I recently read on NPR’s iPhone app (national public radio) about vitamin E being attacked, which focused on prostate cancer risk and links to vitamin e supplementation. However, after reading it, I was emailed the following newsletter from Orthomolecular Medicine News that gives another perspective. It’s very interesting. (You can read more articles here and subscribe to their newsletter here.)
Vitamin E Attacked Again
Of Course. Because It Works.
by Andrew W. Saul
Editor, Orthomolecular Medicine News Service
(OMNS, Oct 14, 2011) The very first Orthomolecular Medicine News Service release was on the clinical benefits of vitamin E. That was seven years ago. (1) In fact, the battle over vitamin E has been going full-tilt for over 60 years. (2)
Well, you can say one thing for vitamin critics: at least they are consistent. Consistently wrong, but consistent.
A recent accusation against vitamin E is that somehow it increases risk of prostate cancer. (3) That is nonsense. If you take close look at the numbers, you will see that “Compared with placebo, the absolute increase in risk of prostate cancer per 1000 person-years was 1.6 for vitamin E, 0.8 for selenium, and 0.4 for the combination.” That works out to be a claimed 0.63% increase risk with vitamin E alone, 0.24% increase in risk with vitamin E and selenium, and 0.15% increase in risk for selenium alone.
Note the decimal points: these are very small figures. But more importantly, note that the combination of selenium with vitamin E resulted in a much smaller number of deaths. If vitamin E were really the problem, vitamin E with selenium would have been a worse problem. Selenium recharges vitamin E, recycling it and effectively rendering it more potent. Something is wrong here, and it isn’t the vitamin E. Indeed, a higher dose of vitamin E might work as well as E with selenium, and be more protective.
And, in fact, this study did show that supplementation was beneficial. Vitamin E and selenium reduced risk of all-cause mortality by about 0.2%., and also reduced the risk of serious cardiovascular events by 0.3%. Vitamin E reduced risk of serious cardiovascular events by 0.7%. But what you were told, and just about all you were told, was “Vitamin E causes cancer!”
The oldest political trick in the book is to create doubt, then fear, and then conformity of action. The pharmaceutical industry knows this full well. One does not waste time and money attacking something that does not work. Vitamin E works, and the evidence is abundant.
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