This May Be The #1 Best Vitamin to Fight Cancer, New Research Says

While you can embrace the best eating habit to lower your risk of cancer and, at the same time, do your best to avoid foods that have been linked to the disease, there is also a vitamin that can apparently help to boost the body's ability to fight cancer.

When scientists at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center took a look at data from years of clinical records and conducted their own studies, their findings, which were recently published by the journal Cancer Discovery, showed that vitamin E effectively improved the results of cancer immunotherapies. In fact, cancer patients who took vitamin E while being treated with immune checkpoint therapy (ICT) "had significantly improved survival."

"Vitamin E's potential role in cancer prevention and alongside chemotherapy has been suggested in several studies. This is one of the first studies however to investigate the role of vitamin E supplements alongside cancer immunotherapies such as immune checkpoint therapy," Melissa Mitri, MS, RD of the nutrition reviews website FinvsFin tells Eat This, Not That!.

Mitri also notes that "vitamin E is a potent antioxidant that may offer a protective effect on the body. As an antioxidant, vitamin E helps prevent free radicals, harmful molecules in the environment from entering the body and causing damage. Since cancer cells often replicate as a result of this damage, there has been an investigation into the role vitamin E may play in reducing cancer growth."

"The research into vitamin E in combination with cancer immunotherapy is still in the early stages. This study is one of the first that has investigated this combination, and therefore more research is needed to come to a definitive conclusion," Mitri also says. "It is clear however that good nutrition in general in addition to vitamin E is vitally important for both cancer prevention and managing cancer treatment, and that cannot be underestimated."

As for how to make sure you're getting enough vitamin E in your diet, Mitri says that it can be "found in almonds, peanut butter, sunflower seeds, wheat germ, beets, and leafy greens such as spinach and collard greens."

To find out more about what you can consume to make sure you're getting enough vitamin E in your diet, be sure to read The 15 Best Vitamin E-Rich Foods.