Vitamin E: The Do-Everything Vitamin

In the 1960s, when Harold Miller began taking vitamin E capsules, he also found himself taking a lot of grief from friends and coworkers. “Ah, the sex vitamin,” some winked. Others were more blunt. “You’re wasting your money,” Miller recalls them saying.
Miller, now 75, is writing a poetic history of the neighborhood where he grew up. And he’s still taking vitamin E supplements. Miller feels gratified that medical studies and newspaper headlines have confirmed vitamin E’s benefits to the heart.
That, in a nutshell, is the story of vitamin E: assailed in the past, lauded today, and perhaps the most important key to a healthy heart.
The vitamin E controversy
Without question, vitamin E is now recognized as the leading natural preventer of coronary heart disease. A study published in the respected journal The Lancet found that supplements of natural vitamin E–a daily capsule containing 400-800 IU–slashed the risk of heart disease by a whopping 77 percent. Even the American Heart Association acknowledged the research, listing vitamin E as one of 1996′s top 10 developments related to heart health.
Incredible as it might seem, this is really all “old news.” The medical use of vitamin E to prevent and reverse coronary heart disease actually dates back to the 1940s. However, for most of the past 50 years, vitamin E was regarded by doctors as a waste of money and even disparaged as “a cure in search of a disease.”
In the 1930s, Canadian obstetrician/gynecologist Evan V. Shute, M.D., read veterinary research showing that vitamin E reduced the likelihood of miscarriage. Vitamin E did the same when Shute gave it to his pregnant female patients. By the early 1940s, Shute, his cardiologist brother Wilfrid, and a medical student had all noticed that vitamin E had potent cardiovascular effects. They cautiously treated several friends and patients with vitamin E and recorded dramatic improvements in heart function and blood flow.
By 1946, Shute and his colleagues reached an unanticipated crossroads. On one hand, medical researchers were largely skeptical that a simple vitamin might be effective against coronary heart disease, which had become the leading cause of death in the United States and Canada. Worse, it happened to be vitamin E, which at that time was recognized only as a fertility enhancer in mice.
On the other hand, other physicians were eyeing their research. One physician in London, Ontario, tried to claim some of the credit for using vitamin E to treat heart disease. To protect their discovery, Shute and his colleagues published a letter in the respected British journal Nature describing how vitamin E reversed heart disease. Within days, the June 10, 1946 issue of TIME magazine featured a story heralding their work as a “startling discovery: a treatment for heart disease … which so far has succeeded against all common forms of the ailment … Large concentrated doses of vitamin E … benefited four types of heart ailment (95 percent of the total): arteriosclerotic, hypertensive, rheumatic, old and new coronary heart disease. The vitamin helps a failing heart. It eliminates anginal pain.”
From that moment on, the Shutes found themselves locked in what would become a decades-long battle with the medical establishment. Evan and Wilfrid Shute treated an estimated 50,000 patients with vitamin E, but their detractors accused them of never proving vitamin E’s benefits with a controlled double-blind study. Shute argued back that a double-blind study–which requires withholding treatment from half the patients–was unnecessary and immoral.
By the 1960s and ’70s, it became clear that vitamin E worked in part as an antioxidant–that is, a nutrient that neutralized harmful molecules called free radicals. During the ’80s, researchers around the world quietly investigated the detailed mechanisms behind vitamin E’s activity, publishing their findings in scientific and medical journals. For example, Lester Packer, Ph.D., of the University of California, researched vitamin E’s roles as an antioxidant and in maintaining the integrity of cell membranes. Angelo Azzi, Ph.D., of the University of Bern, studied how vitamin E influenced gene behavior.
Vitamin E for body and mind
For a healthier heart
British physician Nigel G. Stephens led what has become the watershed study of vitamin E. His study of 2,000 patients with previously diagnosed heart disease found that vitamin E reduced the incidence of heart attacks by 77 percent.
Researchers believe vitamin E works primarily by preventing free radical oxidation of LDL, or “bad,” cholesterol. Free radical oxidation results in artery-clogging cholesterol deposits. White blood cells (the body’s defenders against illness) do scoop up oxidized LDL, but they then lodge in tiny blood vessels within the heart. Recent research has shown that vitamin E also reduces inflammation, which is regarded as another factor that promotes heart disease. In one study by Jane E. Upritchard, Ph.D., of the University of Otago, levels of C-reactive protein (a marker of inflammation and heart disease risk) decreased by half after study participants took 800 IU of natural vitamin E daily for four weeks.
For a better mind
In 1997, Mary Sano, Ph.D., of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, reported that very high doses of supplemental vitamin E (2,000 IU daily) for two years slowed the progression of late Alzheimer’s disease. Although the patients’ cognitive functions did not improve, they were able to care for themselves (e.g., personal grooming) much longer than were patients taking placebos.
Researchers have found that free radicals promote the development of beta-amyloid plaque. This plaque strangles brain cells and is believed to be a major cause of Alzheimer’s disease. In animal experiments, vitamin E has slowed the growth of beta-amyloid. Allan Butterfield, Ph.D., a chemistry professor at the University of Kentucky, found that vitamin E curbed free radicals in brain cells and protected them from beta-amyloid. Meanwhile, Sano is currently testing whether vitamin E supplements can slow the progression of early Alzheimer’s disease.
