What I want from a supplement:
- 400 IU per capsule
- natural, not synthetic
- no soy
- inexpensive and readily available in Canada (I don't want to pay additional shipping and duties to import a niche product from another country)
You wouldn't think that'd be a tall order, but it's turning out to be.
The vitamin E the Shute brothers used was derived from wheat germ oil. Unfortunately, no major company seems to be manufacturing vitamin E from wheat germ anymore. I thought about simply taking expeller-pressed wheat germ oil, but assuming I could even find some at a reasonable price that wasn't rancid, by my calculations, I'd have to take about 20 tablespoons a day to reach 400 IU, which is way more polyunsaturated plant oil than I'm willing to consume. Besides, I'm gluten-intolerant and that probably wouldn't be a wise thing to do.
The only alternative I'm seeing to soy is supplements made from sunflower seed oil.
Of the sunflower-based supplements, these two fit my budget and are easy to obtain:
- Now Sun-E 400: https://www.nowfoods.com/products/suppl ... 0-softgels
- Natural Factors Whole Earth & Sea Sunflower Vitamin E: https://naturalfactors.com/products/who ... -vitamin-e
Does anyone have any thoughts on these products?
Of the two, I prefer the ingredients in the Now product, since it uses rice bran oil as a filler rather than flaxseed oil. Flax is extremely high in phytoestrogens, and though the research isn't clear on if the types of phytoestrogens in flax are harmful, I'd rather steer clear of it. I can't stand the taste of the stuff and suspect that may be my body's way of telling me to avoid it.
Then there's the question of which form of vitamin E should be taken. The claims are all over the map and confusing.
The A.C. Grace company states that:
Taking a Vitamin E supplement with only d-alpha tocopherol instead of the entire mixed tocopherols family of isomers can actually deplete the level of d-gamma tocopherol in the body.
https://acgrace.com/collections/feature ... ls#science
But the Linus Pauling Institute's article on vitamin E implies that the body probably doesn't have much use for anything other than d-alpha-tocopherol: https://lpi.oregonstate.edu/mic/vitamins/vitamin-E
Dr. William Wong goes so far as to call all the other tocopherols and tocotrienols "mere window dressing" and that products containing them are a scam: https://drwongsessentials.com/dry-e-500-iu/
But according to a post on this forum,
All eight forms should probably be taken. They compete with each other for absorption, so tocotrienols and tocopherols should be taken separately.
viewtopic.php?p=62825#p62825
Another poster on the forum claimed that taking a sunflower-based supplement containing only d-alpha-tocopherol made him virile, while A.C. Grace's Unique-E killed it: viewtopic.php?p=57202#p57202
I wish there were a resource site like the Vitamin C Foundation dedicated to vitamin E. Good information on vitamin E is hard to come by on the Web! It's hard to sort the facts from misinformation and disinformation.