Young healthy rats can swim for 45 minutes in 50 degree Fahrenheit water before drowning. Old rats can only last about 15 minutes. And old rats swim differently, less efficiently, with their lower bodies more or less vertical, sort of dog paddling. But when old rats were fed pantothenic acid at a very high dose for a few weeks before the test, they swam 45 minutes too. And swam more efficiently, like the young rats did. More interestingly, their coats changed color (the gray went away) and improved in texture; they began to appear like young rats. And the rats on megadoses of B5 lived lot longer--25 to 33 percent longer than rats not on large doses of B5. Does that mean "megadoses" of B5 have an unknown drug-like effect? Or does that mean the real nutritional requirement for B5 is a lot higher than most people think? I believe the second choice is correct. To give you an idea of how much B5 the old rats were given in human terms, the FDA says the minimum daily requirement for B5 is about 10 milligrams but if humans took as much B5 as the rats, they would take about 750 milligrams per day. Incidentally, I figure I am as worthy as any lab rat and take over 500 milligrams daily. My point is that there is a big difference between preventing a gross vitamin deficiency disease, and using vitamins to create optimum functioning. Any sick person or anyone with a health complaint needs to improve their overall functioning in any way that won't be harmful over the long term. Vitamin therapy can be an amazingly effective adjunct to dietary reform and detoxification. Some of the earlier natural hygienists were opposed to using vitamins. However, these doctors lived in an era when the food supply was better, when mass human degeneration had not proceeded as far as it has today. From their perspective, it was possible to obtain all the nutrition one needed from food. In our time this is unlikely unless a person knowingly and intelligently produces virtually all their own food on a highly fertile soil body whose fertility is maintained and adjusted with a conscious intent to maximize the nutritive content of the food. Unfortunately, ignorance of the degraded nature of industrial food seems to extend to otherwise admirable natural healing methods such as Macrobiotics and homeopathy because these disciplines also downplay any need for food supplementation. Vitamins For Young Persons And Children