Customer Reviews

How to Live Longer and Feel Better

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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.

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.

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.

I read this book in August 2003.

The same month I ordered vitamins as suggested by Linus Pauling on the internet and started taking them. I started with about 3-4 grams of vitamin C daily. Slowly, initially reluctancty, my wife too joined me. And then we started giving our 5 year old twin kids 1 gram of vitamin C daily.

Since then,

(1) nobody from our family has needed to visit a doctor. (earlier we had multiple visits per month)

(2) i have not had a cold, or a cough or a sore throat.

(3) my wife's allergies and asthma have improved.

(4) my kids do not get colds or sore throats or ear aches.

(5) my mother has also started vitamin c and her allergies of 20 years have disappeared.

Now, I sing praises of vitamin C and Linus Pauling in front of anybody who cares to listen !

The orthodox medical establishment doesn't yet realize it but America is in the midst of a major shift in the paradigm of health. To its credit orthodox medicine has conquered virtually all of the infections diseases which were the major ailments a century ago, but it has made little progress against the major ailments of our time -- heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and other degenerative diseases -- because it refuses to recognize what Linus Pauling saw clearly: these diseases are caused by nutrient deficiencies. They will not be cured by pharmaceutical drugs with harmful side effects but rather with appropriate nutrient supplementation -- especially vitamin C. Linus Pauling was a genius. He was the only person ever to win two unshared Nobel Prizes and, quite probably, was the greatest chemist of the 20th century. In this book he presents his simple common sense prescription for a long healthy life. I wish everyone would read this book and heed Pauling's advice. By the way, recently the American Medical Association reversed its long-standing opposition to nutrient supplements and now recommends them. Get this book and get the details about nutrient supplementation from the expert on this subject, Linus Pauling.

Linus Pauling was a man who challenged every conclusion another scientist would reach, only to draw his own conclusions. His conclusions on Vitamin C are backed by the gurus of the health field, namely Gary Null, Dr. Joel Wallach, etc.

This book is much better than his Vitamin C and the Common Cold book, which I bought first. 'How to Live Longer...' has pretty much the same exact information as his other books, but there is also valuable information about his vitamin regimen, that his other books fail to go into detail with. For years, I have taken divided doses of C throughout the day, even as much as 10 times. Pauling likes to take 3/4 of your daily C in one shot, in the morning. After adopting this method, I noticed a remarkable difference.

This book can change lives and like the title says, can help you add 15-30 years to your life, regardless of your age.

Linus Pauling, best known as an advocate of the health value of mega doses of Vitamin C, and a two time Nobel Prize winner.

In a major cancer hospital in 1976, they carried out a study of terminal patients for whom conventional treatment was stopped. The control group of 1,000 who had no Vitamin C therapy all died by August 10, 1976. The test group of 100 patients who were treated with Ascorbate (Vitamin C) had eighteen people surviving by this date. The average survival time of those getting Vitamin C therapy was 4.2 times longer than the control group, on average living over 300 days longer. Some of this group continued to live indefinitely. You can probably imagine that people in a less dire state would show even better results.

Another study indicated that people with cancer tend to have lower amounts of Vitamin C. It is possible that the Vitamin C is depleted because it is being used by the body to fight disease, and therefore it might be reasonable concluded, according to Dr Pauling, that an ill person would need more of this supplement.

Dr Pauling himself took about 18g a day.

There are anecdotal stories in the book. One in particular of a man who took 10-12g a day for a 52mm liver cancer lesion. The cancer was stopped from progressing, and eventually much to the surprise of medical experts shrunk 32%. Dr Pauling recommended he up the dose to 25g daily, and he eventually on his own initiative went to 36g. At the time he wrote to Dr Pauling he had survived two years.

One of the key issues we face as we grow older is disease of our connective tissue, and inflammation. This is manifested through conditions such as arthritis. I remember reading somewhere that about 80% of people age 60 have some form of arthritis. Vitamin C is an excellent anti inflammatory, and also great for allergies and colds.

If you are interested in learning more about health and longevity, I recommend reading this book, and I wonder if this was helpful.

It is the BEST from the BEST ... and let me tell you why. I am taking vitamins in large dosages as prescribed in this book for well over ten years. When I began this regimen after reading this book, most of the Doctors and Nutrition Specialists were against such large dosage of vitamin intakes. Over the last ten years, not only have they changed their position, but most now believe that it is not harmful, and some even prescribe the higher dosages. In this book, this is exactly what Dr. Pauling suggested. I am happy and healthy, physically keeping very active. Throughout these years, I have been monitoring my health and I have found not a single problem associated with this higher dosages of vitamins. Whether I will live longer is certainly an open question, but I am certainly keeping better than most of my peers in my age group. I highly recommend this book.

Dale Carnegie used to say this to help people accept opposition. Inspite of all opposition Linus Pauling takes on the counter arguments and cuts right to the facts. This is brilliant. Somehow people who didn't make it to a Nobel Prize seem to feel elevated when they run down Pauling's research. They remind me of Mark Twain: "The researches of many commentators have already thrown much darkness on this subject, and it is probable, if they continue, we'll soon know nothing at all about it." Pauling's research is not the only realm where this takes place. And I see a lot clearer why his work is great work. The book tackles the foes with mere facts. I can't but admire him after reading this book. As a byproduct I received splendid ideas and direction on how to live longer and feel better.

I'm no health nut but I'd like to stay as healthy as possible without spending all my spare time thinking and worrying about it. That's why I really appreciate this book by Linus Pauling. It sets a steady course through the piles of information and misinformation around the health and vitamin subject. And Pauling's bubbly personality can't help but make this book an even more enjoyable experience. I only wish we had more Linus Paulings in the world to speak, as he did, from a level of education, honesty and conviction.