Dear Friends,
When we started NatureCity about 23 years ago, hardly anyone made the distinction between vitamin K1 and vitamin K2.
It was just vitamin K, the vitamin that helps with blood coagulation or clotting - so our blood doesn’t get too thin, and we bleed to death.
Since then, the world’s knowledge about vitamin K2 has exploded – and as it turns out it’s a very important part of healthy aging for reasons we’ll discuss.
Despite this, a Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) for vitamin K2 still doesn’t exist (we’ll give you our recommendations in a bit). For vitamin K1 (also known as phylloquinone), the RDA is 120mcg for adult males and 90mcg for adult women.
Vitamin K1 is fairly easy to get from diet if you are eating leafy greens like spinach, kale broccoli, arugula or many other types of lettuce.
ried spices like basil, sage, oregano, and parsley also have a very high amount of vitamin K1, but practically since we use these spices in relatively small quantities, you still need the leafy greens to meet vitamin K1 needs.
Vitamin K2 Is Challenging to Get from Diet Alone
The foods with the most vitamin K2 are fermented vegetables, like natto (a fermented soybean dish) and beef liver or goose liver. Not things we commonly eat in the United States.
Fermented cheeses are a good source of vitamin K2, but you’d have to eat a lot of cheese each day to get the amount of vitamin K2 that research is finding valuable to our health.
Unfortunately, eating that much cheese daily isn’t a good idea for our overall health.
This makes vitamin K2 an important nutrient to supplement.
Before we get into what you should look for in a vitamin K2 supplement, let’s review what makes vitamin K2 so important to our bodies.
Why Vitamin K2 Matters
As mentioned, the main function of vitamin K1 is helping with blood clotting.
Vitamin K2 plays a small part in this too, but more importantly vitamin K2 has been recently recognized for its essential role in keeping bones strong and protecting against calcium buildup in arteries and blood vessels – both very important to healthy aging.
When it comes to bone health, vitamin K2 helps activate a protein called osteocalcin, that vitamin D helps your body produce.
Osteocalcin is important because it works to bind calcium to bones, which results in stronger bones.
However, it’s not just good enough for your body to produce this osteocalcin protein, you also need vitamin K2 to turn on the bone-building switch and spur it into action.
Without adequate vitamin K2, it will be more challenging for you to maintain strong healthy bones as you age.
Keeping Calcium Out of Arteries.
And if that’s not enough for you to supplement your vitamin K2 intake, consider this:
Vitamin K2 activates a second protein, this one called Matrix GLA protein, which vitamin D also helps your body produce.
When activated, Matrix GLA essentially repels calcium as it attempts to deposit in arteries, blood vessels and soft tissues.
As you may know, when calcium accumulates in these places, it’s bad for our health, particularly cardiovascular health. Instead, with the help of vitamin K2, excess calcium can be redirected to places it can be useful, like bones.
Supporting bone and cardiovascular health are the two best known reasons why we need to ensure our bodies have adequate vitamin K2, but as I mentioned, these discoveries are very recent.
Much more research is being done to see where else in the body vitamin K2 plays a role, and the early data indicates that vitamin K2 may help support immune system function and brain health too.
One Caution About Taking A Vitamin K2 Supplement
Since vitamin K2 is hard to get from diet alone, it makes a lot of sense to take vitamin K2 as a supplement.
There is one caution for those taking blood thinning medications. Before taking any vitamin K supplement, you need to consult with your physician.
As you may know, many of these drugs work by interfering with the blood clotting action of vitamin K. So you have to be careful about vitamin K intake – this includes vitamin K2.
There are some newer medications available that apparently work differently, so it’s worth a conversation with your doctor to see what’s best for you.
Choosing The Right Vitamin K2 Supplement
When it comes to vitamin K2 supplements, we prefer the MK-7 form over the other most common form which is MK-4.
To clarify what we mean by MK-7, if you look at the chemistry of a vitamin K molecule, the only structural difference between vitamin K1 and vitamin K2 is a side chain of units called menaquinones. MK-7 is a longer chain than MK-4.
Although both MK-4 and MK-7 are almost completely absorbed into the bloodstream, MK-4 has a very short half-life and quickly disappears from circulation.
By contrast, MK-7 can remain in blood serum for 72 hours after taking it, so the vitamin K2 can accumulate in the bloodstream and always be available to be put to work as needed by your body.
This makes MK-7 much more convenient (and effective) because you can take relatively small amounts once (or twice) a day. To get the same effect using MK-4, you’d have to take it every few hours.
Related to this, research indicates that vitamin K2 as MK-7 is the more efficient way to support bone and heart health, which is why we use it in our supplements.
Our Favorite Vitamin K2 Source
Our favorite vitamin K2 ingredient is the MenaQ7 brand. It has far and away the most research support, and the version we use is naturally derived from chickpeas.
At a minimum, we’d recommend supplementing with 90mcg per day.
If you want to match the MenaQ7 studies for bone and cardiovascular health, you should take 180mcg daily.
Currently, we have MenaQ7 vitamin K2 in 3 products:
MenaQ7 is part of our two bone health supplements TrueOsteo+ and the standard TrueOsteo formula.
If you’re taking a calcium supplement, we strongly recommend also taking vitamin K2 to help ensure the calcium ends up where you want it – in bones and not arteries.
We also combine MenaQ7 with its partner vitamin D, in our TrueK2D3 formula. The vitamin D3 comes from algae, so this is a vegan friendly formula if that’s important to you.
As more science on the benefits of vitamin K2 emerges, we’ll let you know – we have a feeling there’s much more to come!
Yours for Good Health,
Carl Pradelli
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