Vitamin C and analyzing myself.

Most mammals produce their own vitamin C, but humans carry a mutated form of the gene responsible for one of four enzymes enzymes necessary for vitamin C production, and so we humans must find it in our diets. In effect, every human being has a metabolic deficiency!

And in light of this wonderful news, why not ingest tremendously huge amounts of vitamin C?

In fact, I’d like to make this into a double-blind study of myself. Here is what I would like to do: randomly take either a placebo pill or a vitamin C pill (without my knowing which I took), and record the type of pill I took. At the end of the day, I would further record how I feel (as a number from 1 to 100, perhaps), and then do a regression to see if the type of pill I am taking is correlated with how I feel.

In fact, I should do this with all sorts of things in my life. Certainly I should be doing this with my caffeine intake, because I feel so convinced that I am much happier while drinking coffee, but that may only be an effect of the coffee–which is, wonderfully and exactly, the point.