Which foods are highest in vitamin E?

1 cup of Sunflower seed kernels, oil roasted gives 49 mg of vitamin E. That is 327% of the Daily Value, and it is the highest of the 1000 foods on this site that has not been fortified.

This ranking is per typical portion rather than per 100 g. Lists built per 100 g end up full of dried herbs and fortified bars, which is technically correct and practically useless, because nobody sits down to 100 g of thyme. Items marked fortified rank where they do because nutrients were added during manufacture, not because the food itself is rich in them.

What this means for you

Vitamin E lives in fat, and this table is basically a list of seeds, nuts and the oils pressed from them. Fifteen milligrams a day covers an adult. A 30 gram handful of sunflower kernels carries around 7 mg, so half a handful a day and a bit of olive or rapeseed oil in cooking finishes the job.

Nobody eats the cup portions at the top of this table. Read them as a ranking of density rather than as a serving suggestion.

The supplement is a different product

Almost everything written about vitamin E is about capsules delivering ten to fifty times what food does, and that is where the harm signal sits.

Myth. Vitamin E was sold for decades as protection against cancer and heart disease. The evidence for cancer prevention is insufficient, and in the SELECT trial men who had taken vitamin E ended up with 17 per cent more prostate cancer than men on placebo. A review of the dementia trials found the evidence for vitamin E too thin to recommend it there either.

Not for everyone. High doses interfere with blood clotting. For anyone on warfarin, aspirin or another antiplatelet drug, that turns a supplement into a bleeding risk worth discussing with a doctor.

There is one modern exception, and it is a prescription decision rather than a shopping one. In a randomised trial in 124 people with fatty liver disease confirmed by biopsy, 300 mg of vitamin E a day improved the liver tissue in 29 per cent of them against 14 per cent on placebo. That result belongs to people under a hepatologist's care, not to anyone told their liver looked bright on an ultrasound.

Two things have sharpened that exception since it was written, and they pull against each other. Pooling six meta-analyses in fatty liver disease, vitamin E lowered both liver enzymes and the scarring and fat scores in the tissue. The scarring only moved at doses above 600 IU a day, which is the range where the mortality analyses start to look unhappy. And in 105 people who had type 2 diabetes alongside the liver disease, 800 IU a day for 18 months missed the target the trial was built around. Only the arm that paired it with a diabetes drug hit that target. Vitamin E on its own did clear one secondary measure, and no group improved the scarring at all.

That is what a specialist decision looks like from the inside. It is not a reason for anyone else to buy a bottle.

Deficiency is rare and almost always belongs to someone who cannot absorb fat, such as people with Crohn's disease or cystic fibrosis.

Where the vitamin E in a real diet comes from

Sunflower oil is the richest everyday source, ahead of corn and rapeseed, then olive and soybean. But almost nobody gets their vitamin E from a bottle of oil they thought about. About half of Finnish adults' alpha-tocopherol arrived through cereals, bakery products, fat spreads, oils and dressings. Bread and salad dressing, rather than anything anyone would call a vitamin E food.

Established. How much of it you actually absorb from a meal ranges from 10 to 79 per cent, and what moves that most is how much fat came with it. The size of the effect is easy to underrate. The same raw vegetable salad with a little oil was eaten with no egg, with 75 g of cooked egg, or with 150 g. Vitamin E absorbed over ten hours came out at 117, 311 and 981 in the same units. Two eggs multiplied it roughly eightfold. One egg did not differ from no egg, which means the fat has to clear a threshold before anything happens at all.

Unsettled. The timing is stranger than the rule implies. In one study the fat that mattered was not the fat eaten with the vitamin. A 40 per cent fat breakfast and a 0 per cent fat breakfast produced the same blood levels at four hours. The difference showed up after the next meal, where the people who had eaten no fat at breakfast got 55 per cent more out of that second meal and finished ahead. In women with obesity and fatty liver, that rescue worked about a third less well. So eat your salad with oil or eggs, because the direction is right, and hold the mechanism loosely.

The number in the table may not mean what you think

EFSA says plainly that food composition databases are not harmonised, and are sometimes ambiguous about whether a vitamin E figure means alpha-tocopherol alone or every form of the vitamin added together. Their expectation is that this overstates the alpha-tocopherol actually present.

That distinction is not academic. Of the eight forms of vitamin E, the liver keeps one. A transfer protein picks out alpha-tocopherol and sends it onward into the bloodstream, while the gamma-tocopherol, the tocotrienols and the mixed tocopherols advertised on supplement labels are broken down and excreted in bile. About 90 per cent of the vitamin E in your body is alpha-tocopherol, whatever the mixture you ate.

Written from the evidence cards and the data on this page, then checked back against the sources. Bioma Learn has no human medical reviewer at this time and we say so rather than invent one. Information, not medical advice. How we verify.

Full ranking →

Full guide: Vitamin E: the antioxidant that failed its trials and then caused harm

Data: USDA FoodData Central. % Daily Value against the FDA DV of 15 mg. Checked 2026-09-15.