Vitamin Trader - Healthy Discounts on Quality Vitamins

Recently media has reported on a study by Johns Hopkins University concluding that supplementing with vitamin E may be harmful. However, careful review by nutritional experts reveal significant flaws in the study which call this conclusion into question. What is now known about vitamin E, and what new research reveals, is that natural forms of E work better than synthetic E and that mixed tocopherols provide additional benefits over alpha tocopherol, and in particular gamma and delta tocopherols have special beneficial properties. The following is an excerpt of an article by Alan R. Gaby, M.D., noted expert in nutritional therapies.

While alpha-tocopherol has a number of biochemical actions (such as preventing the oxidation of LDL "bad" cholesterol and inhibiting platelet aggregation) that would be expected to prevent heart disease, certain functions are performed better by gamma-tocopherol. For example, the formation of nitric-oxide-derived free radicals, which appears to be a factor in heart disease development, is inhibited to greater extent by gamma-tocopherol than by alpha-tocopherol.

In addition, gamma-tocopherol possesses certain anticancer effects that are not shared by alpha-tocopherol. Supplementing with large amounts of alpha-tocopherol alone has been found to deplete gamma-tocopherol.

Consequently, whatever positive effects are produced by alpha-tocopherol supplementaton might be counterbalanced by a reduction of gamma-tocopherol levels in the body, a reduction that would presumably be more pronounced when using higher doses of pure alpha-tocopherol. If high-dose alpha-tocopherol does adversely affect some people, one might reasonably expect that "mixed tocopherols," which contain all four naturally occurring forms of vitamin E, would not have the same negative effects.

Although mixed tocopherols are more expensive than alpha-tocopherol, the available evidence suggests that mixed tocopherols are the preferable form of vitamin E, both in terms of safety and effectiveness. Alpha-tocopherol is commercially available in two forms: D-alpha-tocopherol (the form that occurs in food and in the body) and DL-alpha-tocopherol. The DL-mixture is less expensive to manufacture than the D-form and L-alpha-tocopherol does not occur naturally in food or in the body and has little or no vitamin E activity; preliminary evidence suggests that it may even interfere with some of the effects of D-alpha-tocopherol. Moreover, not much is known about the long-term safety of DL-alpha-tocopherol. Years of research suggest that vitamin E may help prevent heart attacks, slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease, reduce the deleterious effects of air pollution, and aid in the treatment of intermittent claudication, fibrocystic breast disease, premenstrual syndrome, childhood epilepsy, certain forms of chronic hepatitis, osteoarthritis, and infertility. Nearly all of these studies used 400 IU or more of vitamin E per day. Whether lower doses of mixed tocopherols would be as effective as higher doses of alpha-tocopherol should be a topic of future research.