For lower cancer risk
Cancers result from mutations in genetic material (DNA) that change the behavior of normal cells. Many of these mutations are caused by free radicals, and vitamin E can reduce both free radicals and mutations. In a Finnish study, researchers found that a low dose of supplemental vitamin E reduced the risk of prostate cancer by 32 percent and the likelihood of death from it by 41 percent. Ruth E. Patterson, Ph.D., of the University of Washington, reviewed 59 studies on vitamin supplements and cancer risk and found that vitamin E was the one most consistently linked to a low cancer risk.
For better immunity
Vitamin E may boost your resistance to colds and flus while also easing inflammation. Studies at Tufts University have found that vitamin E supplements increase the activity of natural killer cells, a type of immune cell that destroys cancer cells and viruses. Nikbin Meydani, D.V.M., Ph.D., of Tufts found that elderly subjects taking vitamin E supplements reported having 30 percent fewer infections (colds and flus) compared with people not taking supplements.
Vitamin E also appears to moderate abnormal immune responses. Researchers recently reported that arthritics taking supplements of natural vitamin E (600 mg. twice daily) for 12 weeks said their pain decreased by approximately 50 percent. Vitamin E deactivates nuclear factor-kB and activator protein-1, compounds that activate inflammatory genes.
Growing recognition of vitamin E
If all these reports about vitamin E sound too good to be true, rest assured they are based on solid evidence. There’s substantial scientific support for vitamin E. Thousands of studies have been published in scientific and medical journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association, New England Journal of Medicine, and Circulation, and about 600 new vitamin E studies are published each year. Today, almost half of all cardiologists take vitamin E, and many recommend supplements to their patients.
Much of our present-day diet‘s natural content of vitamin E has been removed through the processing of cooking oils and grains. In effect, the modern diet has deprived many people of vitamin E. Compounding the problem, the widespread use of refined fats and oils increases our requirements for vitamin E.
Many experts, such as Robert V. Acuff, Ph.D., of East Tennessee State University, recommend that people take 400 IU of natural vitamin E daily. If you believe that actions speak louder than words, do what Acuff does. That’s the amount of vitamin E he takes every morning.
Jack Challem, the Nutrition Reporter TM, is one of the leading health reporters in the United States. He has been writing about advances in vitamin and mineral research since 1974 and is the lead author of Syndrome X:The Complete Nutritional Program to Prevent and Reverse Insulin Resistance (John Wiley & Sons, 2000).
Nutrition reporter Jack Challem is one of the most trusted names in our industry. He contributes a piece on the importance of vitamin E for this special heart issue.
What to take
The latest official recommendation for vitamin E from the National Academy of Sciences calls for consuming 22 IU of natural vitamin E daily. The problem? Most Americans get only about half of that in their diets, they usually get the wrong type of vitamin E, and they need much more than that to protect their hearts.
Much of the vitamin E found in American diets comes from processed food oils, such as soybean oil. The problem is that the most active form of vitamin E–alpha tocopherol–is extracted from these oils to make supplements, leaving mostly gamma tocopherol, according to Maret G. Traber, Ph.D., an antioxidant researcher at Oregon State University. Gamma tocopherol is also an antioxidant, but the human body selects primarily for alpha tocopherol when assimilating the vitamin. Essentially, processed oils have been stripped of the form of vitamin E that most benefits the body.
Even if you were to eat foods rich in alpha tocopherol, you would probably not be able to eat enough to get 400 IU of vitamin E, the daily amount most often recommended by experts. To get this much vitamin E from food, you would have to consume 5 pounds of olive oil, 4 1/2 pounds of granola, 2 1/2 pounds of almonds or filberts, 1 pound of sunflower seeds; or 8 ounces of wheat germ oil.
Acuff has shown that people assimilate natural alpha tocopherol twice as well as the synthetic version. It’s easy to tell the difference between them. In the fine print on the back of a bottle of vitamins, natural vitamin E will be listed as d-alpha tocopherol, d-alpha tocopheryl acetate, or d-alpha tocopheryl succinate. The synthetic will have a “dl” prefix, which refers to a difference in how the vitamin E molecule rotates. Think of dl as “don’t like.”
Blast from the past
I had the opportunity to interview Evan Shute, M.D., in 1974 and Wilfrid Shute, M.D., in 1979, the two brothers who pioneered the medical use of vitamin E. Together, they treated an estimated 50,000 patients with the vitamin. Evan Shute passed away in 1978; Wilfrid in 1982.
Responding to a question about the medical profession’s resistance to the use of vitamin E, Evan Shute told me, “Ordinary people have been officially told for a long time now that vitamin E in large doses has no therapeutic value. They soon find out for themselves. Nowadays, people are not stupid.”
He felt that one of the most important–and overlooked–uses of vitamin E was in the treatment of burns. He used a topical vitamin E spray (manufactured only by Carlson Laboratories) as well as oral supplements. Recent research has also shown that vitamin E helps protect skin against free radical damage.
Wilfrid told me that the American Medical Association’s criticism of vitamin E was peculiar. In 1950, Journal of the American Medical Association published a report by heart surgeons Michael DeBakey, M.D., and Alton Oschner, M.D., on their use of vitamin E in treating blood clots. Although the Shutes were the first to discover that vitamin E dissolved blood clots, Wilfrid gracefully acknowledged that it was Oschner who first reported that vitamin E could prevent them.