Vitamin E Dosage: Trying to get enough from food is a waste of time



Vitamin E dosage is a complicated matter. Because vitamin E is an antioxidant whose function is to help protect and preserve your health, it is not clear where the positive effects of supplementation start to kick in. Good evidence exists that you can overshoot your vitamin E intake. But it's also clear from all studies showing benefits of vitamin E that you need much more than you get from a balanced diet.

One obvious fact hidden in the trials: in human studies that have shown benefits for vitamin E consumption, moderate to higher dose groups (100-400 mg/day) are the ones that see the benefits (1). Even if you eat avocadoes and walnuts all day, you cannot approach those kinds of levels from food.

Check the vitamin E dosage in your foods here

Once you start doing the math with these figures, you can see that we are talking about a huge rearrangement of your diet just to get 50-60 mg/day! And yet in one clinical trial after another, you see higher serum levels of vitamin E lead to the major results.



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References:

1. Meydani, SN, Meydani, M, Blumberg, JB, et al. "Vitamin E supplementation and in vivo immune response in healthy elderly subjects. A randomized controlled trial." JAMA 277 (1997) 1380-6.