Vitamin E: The Antioxidant That Failed Its Own Trials

Summary

Vitamin E is a genuine essential nutrient whose deficiency is real but rare, and it is also the textbook case of an antioxidant hope that big randomised trials demolished — the "it's an antioxidant, so high-dose supplements prevent heart disease and cancer" thesis was built on observational and surrogate-marker data and then reversed by the largest, cleanest, mostly publicly-funded trials: HOPE/HOPE-TOO found no cardiovascular or cancer benefit and a heart-failure signal, the Miller 2005 meta-analysis linked doses of roughly 400 IU and up to increased all-cause mortality, and SELECT found vita