Travis
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- Joined
- Jul 14, 2016
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- 3,189
Here is a good analysis of almost 500 studies on Vitamin E.
https://examine.com/supplements/vitamin-e/
Not much to write home about unless targeting something specific like thrombosis or high liver enzymes.
are we saying that most of these studies are not worth anything because we dont know that they used mixed tocopherols?
I'm saying which vitamin E form they had used in each case could be discerned by reading them; but also that review articles, blog articles, and many books often fail to discriminate between the two. This is important distinction to make, and I would be willing to bet the majority of the studies that you had linked to were done using α-tocopherol. For historical reasons, α-tocopherol had come to be the main tocopherol used ('vitamin E' proper) despite its lower prevalence in natural food simply on account of its slightly higher activity (10–20%) in rat fertility assays. Although α-tocopherol might be slightly more efficient in terminating free radical chain reactions (free radical electron coming from another lipid), this variety it is far less effective than γ-tocopherol in neutralizing nitrogen-containing free radicals such as nitric oxide (˙NO) and nitrogen dioxide (˙NO₂). And it could be argued that in instances in cancer, reduced intra- and extracellular nitric oxide concentrations would be preferred.
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