Robert Lustig discusses how vitamin E deficiency contributes to fatty liver disease, but the relationship is tricky: too little and too much can both cause harm. Past studies showed vitamin E helped when patients were deficient, though newer repletion trials have been inconclusive.
What's your take on vitamin E and non alcoholic fatty liver disease?
Well, so the problem with vitamin E is that it appears to have an inverted U shaped curve, that too little is not good for you, but too much is also not good for you.
Right.
And so finding the sweet spot in that inverted U is very difficult.
It's hard, yeah.
Studies of vitamin E repletion have not been valuable. They have not given us the answers we want. That's true. Having said that, vitamin E deficiency clearly appears to be associated with metabolic dysfunction.
Oh, interesting.
So you know how to utilize vitamin E. Vitamin E was one of the things in the Piven study that was done years ago in adult gastroenterology that basically helped fatty liver disease.