FAT SOLUBLE VITAMINS (Helpful Therapies)

Welcome back to Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me, I'm Dr. Paul. And today in our ongoing series about natural and integrative and naturopathic therapies, we're talking about nutrients and why they're sometimes added in, what they do, etc. Well, this particular session is a breakout from the vitamin session that I, uh, as promised. So we talked in the vitamin section about water-soluble vitamins. There's also a group of fat-soluble ones, and these are the ones that can build up in your system. They can have some toxicity associated, so they really should be, uh, part of an overall health plan for you, and they should be used for specific reasons. Now, that doesn't mean they're dangerous. It's like anything else, you need enough, you don't need too much. But as we always say, we With nutrition and nutrients, you wanna start with your diet and absorption. And then you wanna do global things like a multivitamin mineral, say. And then you can add on things to increase those levels that may be kind of low, say, in a multivitamin or mineral. So the fat-soluble vitamins are vitamin A, like alpha, D, like dog, E, like Edward, and K, like kite. And so A, D, E, and K are your fat solubles. And so we need to be a little careful with the dosing on those. We do use them up. So it's not like, you know, you have to starve yourself from them. But let's start with vitamin A because it comes first in the alphabet. Vitamin A is an interesting nutrient in that in the plant world, it comes from the carotenoid family. of chemicals, and the plants produce carotenoids. And a famous one is beta-carotene. You've heard of that. That was often used in, you know, days gone by as a food dye because it has sort of a yellowish-orange color to it. Think about carrots, right? So beta-carotene. But there's also— you can have mixed carotenoids, which are you know, other than the beta version. But here's the thing, if you think of— and I apologize to those listening, uh, just on the audio— but if I hold my 2 hands next to each other and then I separate them, that would be like what your body has to do to carotenoids like beta-carotene to turn them into vitamin A. And so vitamin A is a half of a carotenoid. So from a plant You eat it and then you have an enzymatic process that splits the carotenoid in half and makes it into a retinoid, which is vitamin A. Now many people have, you say retinoid and they think of the drug like Retin-A or Accutane, that sort of thing, and that's because those are synthetic retinoids, right? So now, Your body perceives vitamin A when it's not where it's supposed to be as a toxic substance. And your body actually has binding proteins that carry the vitamin A until it gets to the target that it's going to so that the vitamin A can't interact with other places. And these are called retinoid binding proteins. And there's even special ones inside your cells called cytosolic retinol binding proteins. That's how— that's That's how careful your body is with vitamin A. So sometimes, say during cold and flu season or something, we might prescribe high doses of vitamin A. We'll do it for a short period of time. The other thing that you probably heard is vitamin A can be toxic at a lower level in pregnancy. And so in prenatals and dosing in pregnancy, we're always looking to make sure that the dose is at a reasonable level for pregnancy. To my knowledge, there is no prenatal vitamin that has an overdose of vitamin A anyway. So that's usually taken care of. But you do want to keep that in mind. It's much more of a sensitive issue in a pregnant woman. But where does the body use these things? Well, there's 3 tissue type areas. Your eyes use a lot of the both the carotenoid family and the retinoid family to help you with vision. So you can develop night blindness and other things without enough vitamin A. Then you have the epithelial tissues, which includes the skin on the outside, the mucous membranes, and the lining of the inside of your body, like your GI lining, et cetera, and your lungs, which is why we sometimes use vitamin A in respiratory problems, et cetera. And the other thing that vitamin A does is in the reproductive tissue. The gonads use vitamin A also. So low levels of vitamin A can lead to gonadal dysfunction. Vitamin D is probably the most famous fat-soluble vitamin. And that's the one we think of as the sunlight vitamin because we have pre-vitamin D in our blood and in our skin. Ultraviolet light hits the skin, converts it to a little more active version, that goes to the liver, gets converted to a little more active version, that goes to the kidneys, converted to a little more active version, and then goes out and does its work. And vitamin D is really about bone homeostasis, so keeping the amount of bone breakdown and building up equal. It's also used because it's a fat and it's a steroid really in your immune system, and in a number of other places. So low vitamin D levels can be associated with not just bone problems but immune problems, etc. Then there's vitamin E, which is also very famous. And this one is used— and like all fat solubles, it can be, you know, too high you don't want, too low you don't want. But vitamin E is one of those things that's, that's super critical to all of your membranes. So your cell membranes, your blood cell membranes, your lipid, like cholesterol membranes, et cetera, et cetera. And its job is to back up the antioxidant capacity from glutathione and vitamin C, which are water soluble. And so antioxidant in your cholesterol molecules, in your cell membranes, and your blood cells, in the membrane of all of those tissues, vitamin E is responsible for that. And then probably biochemically, one of my favorite vitamins is the vitamin K family. of vitamins, and vitamin K was named for clotting, although clotting not in English but in German, so it's got a K, and there are vitamin K-dependent clotting factors, so you have a whole bunch of things that help you clot, and if you're low in vitamin K, you will not clot as well, you'll have bleeding and bruising, if you're too high in vitamin K, that can be a problem, but The reason I like it so much is vitamin K also is the backup to what vitamin D does with your bones and your soft tissue. So vitamin D on its own helps with the movement of, say, minerals towards the bone, but vitamin K keeps you from having the minerals stop where they shouldn't be. So I want the minerals to go into my bone. I don't want a lot of, like, calcium to build up in my tendons or my ligaments. If I have enough vitamin K, it operates the enzyme systems that make sure that that the calcium goes where it's supposed to go. So it's part of clotting cascade. It's part of calcium movement, etc. And then it's also now we're finding out very important in immune function, a lot like vitamin D. But we're running up against time here. That's the fat soluble vitamin section. Remember, like, share, and subscribe. We're on. YouTube. We're always live on CTR Radio Network, which is where you're seeing me right now if you're watching live. We livestream that over to Facebook. We're on all of the pod burners for podcasts and audio. And then, uh, usually within a day or two, we put these up over onto YouTube. And in YouTube, we'll have, uh, show notes. And then, uh, Cameron at CTR will also take those show notes and put them on the other places as well. So if I mention, you know, backup studies or other things like that, sometimes I give you know, links to things, that's where they are. It's down in the show notes or in the description box, which would be over on YouTube if you're watching the video. Well, we are out of time for today. I'm Dr. Paul Anderson with Medicine and Health. Thank you very much. Please continue to share these with your friends. Like, share, and subscribe. The member— the viewership is growing all over on all the platforms, and we're thankful for that. Thank you very much, and I'll see you next week.