A fresh look at how to best determine dietary guidelines for vitamin E has produced a surprising new finding: Though the vitamin is fat soluble, you don’t have to consume fat along with it for the body to absorb it.
“I think that’s remarkable,” said the study’s corresponding author, Maret Traber of Oregon State University, a leading authority on vitamin E who’s been researching the micronutrient for three decades. “We used to think you had to eat vitamin E and fat simultaneously. What our study shows is that you can wait 12 hours without eating anything, then eat a fat-containing meal and vitamin E gets absorbed.”
The study was published today in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Vitamin E, known scientifically as alpha-tocopherol, has many biologic roles, one of which is to serve as an antioxidant, said Traber, a professor in the OSU College of Public Health and Human Sciences, and Ava Helen Pauling Professor at Oregon State’s Linus Pauling Institute.
Continue reading at Oregon State University.
Image via Oregon State University.