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If you are taking a high dosage of vitamin E, many physicians recommend that this be discontinued one month before elective surgery to decrease the risk of excessive bleeding or hemorrhage. If you are taking blood thinners, you also want to discuss with your physician before taking any vitamin E supplements, since E is a natural blood thinner (or better yet, discuss with him or her switching to E, as it has fewer side effects).
As we warn about on another part of our website, you really need to be careful about the source of vitamin E that you consume. For some reason, synthetic fat soluble vitamins seem not only to be not very helpful, but very detrimental to your health. This would include synthetic vitamin E, which is not completely metabolized and seems to even interfere with the metabolism of natural E in the liver. Some vitamin E products that are labeled "natural" have been found to contain either only partly natural vitamin E or even ALL synthetic vitamin E. As discussed, you do NOT want to be taking the synthetic form, even by mistake, so always make sure that your E is truly natural!
Also, don't be misled by articles you read in the popular press about the dangers of supplementing with vitamin E. These studies all used synthetic vitamin E, and in our opinion it is normal that they had mixed results and sometimes showed problems with E supplementation. Last but not least, it is important for you to take your vitamin E supplement with a meal containing fats, so that proper absorption can occur.
Vitamin E Supplements and Mortality
A recent study that combined the results of 19 clinical trials with E supplementation actually showed a 6 % higher likelihood of dying for those taking vitamin E supplementation. I want to stress that the supplements used were synthetic, and the higher risk was really only associated with taking over 2000 IU of synthetic E per day. So the real lesson is: Don't Take Mega Doses of Synthetic Vitamin E.
Well, this statement most certainly applies to all synthetic vitamins, in our opinion. In addition to synthetic vitamin E causing problems in your body, it does not seem to be retained as long (that could very well be that your body is trying to get rid of it because of the problems it is causing you!) That's another reason why a MUCH smaller natural amount containing all the tocopherols and tocotrienols can be much more effective than large amounts of synthetic E.
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