Vitamin E death risk scare has some people avoiding nutritional supplements to their own detriment

Saturday, November 13, 2004 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: counterthink, health news, Natural News

What's most interesting about the recent headlines scaring people away from vitamin E is the fact that not a single article in the mainstream press has yet mentioned these studies were conducted on synthetic vitamin E, not the natural vitamin E provided by whole foods, nuts, seeds, wheat germ and various high-quality nutritional supplements. To review what has happened here, these studies looked at the health effect of a synthetic chemical that has been misnamed "vitamin E" because it has a similar molecular structure. In fact, this synthetic vitamin E has the opposite molecular structure of natural vitamin E. Yet researchers, scientists and journalists in the mainstream press continue to call this synthetic chemical "vitamin E" and thereby are scaring potentially millions of people away from taking nutritional supplements that are very beneficial to their health.

Most of the debate on this issue, in fact, has been about the dosage of vitamin E that would be considered safe for public consumption. There has been no discussion about the difference between natural vitamin E and synthetic vitamin E. There has also been an effort to get this fear to spill over to other antioxidants. The implied message in many news reports is that if vitamin E causes an increased risk in death, then all antioxidant supplements must be dangerous to your health. This is an inexcusable distortion of science that will only serve to worsen the health of people reading these articles by scaring them away from nutritional supplements that literally thousands of clinical studies have proven offer protection against chronic disease including cancer, heart disease, strokes, neurological disorders, diabetes, osteoporosis, arthritis, and many other common diseases.

In fact, given the poor nutritional quality of foods available today, combined with the fact that most people actually consume processed foods made with nutritionally depleted ingredients, it is impossible for the average person to achieve outstanding nutrition without taking nutritional supplements. There simply isn't enough nutrition available in the everyday foods consumed by people to provide sufficient quantities of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, phytonutrients, and other nutrients needed by the human body. That's why the healthiest people in the world are precisely those who take nutritional supplements on a regular basis.

I am one of those people. And by taking a heavy dose of whole foods, superfoods, and nutritional supplements on a daily basis, I have been able to achieve outstanding human health, including an LDL cholesterol level of 67, blood pressure of 105/60, and body fat of 10.5%. And, yes, I take vitamin E supplements as part of my everyday supplementation. If vitamin E were bad for me, it would be impossible for my blood chemistry to show these positive numbers, which have been verified by a laboratory and published online, right here on this web site, for everyone to see. Naturally, I'm taking natural vitamin E supplements and not synthetic vitamin E.

Most medical research projects don't actually study healthy people. They give synthetic vitamin E and other chemicals to heavily diseased people who are typically suffering from advanced-stage cardiovascular disorders, and then they take the results from those distorted studies and announce to the whole world that "vitamin E will kill you!" Maybe synthetic chemicals will kill people who are already approaching death, but that doesn't say anything about the health benefits of macadamia nuts, cashews, peanuts or other natural sources of vitamin E.

Sadly, most people believe the vitamin E scare stories and change their behavior to stop taking both vitamin E and other nutritional supplements altogether. And that, of course, seems to be precisely what conventional medicine wants people to do.