In this solo educational video, Dr. A, an integrative‑medicine physician with decades of experience treating cancer and chronic illness, explains why vitamin D and vitamin K2 should be taken together. He first clarifies that vitamin D is a fat‑soluble steroid hormone that undergoes a multi‑step metabolism: skin conversion of pre‑vitamin D3 by UV light, hepatic 25‑hydroxylation to 25‑OH‑D3 (the standard lab test), and renal activation to both 24,25‑OH‑D3 and the potent 1,25‑OH‑2‑D3. Dr. A emphasizes the two major physiological domains of vitamin D – calcium regulation (bone health) and immune modulation – and notes that chronic disease states (cancer, autoimmunity, infections) often feature an imbalance between 25‑OH‑D3 and 1,25‑OH‑2‑D3 due to hyper‑hydroxylation driven by inflammation. He then introduces vitamin K, distinguishing K1 (phylloquinone from leafy greens) from K2 (menaquinones MK‑4 and MK‑7 from cultured foods, dairy, and animal products). The core argument is that adequate K2 is required for vitamin D to correctly direct calcium into bone and away from soft tissues and arteries, preventing vascular and soft‑tissue calcification. K2 also partners with vitamin D in immune regulation, helping to achieve balanced immunomodulation rather than excessive activation or suppression. Dr. A outlines practical supplementation regimens: typical maintenance doses of vitamin D (4,000–10,000 IU daily) paired with K2 (≈100 µg MK‑7 or 1 mg MK‑4), with higher MK‑4 doses (15–45 mg) used in therapeutic protocols for bone or vascular health. He concludes by urging viewers to take D and K2 together, monitor both 25‑OH‑D3 and 1,25‑OH‑2‑D3 when dealing with chronic illness, and follow appropriate dosing to maintain synergistic benefits.
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Well, one of the things that I think gets overlooked a lot is the benefits to your whole body of using vitamin D, like dog, and vitamin K, like kind, together. So I wanna talk about how they go together, how they're synergistic, and how they help each other when we take them together in the human body. Hey, it's Dr. A. I've been working with patients with cancer and chronic illness for decades, and I've been teaching and researching in the integrative medical community for 30 years now, and I use this channel to just share things I've learned along the way. Now, I want to talk about 2 global areas of help that vitamin D does in your body. There are many, many, many different things vitamin D does, but the 2 big areas are focused around calcium management in the body. Most of us have heard vitamin D for strong bones. That has to do with calcium and other minerals. But number 2 is the effects vitamin D has on the immune system. Which are known very well in research, but a lot of people don't think about vitamin D and the immune system. But a couple of things before we get started, and then we'll wrap around to vitamin K and where it fits in. The first thing is vitamin D is not really a vitamin. It's a steroid hormone. If you look at the tree of formation of steroids, vitamin D is just one of them that gets formed. And so it has a very hormonal-like activity in the body. The next thing is that vitamin D has very complex metabolism in the body. So if you look at something like vitamin C, one of our favorite topics, here on the channel, vitamin C has pretty discrete things that it does. Now, we've learned new things about it and all that, but vitamin C is water soluble. Vitamin D is fat soluble. So, remember the fat soluble vitamins, vitamin A, D, E, and K, fat soluble, so you can get too much of them. All right, we're going to talk about 2 of those today, vitamin D and K. So, we do have to be careful with dosing, but most people do need both of them. But we're talking about this complex metabolism. It actually starts from a pre-vitamin D that floats around in your blood, gets up to the surface blood vessels, and the ultraviolet light from the sun strikes your skin and does the first conversion from pre-vitamin D to a pre-vitamin D3, which is going to then float around. And then it goes to the second phase of metabolism, which is going to be in your liver. And the liver is primarily going to make something called 25-OHD3. That's the shorthand version of it. And this is often what you get a blood test for. It's sort of the standard basic blood test for vitamin D, 25D3. But you're not done there. Vitamin D then gets out of the liver as 25D3, and then it is activated by the kidneys. So you may have not known your kidneys get involved here, but in order