An Autism Recovery

Vitamin E (continued)

Ah, the high gamma tocopherol is apparently preferred because it is the form closest to the vitamin E found naturally in food (http://www.antiaging.com/white_papers/vitamin_e_jana.html).

Certainly he gets some in his diet (almonds, peanut butter, maybe his gluten-free cereal, tomato sauce all are apparently good sources of vitamin E), but he’s probably light on this vitamin compared to where we would like him to be.

So...where to get some of this stuff? Kirkman? Hmm. Softgels. Would really prefer a liquid to mix into the Painless Vitamin Shot.

Yasoo Health seems to have a handle on this. Interesting products that are optimized for delivery of antioxidative goodness despite serious digestive barriers. Also they use some of the same nutrition delivery ideas from the world of body building, which, as we’ve learned, is a community that really understands nutrition and nutrition delivery. That should give Corinne some confidence in this product.

Along the way I found www.nutritiongeeks.com and www.caoh.org which both offered (at first glance, anyway) some good information, so I’m adding them to the list of sites I’ll visit when looking for product like this in the future.

We’ll let you know how we fare adding some E into the mix...

Vitamin E

E works in concert with C & D (er, the vitamins, not the musical notes. It’s been a while, but I’m pretty sure that C, D, and E together form a secundal chord of major seconds...in other words, sounds like a train wreck :-)).

Anyway, so C, D, and E work together as antioxidants to fight free radicals that can among other things destroy brain cells. Many, most, maybe all, autistic children’s bodies are under what the doctors call “oxidative stress”, which is another way of saying there’s a bunch of those free radicals roaming around doing damage.

Vitamin E does antioxidant work and if you’ve ever played Gauntlet, you know how important it is to not just fight the bad guys but to stop new bad guys from being produced, and vitamin E does that as well. E also helps the body take in vitamin D and calcium. Sounds like a winner, so how much do we take in?

As usual, it’s according the size of the child and somewhere between 200 and 600 IU per day. There’s also an age guideline (you know how I feel about those, but here goes anyway) that says 200IU/day under five years old, and 400IU/day for over five years old.

Vitamin E is a fat-soluable vitamin, which means that it’s stored in the liver and in fat cells, so theoretically you could overaccumulate E and have some kind of toxic reaction. Hmm.

A note as to form: for reasons I don’t understand yet, the high gamma tocopherol form of E is to be preferred.

So let’s see where Logan is at on his vitamin E supplemental intake...well, not so good. He’s getting 30 IU/day of a different form (d-alpha tocopheryl acetate). According to this, what he’s taking now is a naturally sourced form of the alpha-tocopherol (not synthetic). The “acetate” is supposed to make it more “stable”, but I don’t know if that means more stable for its shelf-life or for doing its job once ingested.

More to come...