If there’s a single vitamin you need to know more about, it’s vitamin K2. The first reason is you’re probably not getting enough. The second is that it doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
We are just now starting to appreciate the wide metabolic effects of vita-min K2 on not just blood clotting, but bone health, cardiovascular health, neurological health, cancer development, energy pro-duction and more. Vitamin K2 has a wide range of under appreciated health benefits:
It prevents calcium from going into all the wrong places and makes sure it gets into all the right places. For example, it keeps it out of your kidneys, where it would cause kidney stones, and keeps it out of your blood vessels, where it would cause heart disease, but helps it to get into your bones and teeth, making your bones strong and your teeth resistant to cavities.
It helps you make insulin and remain very sensitive to insulin. This means it helps stabilize your blood sugar, protects against diabetes, and prevents the metabolic problems that often arise as a consequence of obesity.
It promotes sexual health by helping you optimize your sex hormones. For example, it increases tes-tosterone and fertility in males, and it helps bring the high levels of male hormones found in women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) back down to normal.
It helps improve exercise performance by enhancing your ability to utilize energy during bouts of physical activity.
It protects against cancer by suppressing the genes that make cells cancerous and expressing the genes that make cells healthy.
Vitamin K comes in different forms. Vitamin K1 is pri-marily found in plant foods and is most abundant in leafy greens. Vitamin K2 is only found in animal foods and fermented plant foods.
First, once we eat foods with vitamin K in them, our bodies handle the different forms differently. Consider these examples:
Vitamin K2 is better known as MK7 which is the best form to take.
Vitamin K1 travels to our livers more effectively than it does to our bones or blood vessels. The liver is where we use vitamin K to make the proteins involved in blood clotting, so vitamin K1 is better at support-ing blood clotting than it is at providing other health benefits.
Once we eat foods with vitamin K in them, our bodies handle the different forms differently.”
MK-7 is much more effective than K1 at reaching bone. This doesn’t just make it good for bones: our bones use vitamin K to produce a hormone known as osteocalcin, which improves metabolic and hormon-al health and increases exercise performance. Thus, MK-7 better supports these health benefits than K1. The portion of MK-7 that reaches the liver, moreover, stays active in the liver much longer than K1 before being broken down; as a result, MK-7 is even better than K1 at supporting blood clotting.
MK-4 is taken up by our tissues very rapidly after we consume it. While it hasn’t been studied as carefully as MK-7, it may be less effective than MK-7 at reach-ing liver and bone but more effective at reaching most other tissues. This would make it better at protecting those tissues from calcium deposits and cancer de-velopment and supporting sex hormone production through its direct actions within our sex organs.
The second reason the form of vitamin K matters is that MK-4 regulates gene expression in specific ways that no other form of vitamin K does. While we tend to think of our genes as the destiny we inherited from our parents, it’s actually how they are expressed — meaning, what our cells do with the information car-ried by those genes — that determines our health. MK-4 turns on some genes and turns others off. For example, in our sex organs, it turns on the genes in-volved in sex hormone production. In a wide variety of cells, it turns on the genes that keep cells healthy and turns off the genes that make cells become can-cerous. Thus, MK-4 plays an exclusive role in cancer protection and sexual health.
You can find Vitamin K2 in supplement form at Ellen’s Whole Body Health Ltd, or in pastured animals, including beef, chicken, eggs and dairy but the source must be grass fed.
