A Little Known Vitamin That Could Save Your Life.

Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And in the past couple of weeks on the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast, you may have heard me talk a little bit about vitamin K2. And one of the reasons for that is that I've been reading up on it a bit. And one of the best resources that I've found has been a book. The title of the book is vitamin K2 and the calcium Paradox. And while this book does go into the calcium paradox and you'll find out what that is, it goes into very deep detail about many other aspects of vitamin K2 that kind of go above and beyond calcium. The subtitle of this book is How a Little Known Vitamin Could Save youe Life. Now the person who wrote it is right here on the call with me. She's a naturopathic physician. Her name is Kate. And Kate, I am going to completely butcher your last name unless you help me out with it. So how do you pronounce your last name?

Last name is Raelm Blue. So that's why I usually go by Dr. Kate.

Let's just go with Dr. Kate. So Dr. Kate is an expert in natural health. She's a sought after speaker on the national level. She's a frequent guest on radio shows, television shows, and she is the person to go to when it comes to finding out about vitamin K. So Dr. Kate, thanks for coming on the call.

Oh, my pleasure.

So let's jump right in for the people who really have no clue what Vitamin K is, and I didn't until recently, aside from knowing that it's a useful fat soluble vitamin. But let's get into a little more detail. What exactly is vitamin K or in terms of what you specifically talk about in your book vitamin K2 and what does it do?

Well, vitamin K2 is a little known and long overlooked or long misunderstood fat soluble vitamin that guides calcium around the body. So specifically it will activate groups of proteins in the body and they will grab onto calcium once they're activated and drive it into bones and teeth where we want it. And even more importantly, these proteins will keep calcium out of arteries and even remove it from arteries and so remove existing arterial deposits. So vitamin K2 is a really important nutrient for bone health, for heart health and many other health conditions.

So if it's so important and it's so crucial for the utilization of calcium like you talk about in your book, why is it that we don't kind of know more about vitamin K2?

Well, that's really because of a case of mistaken identity. This Nutrient was overlooked for decades, literally, since it was discovered or undiscovered. I guess, in the 1930s. There's another form of vitamin K that people might be more familiar, vitamin K1 that comes from green leafy vegetables and it's necessary for your blood to clot. And these were discovered at the same time. And because deficiency of vitamin K1 is so rare, and it's obvious because you'll have some sort of a bleeding disorder, scientists back when it was discovered thought K1, K2, same thing. And they really ignored vitamin K2 after that for decades. They did not research it further. And it's only the last 10 or 20 years, years that more research has been done to show that, in fact, vitamin K2 is quite distinct from K1. It doesn't participate in blood clotting. It doesn't come from green leafy vegetables. And in fact, you can be deficient in this and not notice. It's not obvious because you can't tell that bone density is declining or plaque is building in the arteries or other health conditions are occurring.

It kind of makes sense, the bone density issue that you brought up. But as far as plaque forming in the arteries, how does that happen? How would a deficiency in K2 lead to plaque forming in the arteries?

Well, scientists have concluded that the body has a number of ways to prevent the deposition of plaque, and it even has a couple of ways to reverse existing plaque. And one of the most important ways, arguably the most important way, is based on this protein called mgp. Now, the purpose of this protein is to find calcium that's in the arteries and other soft tissues and grab onto it and take it away. But that protein won't work unless vitamin K2 is there to activate it. So when vitamin K2 is lacking, this most important mechanism is essentially inactive and useless. And so calcium will gradually build up in the arteries.

I gotcha. Okay, cool. So when we're looking at this, obviously there are other advantages to K2. I'm holding your book right now and thumbing through it. And I mean, the. The list goes on and on. The big two that you talk about, of course, are the concerns for bone density and the concerns for atherosclerosis and people that are deficient in K2. But how many people actually are deficient in K2? Is this something that is common?

Very common. European research done in 2007 and since then has shown that most apparently healthy adults are deficient in vitamin K2. Now, the key word here is apparently, in other words, you can't necessarily Tell by looking at someone that their lacking this nutrient. And again, that's because things like bone density decline and heart disease are typically silent killers or invisible for a long time. But based on several studies now it seems that most people are deficient in K2. We only vary to the extent of our deficiency. So basically in general we don't have enough vitamin K2 in our diets to activate all the proteins to make sure the calcium is going to where it should and not ending up where it shouldn't.

Okay. I kind of like to operate from a standpoint of assuming that unless something is wrong that we should be able to kind of get what we need from food. So is an issue with people being exposed to the wrong things in the environment? Is it an issue with them not eating enough foods that are rich in K2? I mean, what's missing that so many people would be deficient in K2?

It's a bit of both. Certainly the invention of trans fats and having trans fats in your diet interferes with your ability to process and metabolize and utilize vitamin K2. So that hasn't been a good thing. But in general it's a matter of K2 not being available like it used to. So once upon a time we actually had lots of vitamin K2 in our diets, especially in the summertime. And that was back when animals were on pasture. So when cows, chickens, pigs, they're all out on the pasture eating mostly green foods and grass. We have a lot of vitamin K2 in egg yolks and butter and dairy products and all of those foods. Over the last 100 years, as we've removed animals from the pasture, we essentially eliminated this nutrient from our diet and made it very difficult to come by. There are still some foods that will have it in it. And I have a list of those in the book, of course. And I do encourage people to go back to grass fed foods, the old fashioned ways of farming and producing the foods. I know that there's a movement towards that now, but that's really sort of what did away with K2 and how we need to get back to taking it. No, it's not always easy to get enough of those grass fed foods. So you can look at other food sources as well.

