Minimum Daily Requirement of Rabbits for -Tocopherol

Abstract

During the past year we have been studying the vitamin E requirement of rabbits for the cure and prevention of nutritional muscle dystrophy. Recently, MacKenzie and McCollum1 reported that the rabbit requires 0.7 to 1.0 mg of α-tocopherol per kg of body weight, but this does not quite agree with our Findings. In our experience, rabbits made dystrophic on the Goetsch-Pappen-heimer diet 13 were cured by the daily oral administration of synthetic dl-α-tocopherol acetate in quantities ranging from 0.18 to 1.0 mg per kg of body weight, with most of the cures resulting from doses of 0.2 to 0.5 mg (as free alcohol).We found that a definite correlation exists between the higher requirements and the total α-tocopherol intake. When animals with an apparently high vitamin E requirement were subjected to a new test on a smaller total tocopherol intake, their requirement dropped to a lower level (values ranging from 0.2 to 0.4 mg per kg). These findings suggest that the higher values, as well as the wider range of var...