Unfortunately I passed out on the floor during the night after my first bout of reflux and woke with more acute reflux and nausea. Luckily, the diarrhea finally came, so I avoided having to vomit up the burning acidic stuff, but the diarrhea was nasty. It was violent and accompanied by nausea and it was horribly foul smelling. It went on mercilessly for quite a while. I vowed during it that I would never take many grams of ascorbic acid again. To avoid another bout of reflux I slept in the tub with my head elevated, which worked rather well and I was finally able to sleep through the rest of the by now morning, though not well, and I still woke with some stomach upset, occasional mild refluxes, gas, malaise and muscle aches. The awful taste of ascorbic acid occasionally comes up my throat, reminding me of my foolish error born of frustration.
Well I'm sorry PaleoPhil.
I think that ascobic acid whatever the dose should be taken in solution of pure stuff in water. If the acid taste appears to be too harsh just stop drinking and intake or switch to a solution of sodium ascorbate. I do not recommand to buy capsules but rather the pure stuff in the form of powder.
I know you were only trying to help, Alphagruis. I guess this has been a lesson for both of us--be careful what you recommend and how you recommend it and be careful what recommendations you follow and how you follow them. I suppose thorough research beforehand and increased caution by both of us might have helped in this case. I had some experience with vitamin C and had done some past research, and unfortunately put too much reliance on this and my high opinion of you. In my impatience for progress I didn't investigate further before embarking on the experiment.
The capsules contain the pure powder, so you can just empty the capsules to get the pure powder and put it in water. There was no plain powder available at the market and I wasn't about to buy a big bottle of powder when I hadn't even determined yet that the stuff would be safe and effective for me. On the contrary, I looked for and bought the smallest quantity of it that was available, to test it first.
I do see what you mean about how taking this nasty stuff directly in water prevents you from taking too much of a dose, but this also prevented beneficial effect on my bowels. I used your method the first day and couldn't get beyond 3 g of ascorbic acid, so that would have stopped me at that level or lower if I tried the same the next day, but that level had little effect (so small that I'm not sure that it really had any effect at all, though enough of a hint of softening that I decided to try upping the dose, unfortunately), and there's no way I would drink pure ascorbic acid in water again anyway. It tasted nasty and even the 3 g was hard on my stomach, even with trying to buffer it with food. I thought that maybe taking the capsules and buffering with water and food would enable it to get past the stomach and duodenum and maybe digest better, but it didn't work.
In retrospect I wonder why is the body expelling the vitamin C with diarrhea and potentially vomiting unless it views it as very bad to have that level in the body? From a natural perspective, it seems like it wouldn't be a good idea to use megadoses of vitamin C except in rare, acute circumstances when nothing else works. On the other hand, taking excess doses of magnesium has a similar effect and that's generally regarded as safe up to a certain point. Magnesium is far less harsh for me than pure ascorbic acid powder in water, and actually settles my stomach, so between the two I would definitely choose Mg and don't recommend pure ascorbic acid powder to anyone. Also in retrospect, I should have known that ascorbic acid would not be a good idea, because even the acid of orange juice is upsetting to my stomach and tends to give me reflux. My father has the same problem with it and his doctor of decades ago told him to avoid citrus juices and coffee, after which his reflux symptoms disappeared. This is a relatively common problem, from what I've seen on the Internet, but fruit fans never seem to mention it and perhaps many of them are unaware of it. In my frustration with chronic constipation I forgot to consider this problem.
Perhaps some benefit can come out of this misery by my serving as a warning to others about the potential dangers of megadoses of ascorbic acid and about the disturbing lack of discussion of potential dangers among Burger and his followers and other highly ideological dietary groups, such as the 30-BAD crowd. Beware wherever the focus seems more on ideology and propagation of the faith than on consideration and open discussion of ALL effects--harmful as well as helpful.
