Did you know…

More than 90% of Americans do not consume enough vitamin E to meet the estimated average requirement, and the standard blood test cannot detect the deficit. This is not a fringe claim. It comes from Maret Traber, the researcher who helped set the reference in the first place.

The claim, in the words of a member of the Institute of Medicine panel

Maret Traber directs vitamin E research at the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University. She sat on the Institute of Medicine panel that fixed the Recommended Dietary Allowance for vitamin E at 15 mg/day of alpha-tocopherol. In Advances in Nutrition in 2014, she reported the two-part finding that a public-health system rooted in her own reference has not integrated:

“It is estimated that >90% of Americans do not consume sufficient dietary vitamin E, as α-tocopherol, to meet estimated average requirements. […] Seemingly, adequacy of human vitamin E status cannot be assessed from circulating α-tocopherol concentrations.”

— Maret Traber, Advances in Nutrition, 2014

The full family, not the isolated form

There are eight members of the vitamin E family: four tocopherols (alpha, beta, gamma, delta) and four tocotrienols. Most supplements and most research protocols focus exclusively on alpha-tocopherol. Yet, as Packer, Weber, and Rimbach wrote in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences in 2006:

“Current developments in vitamin E research clearly indicate that members of the vitamin E family are not redundant with respect to their biological functions.”

— Packer, Weber, Rimbach, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2006

Alpha-tocopherol taken alone actively depletes gamma-tocopherol from the body, driving it to 30-50% of normal levels. And no laboratory in ordinary use measures tocotrienols.

What has been explored, and what has not

Vitamin E is not a nutrient that science has fully explored. It is a nutrient of which science has explored roughly one eighth of the territory, concluded on the basis of that partial exploration that the rest did not exist, and stopped measuring.

This entry is a companion to Right to Optimal Vitamin E Status (Full Spectrum).