Laura Schoenfeld: Vitamin E is not something you typically want to be supplementing with. Alpha-tocopherols are not the optimal form. Unfortunately with multis, it’s very rare to find a multi that has every single nutrient in the form that you want it. I’m not saying that this is ideal, and perhaps doing a short-term multivitamin and then taking the person off the multi is better than leaving them on it indefinitely because of the alpha-tocopherol. Again, Chris may have a different opinion on this, so do not take this as me speaking for Chris. I’m just speaking for myself, and what I’ve found is that most multis are going to have at least one or two nutrients that you’re not thrilled about the form that is in them.
With vitamin E, 400 IU is not a ton. If you just have it with someone who’s needing a prenatal, that’s fine, but once they’re postnatal or done with breastfeeding and you don’t think that they should be using that kind of multi anymore, then getting them off it after a while would be my recommendation.
There’s a multi that I like to use with my prenatal clients. I can double check. I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I always forget what the brand and the product is. I want to say that this one has the right form of vitamin E, but again, it may not because, like I said, usually with multis there’s always one or two nutrients that are not optimal. Let me see what my prenatal is. I use the ProThera prenatal, and this product has 60 IU of the alpha tocopheryl succinate plus mixed tocopherols—alpha, beta, delta, gamma. Definitely the dosage is a lot lower. 60 IU is much lower than 400 IU. I use this one for a variety of reasons, one of them being that the vitamin E is super-low, so I’m not worried about them getting a lot of that vitamin E. That’s just what I use. Like I said, I’m not speaking for Chris. This is just the product that I like to use for my prenatal clients. Anyway,that’s ProThera prenatal formula if you want to check that one out. That might be another option if you want to use that instead of the Nutrient 950 with K, if you aren’t comfortable with the 400 IU of vitamin E.