Transcription
Well, hello everybody!
Today it gives me great pleasure to talk to you about calcium. This has been a point of interest since I was a fellow because we all know that calcium seems to be what's plugging up the arteries. So, I have an interesting connection between calcium and, with it, vitamin K2.
So what is vitamin K2? It's a vitamin that's unheard of. Okay, one maybe, but K2. Today I'm going to teach you about calcium and vitamin K2 and why I'm so interested in them. I think that this is a very important chapter in understanding what causes blockages in the arteries of the body.
Let's just dive right into it. As a fellow, I noticed that heart disease and blockages in the arteries seem to go along with diabetes, high blood pressure, degenerative joint disease, and many patients also have arthritis. Many of them are very overweight, have bad teeth, bad gums, and dental decay, which seems to coincide with coronary artery disease. I always wondered why this is the case.
There's something going on with the bones, and they all have osteoporosis. So, why do coronary patients have osteoporosis? They come to me because they get hip replacements and knee replacements, and I often wonder what that has to do with heart disease. Why is it that heart patients are also getting joint disease, or vice versa—patients with bad bones and osteoporosis are getting coronary artery disease?
As I started doing the research, I noticed that because of the bad bones in osteopenia, everyone was on calcium supplements. The studies began to come out showing that the calcium supplements you take for your bones and general health are actually increasing mortality. There are numerous studies that show if you take more than one gram of calcium supplement on a daily basis, it increases cardiovascular risk by 20%.
Now, if I had a drug that reduced your cardiovascular risk by 20%, I would definitely give it to you. But here I have a calcium supplement that increases your risk by 20%, and nobody's talking about this. This really got my interest—why is it that calcium increases the risk?
We looked into it. The Women's Health Initiative study was a huge study, and it showed that one gram of elemental calcium supplementation increased mortality by 15% to 22%. You increase your mortality by taking your calcium supplement, and this was with or without vitamin D supplementation. We found that in renal failure patients who were constantly given calcium supplements, their risk increased by 22% just by taking calcium every day. They thought they were taking calcium to avoid bone disease, to have nice strong teeth, and to have strong joints and hips, but no.
So what is it about calcium supplementation? One of the things we thought is that it may increase clotting because if you want a blood sample to clot, what do you do? You put some calcium in it, right? And it clots. Another thing it can do is cause high blood pressure. We know that higher calcium levels can cause high blood pressure, but these patients were not having high blood pressure even though they were taking the calcium supplements. So we were not sure why calcium supplements do this.
Now my recommendation to everyone is: do not take calcium supplements unless there's a good reason to do so. Speak to your physician about it, but just don't take calcium because calcium supplements are available over the counter.
There's something else that has to do with calcium metabolism, and today I'm going to tell you that the answer is probably vitamin K2. So what is vitamin K2? Vitamin K2 is a fat-soluble vitamin. That means you cannot absorb it into your body unless there's some fat present in the environment. Assume for now that it has something to do with good bone metabolism; you need vitamin K2 for strong bones.
What's going to happen if you take vitamin K2 away from your body? You're going to get bone disease. Why would you get rid of vitamin K2? Why do we have vitamin K2 deficiency? Why would I even think anyone has vitamin K2 deficiency?
I'm going to teach you today that you get vitamin K2 deficiency because of the lifestyle changes we've made. Because it's fat-soluble and now we're on a low-fat diet, for the past 40 years we've had this experiment. I'm sure you've all looked at my YouTubes that clearly show you that the notion of a low-fat diet is not very good advice because it has led to vitamin A, D, E, and K deficiencies.
With these vitamins, you just need small amounts in your bloodstream to have a tremendous effect. When we go on these odd diets, such as all these low-fat diets, you're not going to absorb those vitamins, and that's exactly what we've been finding.
Let me tell you a little bit more about vitamin K and how the soil fits into it. In your bones, for example, you have two types of cells: the osteoclasts and your osteoblasts. The osteoblasts build up bone. That means they take calcium from the bloodstream and push it into the bone so you get nice strong bones. Osteoclasts destroy the bone—they demineralize the bone and take the calcium out.
The way it works is that you need osteocalcin to bind calcium. But to activate the osteocalcin, you need vitamin K2. If you do not have vitamin K2 in your body, you're not going to get carboxylation of these chemicals called osteocalcin. In the tissues, the counterpart is called Matrix GLA protein.
This protein must be activated by two things: vitamin D and vitamin K2. In the tissues, this chemical does a different thing. It takes calcium, binds to it, and moves it into the bloodstream out of the tissues. So in the bone, it causes deposition of calcium, but in the tissues, it pulls calcium out of the tissues and takes it into the bloodstream so that it can head off to the bones.
