The sicker you are, the more supplements you will require; as health is regained, the dosage and variety of substances can be reduced.  In chronic illness, megadoses of many nutrients are usually beneficial.  Any sick adult should begin a life extension vitamin program unless they are highly allergic to so many things already that they can not tolerate many kinds of vitamins as well.  In addition to the life extension program, vitamin C should be taken by the chronically ill at a dose from 10 to 25 grams daily, depending on the severity of the condition.

Many people want to know whether or not they should take their regular food supplements during a fast.  On a water fast most supplements in a hard tablet form will not be broken down at all, and often can be seen floating by in the colonic viewing tube looking exactly like it did when you swallowed it.  This waste can be avoided by crushing or chewing (yuck) the tablets, before swallowing.  Encapsulated vitamins usually are absorbed, but if you want to make sure, open the capsule and dump it in the back of your mouth before swallowing with water.  Powdered vitamins are well absorbed.

On a water fast the body is much more sensitive to any substance introduced, so as a general rule it is not a good idea to take more than one half your regular dose of food supplements.  Most fasters do fine without any supplements.  Many people get an upset stomach from supplements on an empty stomach, and these people should not take any during a water fast unless they develop symptoms of mineral deficiencies (usually a pre-existing condition) such as leg cramps and tremors, these symptoms necessitate powdered or well-chewed-up mineral supplement.  Minerals don’t taste too bad to chew, just chalky.

The same suggestions regarding dosage of supplements for a water fast are also true for a juice fast or vegetable broth fast.  On a raw food cleansing diet the full dose of supplements should be taken with meals.

There exists an enormous body of data about vitamins; books and magazine articles are always touting some new product or explaining the uses of an old one.  If you want to know more about using ordinary vitamins you’ll find leads in the bibliography to guide your reading.  However, there is one “old” vitamin and a few newer and relatively unknown life extending substances that are so useful and important to handling illness that I would like to tell you more about them.

Vitamin C is not a newly discovered vitamin, but was one of the first ever identified.  If you are one of those people that just hate taking vitamins, and you were for some reason willing to take only one, vitamin C would be your best choice.  Vitamin C would be the clear winner because it helps enormously with any infection and in invaluable in tissue healing and rebuilding collagen.  If I was going on a long trip and didn’t want to pack a lot of weight, my first choice would be to insure three to six grams of vitamin C for daily use when I was healthy (I’d take the optimum dose—­ten grams a day—­if weight were no limitation).  I’d also carry enough extra C to really beef up my intake when dealing with an unexpected acute illness or accident.