Vitamin E’s history has been fraught with promise and despair. It has never achieved the acceptance of its cousins A, B, C, and D. For more than half a century after its discovery, it remained an enigma—the center of an intriguing scientific controversy.
Naysayers claimed that a vitamin E deficiency disease had not been proven in humans, and treatment with vitamin E was worthless. They called it “the shady lady of nutrition” or “the vitamin in search of a disease.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration for years officially denied vitamin E had any therapeutic value. Yet the FDA official who once read me a statement to that effect, when asked afterward, “What do you really think about it?” admitted to me that he took vitamin E each day before jogging.
The shady lady has at last become highly respectable. Scientific evidence concerning vitamin E’s many benefits is rapidly developing.
The results of recent epidemiological studies have heralded the benefits of vitamin E and other antioxidant nutrients. For example:
Vitamin E is, according to the latest scientific reports, one of the most effective preventative substances against heart disease, cancer, and some of the disabilities associated with aging. In fact, the president of the American Heart Association in 1996 declared vitamin E one of the biggest advances in cardiology. Cancer specialists and neurologists are issuing report after report that vitamin E is effective in warding off some malignancies and nerve damage.4
Why did it take so long for recognition of the value of this vitamin? Even before the positive results from recent major studies, physicians and other intelligent individuals began swallowing their doses of vitamin E. They began to believe that what the “food faddists” and “health nuts” have been saying all along may be absolutely true—vitamin E is of great benefit to the human body and, in medicinal doses, may help prevent and treat many of our major physical ailments.
Is vitamin E necessary to your health? This book is an attempt to inform you about the fascinating history and current scientific excitement about vitamin E, the inexpensive, formerly unappreciated, vital vitamin.