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 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 it because I think that this is a very important chapter in understanding what's causing blockages in the arteries of the body.
So, let's just dive right into it. There's another study done called The Epic Study, and it showed that for every 10 micrograms of vitamin K2 in your diet, there is a nine percent reduction in cardiovascular risk. I take that any day—show me which of my medicines can do that; few, very few.
In the Epic Study, there was a direct correlation: the higher your intake of vitamin K2, the lower your cardiovascular risk. So, if you're consuming 40, that’s 9 times 4—I mean, that's almost a 50% reduction in cardiovascular risk. The references are all listed, and this was an amazing study.
There was another study that was also done in Europe where they showed clearly the amount of coronary calcification. Now, you know that I do coronary scans on all my patients to look for coronary calcification because coronary calcification tells you that you've got atherosclerosis. There's a direct correlation to mortality and heart attacks, and that's been well proven.
This study showed that there's a direct correlation between vitamin K2 intake and coronary calcification—a direct correlation. This was a beautiful study, published in Atherosclerosis in 2009, showing patients with low vitamin K2 intake had the worst coronary calcification, and those with the highest had the lowest amount of coronary calcification.
There was another Dutch study that was done where they looked at 180 micrograms of MK7. This is the preparation that we use of vitamin K2, and, as I said before, it comes from fermented products. It showed not only cardiovascular risk reduction but that these patients had much better bone density, less fractures, and better strength of the bones as well. This was a 2007 study.
Then, there were further studies done where the patients who were given vitamin K2 supplements had improved pulse wave velocities and carotid artery distensibility. So, what does that mean? It's improving the elasticity of the blood vessels. How does it do that? Well, obviously, if there's less calcium buildup in that artery wall and in the smooth muscle, which I explained to you before, then that artery is going to be more distensible.
So if it's more distensible, what happens? Well, what happens is that the systolic blood pressure will be lower because when the heart pumps into a rigid tube, the sustained blood pressure is going to be higher because there's nothing accommodating that stroke volume. But when there's more distensibility, it means there's more compliance in the blood vessel.
Because there's less calcium, it's less rigid, you're going to get a lower systolic blood pressure. We know that systolic blood pressure has a direct correlation to coronary artery disease, cardiomyopathy, congestive heart failure, and total mortality.
So, what happens to diastolic blood pressure? Patients given vitamin K2 supplements have a better diastolic pressure as well because you don't want a very low diastolic pressure. A low diastolic pressure decreases coronary perfusion because coronary perfusion occurs in diastole.
If you have vitamin K2 deficiency, you're going to get a high systolic pressure because of the non-dispensability of your rigid tubes (your aorta and everything else), and you get a lower diastolic pressure because there's no recoil of the aorta. Diastolic pressure is caused by the recoil of the aorta, so it's a double whammy.
You don't want stiff arteries. You don't want calcium. By the way, this process of stiffening of the arteries and losing elasticity starts in your 20s. I hope I have your attention here; it starts in your 20s. By the time you're in your 50s and 60s, if you have not taken care of your vasculature, you're going to have stiff arteries and calcification.
Yes, you may not have had a heart attack yet, but your physiology is being set up to either have a stroke, heart attack, or heart failure, which are leading causes of mortality in the western world. So, lots of studies have been done.
Now there's another study with vitamin K2 supplementation: they took a cohort of patients and gave them vitamin K2. They found that the increase in coronary calcium can be attenuated. The control group showed ongoing calcification because it's so easy to do the coronary calcification scores.
Here's a nice picture of it showing the calcium buildup again, just to remind you all. This chronic calcification was attenuated. You could cause that slope to flatten out with vitamin K2, so you don't get more buildup compared to the group that was given the vitamins, which had much less calcification buildup.
So, any opportunity to decrease the amount of coronary calcification buildup in your arteries and to improve your elasticity and distensibility of vessels, take it. I give my patients vitamin K2, and my diet has to improve diets of what they eat: fermented foods.
The Japanese eat a lot of natto (that's fermented soybeans). If you have a taste for it, then you should have it because it has the highest concentration of vitamin K2. Next is hard cheese, like Gouda. Hard cheese is very high in vitamin K2.
Then come other cheeses like Brie. The French cheeses have a lot of vitamins because it's the fermentation products—the bacteria produce the vitamin K2 in it. Kefir comes in there; sauerkraut comes in there—they also have a lot of vitamin K2, but much less than the first few ones that I already mentioned.
Our regular meats have MK4, and our eggs have MK4. If you have farm-raised free-roaming chickens, they'll have vitamin K2 as well, but they have to be free-roaming. They’ve got to be eating what they would normally eat in their normal life, not the feeds that we're giving them—same thing with the eggs.
So, any opportunity I get to do that, that's the way to go. And then, worst-case scenario, the patients who already have some calcification or are at very high risk also receive vitamin K2 supplementation.
So, is there any downside to giving them vitamin K2 supplementation? There is. Everything does affect your PT INR if you're taking Coumadin. So, if you're taking Coumadin or Warfarin, you need to make sure that you test your PT INR because high doses of vitamin K2 will affect your PT. That's been shown. Other than that, I've not seen any other downside in taking vitamin K2 supplements.
How much vitamin K2 do I recommend? 200 micrograms of vitamin K2 on a daily basis.
So, let me just talk a little bit about—remember I told you I started off by saying there's a correlation between my patients who have diabetes and osteopenia? They seem to have coronary artery disease. Well, let’s see if there's a link here. So, we know that vitamin K2 also affects insulin sensitivity, and I'll show you the references for this as well.
