How much vitamin E do you need per day?

The RDA for vitamin E is 15 mg a day from age 14 and over.

These are the reference amounts used on US food labels and in dietary guidance, not personal targets. What you need shifts with age, pregnancy, medication and health conditions. The % Daily Value shown on every food page here is calculated against the FDA Daily Value for vitamin E, which is 15 mg a day.

What this means for you

Fifteen milligrams a day, and nuts, seeds and vegetable oils do nearly all of the work. A cup of sunflower seed kernels carries three times the daily amount, almonds are close behind, and a tablespoon of sunflower or safflower oil contributes meaningfully.

That is a target most people reach without trying, which is why deficiency from diet is essentially unheard of. The cases that exist almost all belong to someone who cannot absorb fat, because vitamin E travels with fat.

Myth. Vitamin E was sold for decades as protection against cancer and heart disease. The evidence for cancer prevention is insufficient, and in one large trial men who had taken vitamin E ended up with 17 per cent more prostate cancer than men on placebo.

The upper limit is 1,000 mg a day, and the harms at the top end are about bleeding rather than toxicity in the usual sense. High doses interfere with blood clotting, which matters most for anyone taking warfarin, aspirin or another antiplatelet drug.

The ceiling is not where the trouble starts

Established. Nineteen trials in 135,967 people were pooled by dose. The trials giving 400 IU a day or more came out with 39 extra deaths per 10,000 people, and nine of the eleven pointed that way. Below that there was no such signal. The curve begins to turn upward above roughly 150 IU a day, and 400 IU is an ordinary capsule sitting well under the stated limit.

Read the caveat with the number. Those high-dose trials were often small and run in people who already had a chronic illness, so nobody can say a healthy adult would meet the same fate, and the exact turning point cannot be pinned down. What it does say is that the 1,000 mg on the label was set for a different kind of harm. The useful comparison is a capsule against the 15 milligrams already on your plate rather than against that ceiling.

Practical version: eat the seeds, skip the capsule.

Where 15 milligrams came from

It is worth knowing how this number was arrived at, because it is softer than it looks.

Unsettled. The 15 mg was not measured in anybody. It was extrapolated from an older figure, which itself came from depletion and repletion studies in men using a test-tube measure of how easily red blood cells burst in hydrogen peroxide. That marker was picked because haemolysis tracked red cell fragility in deficient people. It is a reasonable laboratory proxy and it is a long way from anything that happens to a person. Nobody has shown what intake of vitamin E produces better health, as opposed to sturdier red cells in a tube.

Unsettled. Which is why whether you are short depends on whose recommendation you open. Intake in the Nordic countries runs 8.8 to 13.2 mg a day and in the Baltic countries 7.8 to 13.9, averaging 12.2. Those same numbers fall short of the American 15 mg and comfortably meet the Nordic recommendation of 10 mg for men and 8 for women. Same food, same people, two verdicts. There is no deficiency epidemic hiding in that gap, and there is no reason to treat 15 as a line you have crossed or failed to.

The units on a bottle are not interchangeable

Two labelling facts make vitamin E harder to buy than almost anything else here.

Synthetic vitamin E, labelled DL or dl, contains all eight stereoisomers of alpha-tocopherol, and your body keeps only four of them. That makes it worth about half of the natural RRR form, labelled D or d, milligram for milligram. And most vitamin-E-only capsules hold at least four times the daily recommendation whichever form is in them.

There is also no single conversion between international units and milligrams. One milligram of alpha-tocopherol is 1.49 IU of the natural form and 2.22 IU of the synthetic. One IU is 0.67 mg natural and 0.45 mg synthetic. So a conversion quoted without naming the form can be wrong by a third, and most of them are quoted that way.

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.

Foods highest in vitamin E on this site

• Sunflower seed kernels, oil roasted — 49 mg per 1 cup (327% DV)
• Almonds, oil roasted — 40.8 mg per 1 cup whole kernels (272% DV)
• Almonds, blanched — 34.4 mg per 1 cup whole kernels (230% DV)
• Sunflower seed kernels from shell, dry roasted — 33.4 mg per 1 cup (223% DV)
• Almonds, dry roasted — 33 mg per 1 cup whole kernels (220% DV)

All vitamin E sources ranked →

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