The Vitamin E Effect

I’m going to start this post with a disclaimer: I do not know a lot about Vitamin E. There, I said it. But the reason I don’t know a lot about it is that the professional and research world also doesn’t know a lot about Vitamin E. I know this may seem crazy and such, but the medical world doesn’t know everything (gasp!). So I will tell you what I know to be fact, as well as some of the things research suggests about Vitamin E.

First and foremost, Vitamin E is another one of those fat-soluble vitamins I have talked a lot about the past couple of weeks. In fact, Vitamin E is stored in adipose (fat) tissue inside of the body, and this is particularly unique among the four fat-soluble vitamins—the other three are stored in the liver. So basically, Vitamin E is the middle-child of the fat-soluble vitamins and never gets invited to the liver party. Not that that is a party anybody would want to get invited to anyways.

Another trait that alienated Vitamin E from the others is that it does not have a known curative effect. In other words, you can’t give somebody a dose of Vitamin E and expect it to cure an illness or ailment. Vitamin A can help cure poor eyesight. Vitamin D can help cure poor bone strength. Vitamin K (which we will talk about next week) promotes blood-clotting, which can help cure a lot of things. But Vitamin E doesn’t do any of this. Instead, Vitamin E is a strong antioxidant, meaning it gets rid of free radicals (bad guys) inside of the body. Free radicals come from a couple of different places: unsaturated fatty acids that make up your cell membranes, and cholesterol inside of the blood stream. Vitamin E is able to neutralize free radicals and get rid of their harmful effects on the body. This keeps your cells functioning normally, and helps reduce (but not cure...) the risk of atherosclerosis.

The second known function of Vitamin E is its use as an anticoagulant; in other words, it does the opposite of Vitamin K. This helps prevent the buildup of plaque inside of the arteries, reducing the risk of a heart attack or a stroke. Having said that, though Vitamin E does improve the health of cardiovascular system, there is no proof that it helps long term…which basically means that professionals, in reality, have no idea how it works or what it does on the cellular and molecular level. They have simply just witnessed its effects in a laboratory.

Similar to Vitamin E’s functions, there is not a lot to tell you about food sources. Thankfully, the foods we know contain Vitamin E are specific and easy to consume. The list of preferred sources is short, containing only: vegetable oils (or foods that contain them…I don’t know anybody who consumes vegetable oil by itself), avocados, nuts, and seeds. That’s it. Four things. That can either be a good thing or a bad thing. I personally think it makes things easier, but I also really like avocados, nuts, and seeds. So I shouldn’t be the one talking.

And yet, I will continue to talk. But not for much longer, I promise. This is a bit off topic from Vitamin E, but I feel that it is important to bring up now that I have mentioned five nutrients and will mention many more. I hope you have noticed that the food sources for many of these nutrients overlap. For example, nuts have fat, protein, and Vitamin E. Dairy has carbs, fat, protein, Vitamin D, and can be fortified with Vitamin A. The point of telling you this is to ensure that you don’t stress. There doesn’t need to be a different representation of every nutrient at every meal. If that were the case, you would need dozens of foods every time you sat down to eat. Instead, eat foods that contain many…it makes life SO much easier (and cheaper, I might add). If it makes you feel more confident, every food I mention in my blog will contain more than one nutrient; most of them will contain many. So don’t stress. Eating shouldn’t be stressful, it should be joyful. We just need to make sure we are eating the right things.