Natural Vitamin E

Vitamin E is a very misunderstood vitamin. People try to read labels and really they don't understand them. Instead of reading the ingredients, they read how many units of this or that something has which throws them off. Vitamin E is classified by the government as to the amount of tocopherol it has. There are seven tocopherols in all, alpha being one of them. The government has decided to rate any vitamin E product according to the amount of alpha-tocopherol it contains. The tocopherols are antioxidant part of the E complex, just like ascorbic acid is in vitamin C. So while tocopherols are a part of the E complex but they are not the active ingredient. Their function is to preserve the active factors. The entire E complex contains polyunsaturated fatty acids, vitamin F, vitamin A and vitamin K. There are also forms of vitamin D, manganese and selenium present. The traditional source for synthetic vitamin E is vegetable oils but the best quality natural vitamin E comes from whole vegetables. One manufacture uses green lettuce and the pea plant for their vitamin E whole food supplement. They press all the juice out of the plants and vacuum dry them. One could consider their supplement a "naturally chelated" product. Chelated means "combined." If you take any high potency laboratory chelated product, your body has to do some adding and combining in order to make them work. But if you take your vitamin the way nature provides them with proteins, enzymes and other vitamin factors, they are bound to work better. For example, if you could take vitamin E and separate the tocopherols from the manganese and put them back together in the laboratory -- chelating them artificially -- you would find they wouldn't work the same. Most high potency vitamin E products on the market are made this way. Tocopherols are broken down and separated from vegetable oil. Then they are packed into a gelatin perle to give you have a high potency vitamin E supplement -- a 200 or 500 International Unit vitamin E product. That means 200 or 500 International Units of alpha-tocopherol because the government insists that the potency of a product is measured by the amount of alpha-tocopherol it contains. The reason for doing this is to give the public a "high potency" product. The label of such a product will say "all natural" or "organic" since it was taken from oil, a natural organic source, but it's still not food. It's an incomplete product. You are getting lots of alpha-tocopherol, but none of the active components of the E complex; the F, A, K, D vitamins, manganese, etc. The whole food supplement discussed earlier contains 2.5 International Units of alpha-tocopherol in each tablet. The remainder of the tablet is composed of all the other vitamin E components and factors. How do the high potency vitamin E products work? By utilizing the active components of the E complex which still remain in the users tissues. As mentioned, the tocopherols are an antioxidant so symptoms such as angina will disappear, but often only temporarily. The body is designed to utilize food in its whole form. If you eat incomplete foods -- such as refined tocopherols -- all the missing factors are borrowed from the tissue reserves in order to make the partial food usable. Sooner or later, depending on one's past eating habits, there will be a deficiency of those nutrients, causing what's referred to as a "reversal of symptoms." This means there is a recurrence of the same symptoms which were causing the problem in the first place, often to a more serious degree.