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Vitamin E Scare
Vitamin E users were recently frightened by news was that
high doses of the nutrient may be dangerous — “High
dose of vitamin E may increase death risk” was how
USA Today put it.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University reported that
people who took more than 400 International Units (IUs)of
vitamin E per day had about a 5 percent greater risk of
premature death than subjects who took lower daily doses
of vitamin E.
The researchers concluded that “High dosage vitamin
E supplements may increase mortality and should be avoided.”
While I can’t assure you that “high dose”
vitamin E supplementation will definitely improve your health,
I’m pretty confident that the Hopkins study shouldn’t
scare you about the nutrient.
The researchers didn’t study any vitamin E-users first-hand;
instead they simply reviewed data from 19 earlier vitamin
E clinical trials, including 11 "high dose" trials.
But 10 of the 11 “high-dose” trials didn’t
make any statistically significant correlations between
vitamin E use and premature death.
Apparently this glaring fact didn’t fit with the researchers’
seemingly pre-determined conclusion, so they “cooked
the books,” statistically speaking. They combined the
11 high-dose studies into one larger, supposedly more statistically
robust study.
But while this “study stew” produced the appearance
of a slightly elevated risk of premature death among high-dose
vitamin E users, the reported “increase” was exceedingly
small — too small to be considered reliable, particularly
given the crudeness of the statistical method used to obtain
it.
In a sense, it’s like the researchers tried to count
atoms with the naked eye — it simply can’t be
done.
The most prudent interpretation of the Hopkins’ results
is that there is no persuasive evidence that “high
dose” vitamin E users have a higher risk of premature
death. But that wouldn’t be news, now would it?
Steven Milloy is the publisher of JunkScience.com, an
adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and the author of
"Junk Science Judo: Self-Defense Against Health Scares
and Scams" (Cato Institute, 2001).
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