From the editor

My intention is to provide the general public with reliable and truthful information on antioxidants, foods, beverages, supplements, cosmetics, and natural products. The volume of information that becomes available every day is such that even the professionals working in the respective fields are having difficulty keeping up with it. For a layperson, it is impossible to read the original sources, to evaluate them, and to understand their scientific value. These “informational pieces” will help the general public to make educated choices, at the time when the federal and state agencies do not adequately protect them from potentially hazardous compounds.

Vitamin E supplement causes prostate cancer!

A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) claims that large doses of Vitamin E taken as a supplement, can cause a significant increase in prostate cancer incidence. The trial was carried out with 35,000 men, who were given 268mg of Vitamin E (400 IU) over a period of 10 years. Not only did Vitamin E fail to act as preventive means, but, unexpectedly, a 17% increase in prostate cancer was observed. Now the problem is that the authors of this study did NOT use natural Vitamin E. They used a synthetic one, which is much cheaper, but is structurally different from its natural counterpart. The designation of the synthetic product is rac-alpha-tocopherol acetate, while the natural product is enantiomerically pure, gamma-tocopherol derivative.

My feeling is that the days are long gone when structural and stereoisomeric differences can be ignored and the same efficiency could be expected from the synthetic sample as compared with the natural one, unless they are chromatographically and spectroscopically identical. This kind of research brings – undeservedly – a bad reputation to the word “synthetic.” It should be kept in mind that Vitamin E is a complex organic molecule that, other than having four different structural analogs (alpha-, beta-, gamma- and delta-), can also have 8 different stereoisomers for each structural analog! And natural Vitamin E is just one among many (gamma-isomer with R,R,R-configuration). It is conceiva