In France it's available for wine growers in cheap 1kg bags. You can get it in the US for instance here:
http://www.sourcenaturals.com/search/?terms=sodium+ascorbate
This is one of those rare instances when I can feel justified saying hell no! Never again. It would be unwise and irrational for me to do that given my experiences on both occasions I tried it and I humbly suggest that you don't recommend it to anyone without
strong warnings about the potential problems of severe diarrhea and nausea and with chronic use for gastritis and kidney stones (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/natural/patient-vitaminc.html), which are commonly listed as side effects for high doses of ascorbic acid, and from my experience I would add stomach upset and reflux. I despised ascorbic acid in the pure-powder-with-water form. It was harsh on my stomach and even 3 g produced a little reflux with very little benefit, which are the reasons why I tried leaving it in the capsules. I could probably manage the vitamin C powder drinks, which are buffered with refined sugar, but I don't handle refined sugar well, or any sweetener for that matter, and would rather not take it as a regular treatment. My problem is not a occasional constipation, but chronic. This is an important distinction that bears repeating, as many people are only personally familiar with acute constipation and wrongly assume that all constipation is the same. I already have senna and mega dose magnesium, which I far, far prefer to ascorbic acid, for the acute cases of particularly bad constipation. I need something I can take nearly every day.
Now, if Vit C doesn't help maybe, as Iguana already suggested as far as I can remember, you should also give a try to cassia fistula, the fruit used by instinctos and claimed by Burger to help in body detox. This might well bear some truth and at any rate whenever I used it to this purpose it invariably triggered bowel movement in me a few hours after intake.
This is a legume whose fruit contains quinones well known for their laxative properties.
Yes, cassia fistula is a legume, like senna and both contain quinones (the quinones in senna that are the main active ingredients are senna glycosides). Senna is readily available where I live, but I've never seen cassia fistula fruit, which is probably why I've never seen it recommended anywhere except this forum and Burger's Anopsology.
Senna works OK for me acutely. The bowels it produces are mildly unpleasant and malodorous, however, and become black and the odd unpleasantness increases (as though toxins were going through my bowel, irritating it and producing mild nausea, and this is apparently part of how they work) if I take a higher dose of senna--again it seems that the body is trying to get rid of it and legumes like senna are regarded as toxic in raw Paleo for the lack of human biological adaptation to them, for the lectins and other toxic antinutrients they contain, and for the fact that most of them need to be cooked to reduce their toxins to digestible levels, so I'm trying to find something less toxic to use on a regular basis and save the senna and high-dose Mg for rare occasions.
Have you done any research on cassia fistula yourself and have you read any of the reports from Cordain's international team of scientists on plant antinutrients? I hope you're not just relying on Burger's recommendation. I see Cordain and his colleagues (Eaton, Bastos, Lindeberg, and others) as much more credible than Burger. I haven't seen any evidence that cassia fistula is toxic in occasional acute doses, but I haven't found any research at all on chronic use, which is concerning. After all, most people don't consider
any of the non-Paleo or cooked foods as toxic, but we here know better. I'm particularly looking for something I can use relatively regularly--preferably a nontoxic food. Ascorbic acid seemed like something sufficiently benign that I could take it more than just occasionally, but boy was I mistaken!
One eats just the sweet fruitpulp (only if attractive according to instincto stance 
) that surrounds the seeds. The latter are toxic.
If the fruit were also not mildly toxic by including milder levels of toxins like quinone glycosides, it would likely not have nearly as much of a laxative effect. This is one thing that many fruit fans don't seem to be aware of--that even fruits as well as seeds and other parts of plants can contain toxic substances. Fruits are not always totally free of toxins, they just usually contain lower concentrations of defensive chemicals and less toxic varieties. The fruit-plant strategy seems to be to include just enough insecticide-type toxins to discourage small predators that aren't large enough to consume the seeds and spread them through defecation, but not so much that the fruit becomes bitter to larger animals that can spread the seeds of the fruit.
Not just plants, but also arthropods take advantage of the toxic nature of quinones to defend themselves against predators:
"Some of the quinones don't get used up, but sit on the epidermis, making the arthropod distasteful. (Quinones are used as defensive secretions in a variety of modern arthropods, from beetles to millipedes. [Eisner, 1970])" (
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/bombardier.html)
So it's not that quinones are inherently nontoxic, it's that the levels in sources like cassia fistula and senna are not concentrated enough to be toxic for large animals like humans in the short term. What effects they have over the longer term is an unknown, though the research on other legumes suggests that there may be potential for some harm.
