Vitamin C Reduces Field Rodent Lifespan Paper

A desperate absurdist attempt to "pull the wool over the sheep's eyes" was just made by picking up a field rodent that makes its own vitamin C and giving it two doses - a little bit more, and a lot more.  Typical for the people who want to make money off sick people, they touted this as new evidence that you shouldn't take extra vitamin C.  They measured the lifespan of these two groups and found that the group given a lot more died sooner than the group given a little more.

Here is the Achilles' Heel of the study.  There was no Zero Vitamin C group.  Why?  Because unlike humans and primates that do not make their own vitamin C, the field rodent would happily live its full life with zero dietary vitamin C.  So in effect, the little bit of vitamin C group is not zero + a little more, but what the rodent made in its own liver + a little more.  This is more than slightly misleading.  By not divulging the endogenous status of the field rodent's vitamin C synthesis, they are implying that the field rodent does not make vitamin C and that additional vitamin C kills the rodent.  Disingenuous yet with the cool dissimulation of people with an agenda to accept bribes from large corporations, it seems like a logical argument.  Except it isn't.

A person, any person anywhere on Planet Earth will die within a year without vitamin C in their diet.  The group omitted the zero vitamin C group, because the field rodent does not need it thanks to its own vitamin C generation in its own liver.  People do not possess this ability.  To properly match the studies, we would have demanded a zero vitamin C group for the field rodents and observed the life shortening qualities of vitamin C.  Then we would try this on humans and compare.

The results, which would be illegal and inhumane, would be the following:

Field rodents (n=100) + no vitamin C = full life span.
Humans (n =100) + no vitamin C = 100% mortality

The conclusion would then not be that supplemental vitamin C shortens human life, but extends it by 1,000,000%.  This absurd numerical conclusion of +1,000,000% is just as absurd as comparing the performance of a submarine on land versus in the ocean, or the effects of vitamin C on life extension in an animal that already makes its own to one that doesn't.

The last several decades of independent academic research have definitively and conclusively shown that Vitamin C and other antioxidants help to extend life span, not shorten it in humans.  A singular mass hypnosis piece in the pop media pimped by corporate funding contradicts thousands of scientists' findings across the globe.

What happens when a person doesn't take enough vitamin C, but just a tiny fraction of what you need?  This is still what will happen to you in 2013:

If some corporate shills had their way, we'd all just reverse centuries of scientific progress and go back to being scurvy pirates.  They should probably refresh themselves on medical documentation of scurvy.