Yeah, and you talk about those quite a bit in your book. The richest source that you bring up in your book is natto. What is natto and why is that such a great source of K2?

Natto is a fermented Japanese soybean food. It's A traditional breakfast food in some areas of Japan. And it is the number one highest food in vitamin K2. And studies have shown that where they eat this in Japan, people have higher blood levels of K2 and lot lower osteoporosis, hip fractures and heart disease compared to areas where they don't. So this one is really a superfood. And it's also the only vegan or vegetarian source of vitamin K2.

Is it as gross as you kind of describe in your book?

Well, I'm still trying to learn to like it and eat it. I've still got it in my freezer. I can send you some if you want. People told me that if I ate enough of it, I would learn to like it and crave it. And so far that hasn't happened. But I've got a great recipe for nacho fried rice in the book. And if you do learn to like this, if you can learn to like it, then good on you because it really has been shown to boost health in a number of ways.

But you could eat fatty, rich foods like fatty beef and butter and things.

Of that nature and goose liver pate and egg yolks.

Yeah, nice. Okay, cool. So these same foods are sources of other fat soluble vitamins like vitamin D or vitamin A. So is there an interaction between vitamin K and those? I mean, like if somebody is deficient in vitamin D and they're taking a bunch of vitamin D, should they also be taking vitamin K or eating fatty foods or the same for vitamin A? Kind of how all these work together.

They do definitely work together. They're all interrelated. And the more vitamin D you take, for example, I know a lot of people are on the vitamin D megadose bandwagon and that's fine, except that the more vitamin D you take, the greater demand you create in your body for vitamin K2. Because when you take D, the body makes these K2 dependent proteins, but then those proteins are useless until you have K2 to activate them. There's other relationships between D and K2. D helps us absorb calcium and then K2 guides it into the bones where it's supposed to go. When K2 removes calcium from the arteries, you'd like to think it gets transferred into the bones, but in fact that's not what happens. It was eliminated from the body and vitamin A does that. It guides calcium out of the body once it's been taken out of where it shouldn't be. There's a lot of interactions between all these three fat soluble vitamins and A Lot of foods in nature have these three together, so they really are important to balance them.

Okay, I see. So when it comes to balancing these three out, do you think that people need to be using a K2 supplement or should they just be eating some of these foods that you mentioned?

Well, in theory, you could get enough vitamin K2 from your diet if you put a lot of effort into finding grass fed foods or you're willing to eat some of these unusual foods on a regular basis, like natto and goose liver pate and these kinds of things. If you're not, which for most people that is impractical, then a supplement's a good idea.

And when it comes to a supplement, if somebody wanders into their local health food store or to Amazon or Vitacost or any of these other supplement websites, what should people be looking for?

There's a few things. First of all, you want to make sure that the supplement you're buying contains vitamin K2 and says that on the label. If it just says vitamin K, then you don't exactly know what you're getting next. There's two main types of vitamin K2 that you'll find on the market. So you want to look for Menaquinone on the label. That'll be either designated MenaquinOne4 or MenaquinOne7. I prefer MenaquinOne7 because it's a natural natto derived from bacterial synthesis form of vitamin K2 that's been shown to be helpful in relatively small doses, like 100 milligrams to 200 milligrams. You see really good results. MK4 does work. There's lots of benefits shown in the studies, but you need 45 micrograms, that's 4,500 milligrams. And you should best break that up. Take it three times a day. So that's a little bit inconvenient. So that's why I recommend people look for MK7 when they're shopping for a vitamin K2 supplement.

Okay, got it. There are many benefits of K2 that you go through in your book. And I never want to sit here on a podcast and just go through a laundry list of incredible reasons to take it. Even though you've got these in your book. There are a lot of very active people that listen to the show, however, people who like to do things like rock climbing and marathons and triathlons and extreme sports. For these people, is vitamin K2 going to offer any kind of a performance advantage or neurological advantage or recovery advantage, or is there an athletic or a human performance reason to take something like K2.

There absolutely is. I mean, we know K2 of course is good for cardiovascular health and athletes and active people want to optimize that more than anybody. But there's some very new research out that just came out a couple months ago. As a matter of fact, it didn't make it into my book that shows that vitamin K2 first of all will reduce cramping muscle cramping, which is important for athletes as well as has been shown to improve VO2 max in both average individuals as well as elite athletes. So improving your aerobic capacity and performance is a great benefit of vitamin K2.

Okay, great. So important reasons to take it. And of course the book goes into a lot more detail about the importance of vitamin K2. And of course if you have follow up questions about it, then you can go to the show Notes for this episode over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com and leave your questions about K2. I would also recommend that you check out Dr. Kate's book. It really was one of the more insightful and informative books that I've read this month and it answers a lot of the questions about why not only fat soluble vitamins are important, but in particular why this vitamin that seems to have flown under the radar for a really long period of time could literally save your life. So Dr. Kate, thank you for coming on the call today.

Thanks Ben.