Some products don’t have a lot of luck. Despite its healthful properties, and its longevity of use, Vitamin E has experienced a lot of public relations problems. Just over 10 years ago, news sources were reporting that Vitamin E did nothing positive, and in fact, “increased the risk of dying.”
After the increased heart attack rumors were disproven, the next major report declared Vitamin E to be of no positive value – if not harmful still generally useless. A later report, also disproved, said that Vitamin E was a contributor to prostrate cancer.
Gauntlet of Bad Publicity
In addition to public relations problems, vitamin E oil suffered through an extreme shortage in 2012 when the oil available contained so many possible filler ingredients that product trust among consumers was undermined. Most recently, as concerns over GMO presence in all food and skincare products has grown, Vitamin E has become part of the general discussion about traceability of ingredients used in manufactured products, but it’s also the object of a specific inquiry: are there GMOs in the Vitamin E oil used in the products you’re buying?
What About Genetic DNA?
The source of nearly all natural market Vitamin E is fully refined vegetable oil distillate. This distillate is composed of a number of different oils, but the primary oil is soy. Which raises a perceptual problem. By most estimates, soy is an almost certain source of GMOs. Producers of natural source Vitamin E are sensitive to this general consensus. Most, including where we source our Vitamin E oil, use extensive purification processes designed to remove any foreign material, specifically DNA and protein. Still, to doubly assure manufacturers and consumers, and confirm the absence of DNA derived from genetically modified organisms, our Vitamin E oil is analyzed by an independent, certified and state-of-the-art lab, to confirm the absence of GMOs.
You’d Think It Would Be Easier
More and more, consumers want what organic certification provides, a process to track a product’s ingredients back to their sources, so consumers can be certain of what they’re buying, especially products consumed in or on the body.
The natural products market has always made tracking the true sources of certain ingredients more difficult than it should be. Vitamin E oil is one of those ingredients. So are olive oil and bergamot essential oil. But as more organic certifying agencies push toward full transparency, vendors and manufacturers will have to develop new ways of providing source information for their ingredients. In the meantime, certified organic manufacturers will be scrambling to keep up.