Nutrition Center

Alpha Tocopherol is not Vitamin E?
By Dr. Erik J. Rosseland, D.C.

There are seven tocopherols in all, alpha being one of them. The government has decided to rate any vitamin E product according to the amount of alpha tocopherol it contains (just as it rates vitamin C according to the amount of ascorbic acid it contains). The tocopherols are antioxidants, just like ascorbic acid. The tocopherols are part of the E complex but they are not the active ingredient; their function is to preserve the active ingredients.

Kids who have acne have it at a time when their sex organs are beginning to develop and require vitamin E. If they're not getting enough vitamin E in their diet, the gonads begin to take the vitamin E that would otherwise be used in the maintenance of the health of the skin. So there begins to be abnormal skin growth.

The entire E complex contains the polyunsaturated fatty acids. The traditional source for vitamin E is vegetable oils but the best quality vitamin E comes from whole vegetables. Green lettuce is one of the best sources as is the pea plant. If you take any high potency laboratory‑chelated product ("chelated" means "combined"), your body has to do some combining in order to make them work. But if you take minerals the way nature provides them, combined with protein and vitamins through the growing process of plants, they are bound to work. For example, we could take vitamin E and separate the tocopherols, from say, manganese and put them back together in a lab, chelating them artificially, and we would find that they wouldn't work. But they worked before you took them apart. One doctor uses the analogy of giving a watch to a chemist to analyze it for content. Then hit it with a hammer and give it back to him. Although it is the same watch and all the parts (ingredients) are still there, it has lost its function. A nutritional concentrate is an organized mechanism that has a function. If you break the function by separating the parts, the body can no longer use the mechanism. High potency vitamin E products are made this way. Tocopherols are broken down and separated from oils (the natural tocopherols are separated from vegetable oil). Then they are packed into a gelatin perle and you have a high potency vitamin E product, a 200 or 500 International Unit vitamin E product. That means 200 or 500 I.U.'s of alpha tocopherol because as we said the government insists that the potency of the product is measured by the amount of alpha tocopherol it contains. Of course the reason for doing this is to give the public a "high potency" product. Although the label of such a product will say "all natural" or "organic" as it was taken from oil, a natural source, it is still not food. It's an incomplete product. You are getting lots of tocopherols, but none of the active ingredients of the E complex. The vitamin E that I use is a two I. U. Product. Two I.U.'s of alpha tocopherol. Can you believe that? The remainder of the tablet is composed of all the other vitamin E components. If this product was on a shelf in a health food store it wouldn't sell because people read labels and don't understand them. Instead of reading the ingredients most people look at how many units it has and that throws them off. Even the ingredients could throw us off because the parts may all be there but have no function. Our product must have function.

How do the high potency vitamin E products work? They work by preserving the active components of the E complex which still remain in our tissues. As we said, the tocopherols are an antioxidant, so the person's symptoms, such as angina, will disappear, but often only temporarily. The body is designed to utilize food in its whole form. If you eat or take something incomplete, such as refined tocopherols, all the missing factors are borrowed from the tissue reserves in order to make the partial "food" usable. Sooner or later, depending on the person's past eating habits, there will be a deficiency of those nutrients, causing what's referred to as a "reversal of symptoms." This means that there is a recurrence of the same symptoms which were causing the problem in the first place, often to a more serious degree. So high potency vitamins are similar to drugs in their effect ‑ they cause a masking of symptoms which eventually create additional problems.

Thank you to those who have called me, thanked me, and told me how useful this information has been, even though you are now frustrated, along with me, as to the vast amounts of garbage that is being sold out there, that you yourselves have bought with your hard earned money and have had sitting on your shelves and in your bodies. Until next month.

Dr. Rosseland can be reached at Soul Purpose Chiropractic Center at 520‑444­1937 or info@SoulPurposeChiropractic.com.