Funny, the study doesn't tell us what KIND of vitamin E. It has been known by those on the cutting edge for some time now that most Vit E supplements are only comprised of alpha tocopherols, which actually eliminates other forms of the vitamin like gamma, which may be more important.
A complete Vitamin E with all the various subfractions and forms is much less likely to have any negative consequence and is much more likely to have positive consequences.
Most who take E supplements are likely taking a very inferior form that very well could be a problem, but certainly is helping less than it should.
All the Doctors quoted in the article could certainly mention that not all Vit E Supps are the same and the study cold have noted that poor quality, unbalanced E supps may the real problem, but they would rather blame Vit E in the generic sense. Us rubes can't be trusted to critically think about the matter, so they simplify it for us. They would love to outlaw supps altogether so that we can depend on them for costly pharmaceuticals, which generally have more questionable safety records themselves!
This leads me to conclude that the study is simply another scare piece, pushed by somebody with an anti-supplement bias. If that bias was centered around shoddy marketing practices by the supplement industry or general supplement ignorance, I wouldn't have a problem with it. Yet typically, these kinds of studies are advanced by those on a crusade against supplementation in general, with a relious zealotry that the concept itself is somehow evil.
Yes, indeed. They would rather you took Coumadin (rat poison) so that you can weaken yourself and die good and early the way a member of my family did. Tragic thing is the man had no symptoms that called for blood thinning.
Agreement ping.
Limitations: High-dosage (400 IU/d) trials were often small and were performed in patients with chronic diseases. The generalizability of the findings to healthy adults is uncertain. Precise estimation of the threshold at which risk increases is difficult.
Discussion
In our meta-analysis, we identified a dose-dependent relationship between vitamin E supplementation and all-cause mortality. Specifically, all-cause mortality progressively increased for dosages approximately greater than 150 IU/d. This dosage is substantially lower than the tolerable upper intake level for vitamin E, which is currently designated at 1000 mg of any form of supplementary alpha-tocopherol per day (corresponding to 1100 IU of synthetic vitamin E per day or 1500 IU of natural vitamin E per day) (1).
I haven't read the whole article, but apparently gamma-tocopherol per se wasn't a consideration. I think the only thing you can say with certainty is that more study is needed.
Ah, the truth at last...
The "artificial" vitamin E contains the D and L isomers of which only one is useful to the body and the other one (I think L) is a waste product and as such is possibly bad.