sophomoric view.

Some years later, now back in America and, quite suddenly, with two kids in diapers, I was reading all the Pauling papers and books I could get my hands on. Now, you see, I had become a man with an all-too-prosaic mission: to keep my two little kids healthy. Life for me has not been the same since, nor for my children. I raised them both all the way into college without a single dose of any antibiotic. I saw for myself that Pauling was right. Vitamins worked, for prevention and for cure.

It would be difficult to imagine that his advocacy of the practical medical application of vitamins would ultimately cause more of a ruckus than Pauling's previous overhaul of our knowledge of chemistry, or even the vicious blacklisting that Pauling got from the US government when he opposed nuclear testing. After bringing high-dose vitamin C therapy for colds and flu to the public's attention in the early 1970s, Dr. Pauling had to spend quite a bit of time defending much-larger-than-RDA nutritional medicine from an abundant supply of under-informed critics. By 1986, when he first published How to Live Longer and Feel Better, he'd had a lot of practice.

Pauling had the rare gift for making the complex understandable, and his talent shows most clearly in this book. Distilling thirty pages of scientific references into logical, common-sense advice, he covers vitamins and cancer, heart disease, aging, infectious diseases, vitamin safety, toxicity and side effects, medicines, doctors' attitudes, nutrition history, vitamin biochemistry and a good deal more. And, with all that, he still finds time to clearly summarize as he goes, and to include some personal thoughts on attaining world peace. This is perhaps the strongest presentation ever written on the need for supplemental vitamins. The new edition benefits from added notes, an introduction outlining Pauling's career, and the welcome inclusion of cartoon illustrations previously dropped from the mass-market edition. There are many good reasons why a one-second Google search for Linus Pauling will bring up nearly a million responses. How to Live Longer and Feel Better is definitely one of the best.