Prostate Cancer and the Villainous Vitamin E

[liverock]

https://hsionline.com/2012/06/26/the-villain-vitamin/

Men, don�t be surprised if your doctor tells you to stop taking vitamin E.
After all, he might have seen this� �Dietary supplementation with vitamin E significantly increased the risk of prostate cancer among healthy men.�

That�s the shocking conclusion of a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
What�s more, it was a �gold standard� placebo-controlled study. AND it involved many men over many years.
Impressive!
Except that it�s actually anything but.

Golden opportunity�squandered

This study might have provided an important breakthrough in our understanding of vitamin E.
Instead, it�s no more than an expensive blunder. That�s because the researchers got everything right except for one critical detail.
They used a synthetic form of vitamin E. Which is junk.

As Dr. Spreen has cautioned many times, this form of E supplement should only be used EXTERNALLY. As he puts it, �it�s a molecule shape that the body is not designed to handle.�
If the researchers had wanted to put vitamin E to a GENUINE test, they would have used d-alpha. Or even better � the full spectrum of tocopherols and tocotrienols.

But in using the synthetic form, they simply wasted their time. And they put thousands of men through a very long pointless exercise.
But maybe not entirely pointless.
Researchers have known for decades that selenium enhances the effectiveness of vitamin E. And that proved true here.
Subjects in this study who took both E and selenium had prostate cancer rates that were very close to rates in the placebo group.
So if researchers had given subjects the proper form of E, I believe the study would have produced VERY different results. In other words: prostate cancer PREVENTIVE results.

This was a golden opportunity � squandered. The only lingering question is whether they squandered it on purpose.

It�s no secret that vitamin E has different forms. Dr. Spreen hasn�t been keeping this information to himself all these years. So anyone with enough experience to conduct a massive vitamin E study would surely be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the different forms.

And�just for fun, let�s check the study�s Conflict of Interest Disclosures�

• Merck appears three times
• Pfizer twice
• Novartis twice
• AstraZeneca twice
• Sanofi-aventis, Abbott, Janssen, and Amgen all appear once
• One researcher helped develop educational presentations for a prostate cancer drug
• Another researcher is co-founder of Cancer Prevention Pharmaceuticals

All of that doesn�t add up to a smoking gun. But I�m finding it very hard to avoid the conclusion that the fix was in.

Sources:
�Vitamin E and the Risk of Prostate Cancer� Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 306, No. 14, 10/12/11, jama.ama-assn.org

This article underlines that the fact that the people doing the study had no idea what they where doing. or chose not to investigate the differences between synthetic and natural forms of Vitamin E before carrying out the study..

https://www.lef.org/featured-articles...tal_E_1018.htm

Synthetic forms of Vitamin E (prefixed dl)are used in cheap Vitamin supplements. Always check that your taking the natural form.