These Matrix GLA proteins—what are they doing in the tissues and where are they being produced? They're produced by the smooth muscle cells of the blood vessels. The blood vessels have smooth muscle cells—that's where they can vasodilate and vasoconstrict. They make this protein, which has to be activated by vitamin K2. When it's activated, it'll bind calcium and move it out of the blood vessel.
When vitamin K2 is not there, there's nothing to take the calcium out of the blood vessel. When vitamin K2 is not there for the bone, the bone will not be able to mineralize because that particular protein in the bone binds to hydroxyapatite, and then the calcium gets trapped in the bone.
You would expect that vitamin K2 deficiency is going to cause calcification in the tissues, the blood vessels, and causes demineralization of bones. So it causes osteopenia. That's exactly what we've been seeing: more degenerative joint disease, more osteopenia, and more calcification where you shouldn't find calcification. Blood vessels should not be becoming ossified.
What's happened is that the total body calcium is actually pretty good, but it's all in the wrong places. Calcium supplementation doesn't help because calcium supplements just don't end up going to the bones. You need chemicals, hormones, enzymes, and cofactors to put it in the bones. Vitamin K2 deficiency seems to be a very strong link.
There are two types of vitamin K: vitamin K1 and K2. K1 has to do with coagulation—that's why we missed this for a long time. Did you know that there are 10 types of vitamin K, from one all the way to ten? But the important ones are vitamin K1 and vitamin K2.
K1 has to do with coagulation, and if you want to antagonize that, you take Coumadin. So how does it work? It antagonizes vitamin K1. I want to point out that if you take Coumadin, you antagonize K2 also.
Does that mean that when you're giving Coumadin, or a blood thinner, long-term to a patient, the patient is going to have vitamin K2 deficiency as well? Yes. I have known personally for 30 years that patients who are on Coumadin get calcification of the arteries, calcification of the aorta, calcification of the valves, and calcification of the coronary arteries.
We knew that years ago; it took us 30 years to piece this puzzle together. Now we know that Coumadin patients have a problem because they have not only low vitamin K1—which is what you want, so they don't want their blood to clot—but you also have vitamin K2 deficiency.
Where does K1 come from? K1 comes mostly from chloroplasts—so anything green, leafy vegetables, and algae are where vitamin K1 comes from.
Now, where does vitamin K2 come from? There are two sources of vitamin K2: one is animal sources, and the other is my favorite, fermented products.
It's all coming together why I've been encouraging fermented products. Let's look at vitamin K2, also known as monoquinone. One form is called MK4, and the one that comes from fermented products is called MK7. MK7 is a longer molecule and is also biologically more active. It is found in some meats, some eggs, dairy, and fermented products.
Why would vitamin K2 deficiency happen if people are eating lots of meat and eggs? Because the quality of the meat is also going down. If your animal is not eating green chloroplasts or greens—natural grass food—that meat is not going to have enough vitamin K2. Similarly, eggs are supposed to have a lot of vitamin K2, but today's eggs are all fed grains, and grains don't have vitamin K2.
Vitamin K2 must come from the original product, which means nature has to provide it first. So, when it goes through the cycles of the animals, that's when vitamin K2 levels go up. Fermented foods make vitamin K2, and the fermentation process creates it.
Vitamin K2 gets into the body, activates all the MGPs, and in the bones, you're going to get strong bones, while in the blood vessels, you're going to get inhibition of calcification.
Now, can we measure vitamin K2? If this is so good, then why can't I just go ahead and get a vitamin K2 level? It's because there's no method to do it. What we look at is non-carboxylated proteins, and that's a test you can do, but it's not available right now; it's only being used in research purposes.
There was a huge study done, and as you can see from the references, I'll show them to you. We correlated the non-carboxylated proteins, which indicate vitamin K2 deficiency, with the amount of calcification in the arteries. There was a direct correlation: the more non-carboxylated MGPs there are, the more calcification there is in these arteries.
This really made us think that we do have a problem here. Then they did another study in England, called the Rotterdam study. They took male and female patients over the age of 55, thousands of them, and looked at the vitamin K2 intake. They listed the vitamin K2 intake that each patient had and then looked at outcomes over the next eight years.
They found that aortic calcification and coronary artery disease, but also all-cause mortality, were directly related to the vitamin K2 intake. More vitamin K2 meant lower mortality and less coronary artery disease.
You may argue that it could be the food rather than K2 itself, and that's a possibility. But at least we're beginning to see a correlation here in the studies.
They found that if you consume more than 32 micrograms of vitamin K2 a day in your diet, there is a 50% reduction in cardiovascular death. Now you've got my attention as a cardiologist! There is also a 25% decrease in all-cause mortality.
Why is all-cause mortality also important? That means it's not just decreasing heart attacks; it's also decreasing other causes of mortality, which may include some cancers. It's showing that vitamin K2 supplementation reduces certain types of cancers.
And I'll come to that if we get a chance here. If you like this video, then this one I strongly recommend for you. But if you want to see the whole series, please click here.