to activate 25D3, there's 2 pathways in the kidneys, and they normally have a balance. There are 2 different enzymes that kind of sound the same, but they have different prefix numbers. Don't need to talk about them too much, but they go down in the kidneys. And if everything is happy with your blood calcium, meaning it's normal, then your kidney will make equal amount of the 2 enzymes active. And you get something called 24,25-vitamin D3 or OHD3 and 1,25-OHD3. Now, most articles only talk about 1,25, but your kidney actually makes both. And why do we say if your calcium is good, it makes both? That's because between 125 and 2425, they modulate the amount of calcium going in and out of your bones for bone turnover. If suddenly your calcium shifts, your body will sense this. The kidneys will shut one of the pathways down and preferentially hold on to calcium in your blood instead of sending it to your bones. Why would it do that? So you don't have an arrhythmia and die. Your body's very sensitive to drops in calcium as well as other minerals. And this is one way it does it. So vitamin D is very complex. And most of what we look at nowadays as far as, well, what's doing the heavy lifting of vitamin D, it's that downstream metabolite 1,25-OHD3, which you also can get tested when you do your labs. And in chronically ill people, cancer patients, autoimmune patients, we often test 25 and 1,25 because you need the balance. So What we need to have normally is in, at least in your lab testing, is a balance between your 25D3, which is your usual vitamin D test, and 1,25. Because what'll happen is if you get inflamed, sick, et cetera, your body will shift often and hyperhydroxylate 25D3 over to 1,25 because 1,25 has a kind of super immunomodulatory effect. So if we have it out of balance and we have high 1,25, We can actually have some immune suppression. Why would my body do that when I'm inflamed? Because I got all those inflammatory chemicals running around and my body's trying to calm them down. So this is a natural thing that your body does with the hyperactive form, 125 OHD3. So what could cause that? Mast cell activation can cause it. Any mast cell related problem, chronic allergies, autoimmunity, chronic infections. One of the first Beautiful papers written about this hyperconversion was about people who didn't know that they had chronic infections, and they would have low vitamin D 25OH but high active vitamin D. And then it's like, why? Well, there's a lot of reasons why, but it's the inflammation from the chronic infections. Some patients with cancer will see this, and really any other chronic disease is possible. That's why I say in people with cancer and chronic disease, usually we look at the 25OH and 125 to see if they're roughly in balance. But now we promised to talk about vitamin K2. So what are we talking about there with vitamin K2? Well, so vitamin K comes in 2 forms from food. There's K1, phylloquinone, and that's usually from, you know, phyllo, like green leafies and stuff like that. And then there's K2, which is menaquinone, which comes from some cultured things like, you know, sauerkraut, kimchi, all that, that has menaquinone in it. Butter and a bunch of other foods have menaquinone in it. You want to look, you look online for vitamin K2 food sources. You'll see a lot of cultured foods in there, a lot of dairy-type products and other animal-related foods. But if you don't eat dairy or animal-related foods, you can eat cultured foods and still get vitamin K2. Now, why does vitamin K, a fat-soluble vitamin, go with vitamin D? And why should we put these together? Now, this is something that some of us have been teaching medical students for at least 30 years, in my experience at this point. And it goes back to basic physiology of how your body uses vitamin D and how it balances vitamin D out. And one of the big ways that that happens is vitamin K. Now, vitamin K has benefits and effects in both of the primary big areas we talked about for vitamin D, calcium movement and immune activation or immune modulation. So what does it do in calcium movement? This is usually what we teach like in basic science in medical school. And you have to remember this for board exams. And that is that if you have vitamin D, but you don't have enough vitamin K, then the calcium manipulation that vitamin D does can go awry. Meaning I got plenty of vitamin D, not enough vitamin K. I might put some calcium in the bones and some calcium in my soft tissues, like my tendons and muscles. And that's not where the calcium goes. There's