Research shows that the entire diet, not just the vitamin, must be considered

Friday, January 16, 2004 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: nutritional supplements, vitamin E, vitamins

This is fascinating research about the importance of looking at the big
picture when researchers studying nutritional supplements, vitamins and
minerals. In this study researchers were able to demonstrate that the
absorbability of vitamin E was five times greater when this vitamin was
supplemented with grains and cereals than when taken alone as a
supplement. It's good research and it teaches all nutritional
researchers and important lesson: that vitamins, minerals and
nutritional supplements cannot be studied in isolation. The ability of
a vitamin to enter the bloodstream and actually be useful to the person
consuming the vitamin may depend greatly on what else that person is
eating. This may also help explain the wide variability in nutritional
supplementation studies that have been published over the last several
decades. One thing this story leaves out is whether researchers are
using the natural versus synthetic form of vitamin E in their studies,
because most studies that use synthetic vitamin E tend to show the
vitamin as having no positive effect on the body whatsoever. But
studies using the natural form of vitamin E - the variety of vitamin E
found in nuts seeds and other plants - tend to show very positive
results. This leads to the rather obvious conclusion that if you
represent a company who is interested in this crediting the value of
nutritional supplements, such as a pharmaceutical company, it is very
easy to create such results in a controlled study: simply use synthetic
vitamin E, and make sure that study participants ingest the vitamin in
isolation.