Too Much of a Good Thing

Vitamins are vital but they’re not benign.

First, the basics. Vitamins come in two versions, fat soluble and water soluble. Group One’s – A, D, E, K – are stored in body fat which means that if you consume very large amounts, the excess piles up. Group Two’s – B’s plus C – dissolve in water. Overdose within reason, and you will flush the extras away in urine. But even here “within reason” matters. Last year, a trio of researchers at the University of Melbourne suggested megadose C to treat an extreme reaction to a bacterial or viral infection such as COVID 19. But they were prescribing medicine. In real life, C binds with minerals. Up the recommended daily dose/RDA from 90 mg for a man/70 mg for a woman to 2,000 mg, and the result may be iron overload and kidney stones.

The latest vitamin to hit the watch-how-much limit is E, an antioxidant that protects vision, reproduction, blood, brain and skin. Get too little and you may trip into a deficiency characterized by peripheral neuropathy: weakness, numbness and pain, usually in the hands and feet. Deficiency or not, this is condition most commonly linked to diabetes, but it has also shown up in breast cancer patients treated with Paclitaxel (Taxol).,

But in 2010, when researchers at hospitals affiliated with China’s Zhejiang University School of Medicine combed through data on 486 such patients in nine different controlled studies and compared those taking vitamin E with those who weren’t they reported a reliably lower incidence of neuropathy among the women on E. While not ready to recommend E as a cure-all, they did conclude that the vitamin takers had “a significantly reduced incidence and symptoms of neuropathy.”

Sounds good. In fact, so good that everyone with even the suspicion of neuropathy should hop ion the bandwagon, right?

Not a chance.

Vitamin E is not only an antioxidant, it’s also an anticoagulant which keeps blood particles called platelets from sticking together thus “thinning” blood. The result may be excessive bleeding. That includes an increased risk of hemorrhagic stroke (AKA bleeding in the brain). In fact, one study tied this to daily doses as low as the 180 mg found in many over-the-counter supplements.

The answer is obvious. Whenever possible, get your nutrients from the best source: food. There’s plenty of E in food oils (canola, corn, olive an on down the list), plus egg yolks, seeds, and nuts. In fact, one egg plus an ounce of almonds and two ounces of sunflower seeds meets the FDA’S Recommended Daily Allowance/RDA of 15 mg a day for both men and women. Best of all, as Johanna Dwyer, RD, a senior research scientist with the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Dietary Supplements, says, “It’s pretty hard to overdose on food.”