reasons you use calcium in your muscles, but not like this. You don't want to have calcific tendinosis, for example, or calcification in your muscles. Muscles, etc. You want the calcium, among other things, to go into your bones. So vitamin K in appropriate amounts helps vitamin D work to put the calcium where it belongs and not where it doesn't belong. That's the DK thing with calcium in your bones and your soft tissues, etc. Now, where else would that be super important? How about like your arteries, right? We don't want a bunch of calcium building up in our arteries. That's either arteriosclerosis or atherosclerosis of a later stage usually. And vitamin K Prevents that, helps to prevent that. So D and K go together. So it's not just about your joints and your bones and your tendons. It's also about your heart and your big blood vessels and your little blood vessels. But what about the immune system? Well, it turns out kind of like this buddy system that vitamin D and K have in regard to calcium, vitamin D and vitamin K2, especially more than K1, have a buddy system with the immune system. So we talked a little bit earlier about how if you're real inflamed, your body will hyperconvert to the super active one. 25, vitamin D3 at the end of the trail, you know, after the kidneys. It does that to decrease inflammation, et cetera. Well, what you want really in chronically, you know, health-maintaining things is not too much, not too little of vitamin D, but also not too much, not too little of K2. And what that leads to is immunomodulation. Now, we've talked a lot about chronic infections and, you know, COVID and other stuff like that, and how immunodepression Dysregulation creates most of the problems that go on. Well, the biggest thing that you want with your immune system is not really immune stimulation, except in rare instances, et cetera. You want it to modulate because if you're gonna get sick, you want it to be able to modulate up, but then you want it to modulate down after so you don't develop other problems. Well, it turns out that vitamin D is very important for that, but vitamin K provides the other side. This is exactly the relationship they have with helping calcium It's just through other means, other, you know, receptor activities, et cetera. So when nowadays we do chronic dosing of vitamin D with somebody, we generally recommend that they take a vitamin D and a K2 supplement together. And that's just one pill. Now, the one that I take, because I live in a darker part of the world and, you know, my vitamin D checked periodically to keep it where it's supposed to be, happens to have about 10,000 IUs of vitamin D. And it's got about 100 micrograms of K2 as MK-7. Now, menaquinone is K2. There's MK-4 and MK-7. MK-4 has more research, especially around bones, et cetera. It's also been researched in the immunology world with non-bone stuff. And MK-7 basically has less research, but they both kind of do similar things. You notice the doses of MK-7 seem to be lower than MK-4. It's just the way that they metabolize in the body. Most people who need a lower level than, say, I do, where I'm taking 10,000 of D and 100 micrograms of K2 as MK-7, will use 4,000 or 5,000 of vitamin D. And most of the supplements will still have 75 to 100 micrograms of K2 as MK-7. There's also some that do 5,000 vitamin D and then 1 milligram or 1,000 micrograms of MK-4. And that's fine for maintenance chronically. Okay. You will notice occasionally if you go to the doctor and they're really working nutritionally on your bone health or maybe vascular calcification or nowadays some immunology purposes, they might use MK-4 in higher doses like 15 to 45 milligrams for bone health, for example, or calcification, et cetera. So, there's a lot of different dose structures, but for maintenance, it's usually 5,000 to 10,000 of D. And, if it's MK-7, it's usually 100 micrograms. If it's MK-4, It's usually 1,000 micrograms, which is also 1 milligram. So remember, vitamin D and K go together. They help each other work more appropriately in the body. And a lot of the imbalances in vitamin D metabolism, because it's so complex, can be brought back into balance by vitamin K being insufficient amounts. So vitamin D and K always go together and they always help each other, whether it's in the world of calcium movement or in the world of your immune system. Thank you for listening. I'm Dr. A. Love having you on the channel. Please like, share, and subscribe. Check out these other videos we're going to link here. I think you're going to like them. Thanks.
