well, when they cut it out of the margarine, they removed the only stable source in my diet. i get some e from red peppers, kiwis, avocados, sunflower seeds. but, to meet the rdi without the 50% i used to get from the margarine would require consuming an unhealthy amount of calories. i'm not meeting it, with certainty, and am not sure how i could. i can say that.
due the removal of vitamin e fortification from a number of items out of absurd concerns about "over-fortifcation", i would consider it virtually impossible for a person to meet the rdi for vitamin e from food in canada today without becoming obese in the process. i might suspect vitamin e deficiency is going to become a serious problem for young people in canada over the next decade and result in unnecessary health care costs that could be resolved by returning to fortification in margarine and dairy.
the major symptoms of deficiency are dry skin and peripheral neuropathy, which is a component of the hemiplegic migraines i've been getting for the last ten years. the migraines initially went away after i added fortified nutritional yeast to my diet (i assigned that to boosting my b12), but have come back since they cut the vitamin e from the margarine.
given my absorption problem, yes, it's possible that i have a vitamin e deficiency.
i used to take a pill called menoprim made by a company that disappeared 2-4x a day that was great because it had a reasonable amount of vitamin e - 50% of the rdi. it also had a ton of b6, magnesium, calcium and phyoestrogens from soy, black cohosh, dong quai, red clover and other plants. it wasn't powerful enough to transition me, and i stopped when i went back on estrogen, but i found that a combination of menoprim, wild yam and saw palmetto was enough to keep me looking effeminate. maybe it was a placebo, and i was just noticing natural variation and the fact that i never went through puberty, but the pictures i have of me from 2005-2008, when i was on herbs and not estradiol, are in truth as good or better than the ones after 2009. the vitamin e, though, was definitely good for my skin and hair.
i probably should have found a secondary low dose of e a long time ago.
it's possible that what happened in 2016 is that my vitamin e stores finally ran out and i started to get migraines from it. i was taking the menoprim from about 2005 to about 2012, when the company disappeared. the store i bought it from said the phone number was out of service.
this was the product:
but i do think it was an excellent vitamin e supplement and i should have replaced that source of vitamin e years ago. i have now.