Editor’s note –
October 2026

Breakthrough RCT shows vitamin C helps in cancer: but we’ve known since the 1950s – so what took so long?

The old lags among us will remember Dr William McCormick, who in the 1950s suggested that cancer patients were so low in vitamin C they looked like they had scurvy. We easily recall Nobel Prize for Chemistry winner Dr Linus Pauling, revered for his work on chemical bonds but pilloried for suggesting in the ‘70s that vitamin C had a role in cancer. Pauling links us to Dr Ewan Cameron, his co-author for their 1979 classic Cancer and Vitamin C. Scottish physicians Cameron and Dr Allan Campbell were the first to publish successful results – in the 1970s – using vitamin C to help terminally ill cancer patients. In the process they helped launch the concept of orthomolecular nutrition.

End of history lesson.

Why am I telling you this? Well, researchers in the US have just discovered that a modest oral dose of vitamin C has startling results in people with pre-cancerous blood disorders – en route for leukaemia – and early-stage blood cancers.

Three important things here. First, this was a “gold standard” trial: a randomised, double-blinded, placebo-controlled phase 2 EVITA clinical trial, led by the grandiosely-named “Van Andel Institute–Stand Up To Cancer® Epigenetics Dream Team”.

Second, the results were published in the peer-reviewed American Cancer Society journal CANCER. It’s ticked all the establishment boxes.

Third, patients who took a 1g vitamin C supplement for a year had fewer adverse events during the trial and follow-up period AND were significantly more likely to be alive after approximately three years of follow-up than those who received a placebo.

Sorry, two more things:

All this on just 1g? This shows the parlous nutritional status of people with cancer. Not news to our pioneers. And as the researchers point out – this is a health food store dose, nothing dramatic.

And finally, I’m surprised-not-surprised  that this is the FIRST trial of its kind. Despite there being NO approved therapies that prevent the kind of progression into leukaemia that C appears to slow and despite the benefits of vitamin being in the literature for decades.

The researchers admit as much and make their excuses.

“For more than 70 years, scientists have explored vitamin C’s potential to support cancer treatment, but inconclusive results and methodological differences across studies left its possible role unclear. That has changed over the past decade thanks to advances in technology, which enabled discoveries that revealed vitamin C’s role in gene regulation and cell development.

“These critical studies found that vitamin C is an essential partner to TET2, an enzyme that suppresses cancer cell growth by regulating whether certain genes are ‘on’ or ‘off’. Mutations in TET2 can allow malignant cells to proliferate and are a common feature of leukaemia and related disorders”.

In 2016, the VAI–SU2C Epigenetics Dream Team conducted a clinical pilot study to assess whether oral supplementation was enough to increase vitamin C levels in the blood. That was a “yes” and, in 2017, the team started the phase 2 EVITA trial.    

More time wasted, but – “This early work was critical because it offered a foundation from which to develop the present trial,” said first author Stine Ulrik Mikkelsen, MD, PhD. “Vitamin C is important because it is involved in a range of biological functions, including the activity of enzymes that regulate normal cell function”.

1 gram is all it took. Given this paper made it into the über-orthodox American Cancer Society journal, this may well be a breakthrough that finally leads to serious research into vitamin C and cancer. (Report, page 59.)…