Setting the record straight – don’t take 12 grams of lutein daily

Good catch!

That’s my message to several HSI members who sent e-mails with questions like this one: “6 or 12 grams of lutein daily? Don’t you mean milligrams? Thanks for the avocado tip!”

Absolutely correct – I wrote “grams” when I should have written “milligrams.”

This was in the recent e-Alert “Screen Saver” (3/17/09), in which I told you about a study that examined the effects of lutein supplementation in subjects with long-term exposure to computer monitor screens. Subjects received either 6 milligrams of lutein daily, 12 milligrams daily, or a placebo.

There are no known adverse side effects linked with lutein, but if you took 12 grams each day for an extended period…well, let’s just say that would probably be way too much lutein.

But if you were to take 12 mg per day for 12 weeks, you might improve visual function and contrast sensitivity (which is what occurred in both of the intervention groups), and you’d very likely reduce your risk of age-related macular degeneration.

And in case you missed the 3/17 e-Alert, here’s that avocado tip…

In a 2004 study from Iowa State University, researchers fed subjects a salad with avocado or a salad without avocado. Blood tests showed that subjects who ate an avocado with their salad absorbed more than four times as much lutein as subjects who didn’t eat avocados. In other tests, eating an avocado helped subjects absorb more lycopene from salsa and beta-carotene from salad.