If we induce vitamin K2 deficiency in a patient by changing their diet, it produces insulin resistance. When you supplement them with vitamin K2 200 micrograms MK7, we show that insulin sensitivity gets better. Remember my previous talks; I talked to you about insulin sensitivity. These patients who have insulin resistance—just by giving them vitamin K2—I’m also improving their insulin sensitivity.
Now, why is that? Why is that the case? What's that got to do with this? Well, vitamin K2 is found in high concentrations in the body in certain places—saliva. There’s an extremely high level of vitamin K2 in it, so what's that doing in the mouth? Well, guess what? I’ve got teeth.
So, vitamin K2 and the saliva in it causes me to deposit dentine. The higher my vitamin K2 levels in my saliva, the better teeth I'm going to have. Is this all making sense? Now, if you have vitamin K2 deficiency, you're going to get dental caries.
This has been directly correlated. Western Price, a dentist, clearly showed that he was curing the worst dental caries by giving patients vitamin K2. He called it Factor X at that time; he didn't know it was vitamin K2. He would cure all these people's bad dental caries; he wouldn't pull teeth. He just gave them this, and all of a sudden, all the caries would get better. This is amazing stuff.
So, vitamin K2 in the saliva is there for a purpose. It's the highest concentration in the body because you want to keep good dentition.
Number two, it's in the pancreas. There's a very high concentration of vitamin K2 in the pancreas. What’s it got to do with the pancreas? It's got to do with insulin sensitivity. That’s what it's got to do with. So, that's why when you give vitamin K2, you're boosting your pancreatic function and preventing that over-secretion of insulin.
That unregulated over-secretion of insulin—the incretion response is attenuated when there are good amounts of vitamin K2 inside the pancreas.
And joint disease? I think I already touched on that: if you don't have vitamin K2, you're not going to activate the matrix proteins in your bones, and therefore, you're going to get osteopenia. There are lots of references for this.
Now, there's another link: Alzheimer's disease. So, what's that got to do with it? Well, again, we're not 100% sure, but remember the vasodilatory capacity of your capillaries in your brain is very important.
When I do functional MRI studies, you look at the flow of blood in different parts of the brain. Instantaneously, the flow increases here, and it decreases there. That’s brain wave activity. How does that happen? Through vasodilation, right?
So, you vasodilate; your vasoconstriction; this ability (this microvasculature)—automatic vasodilation and constriction is controlled by vitamins in your blood vessels and in your smooth muscle cells.
A further study showed that with cancer—overall, this huge study showed a 30% reduced risk in cancer in patients who had high levels of vitamin K2 or equivalent in the bloodstream.
As I mentioned before, I'll mention them again: natto, hard cheese, butter, liver, and cod liver oil have very high concentrations of vitamin K2 in them.
Then there's prostate cancer. There was a study that showed less prostate cancer and spread of cancer in patients who had the highest levels of vitamin K2 in their body.
Regarding osteodystrophy in renal failure patients, one of the biggest problems with renal failure patients is that they get calcification of non-osseous structures. When they come to me, I see the coronary calcium score is extremely high, the carotids are calcified, the aorta is calcified, and the aortic valve is calcified.
Again, those patients used to be given calcium. We don't give them calcium anymore because the mortality is very high. We feel this is secondary to two factors: vitamin D deficiency and vitamin K2 deficiency.
Now, I’ve got to tell you about vitamin D at this point because, in order to get the optimal function of your vitamin K2, you also need vitamin D. Vitamin D goes to that same matrix protein, and then comes along K2, and they work together on the matrix protein. You need good levels of vitamin D as well. That's why we give vitamin D to our patients as well.
Vitamin D's job in the body is twofold. One, it increases the absorption of calcium from your gut—that's what vitamin D does. But vitamin D doesn't then take it and do anything else with the calcium—that job is vitamin K2's job.
Vitamin D's job is simply to absorb the calcium into your body. What the destination is for that calcium afterward—whether it's going to go into a vascular structure or into the bone—That's not determined by vitamin D.
That's why if you have a patient with osteopenia, I mean, just giving them vitamin D alone isn't really helping them. Look around you; everybody's on calcium supplements and vitamin D supplements, but they're not on vitamin K2 supplements.
This experiment has gone long enough. In spite of all your foods being vitamin D supplemented, the environment is supplementing with vitamin D. Even in your orange juice, just about anything you pick up is vitamin D supplemented, and yet we have this epidemic of 25-year-olds coming to me with osteopenia.
Oh yeah, I have osteopenia as well. I’m surprised, and you’re drinking all the stuff with so much vitamin D in it and calcium—everything is calcium fortified. Yet, they’re osteopenic because they don't have the right chemistry.
By the way, vitamin K2 deficiency has also been linked to fertility problems. In kids, the development of the face, the arch, and the nose is also related to vitamin K2. This is again highlighted by Weston Price, who nailed it down that the mothers and the kids who were vitamin K2 deficient had premature calcification of the cartilage.
The cartilage in their face, the nasal bridges, and therefore they develop small jaws and upper airway obstruction. So, the question is: why did these kids develop this? Because they didn't develop their face properly due to premature calcification of the cartilage.
You know, everything closes after a while and that's it. Now, the cartilage cannot because it's been calcified, leading to narrow arches.
By the way, they say that you can detect some of this in utero—that this baby is probably vitamin K2 deficient by the way that facial structure looks. This is a very exciting area as well, but it shows that the mother's nutrition is exceedingly important during pregnancy to avoid narrow jaws, the mouth, and these issues.
Tooth decay? I already touched upon the very high levels that are inside your saliva and want to keep that going. By the way, patients who have bad dental caries can get low-grade endotoxemia because the gums get bad, creating a direct route for tiny bacterial products to get into your bloodstream.
These products, called lipopolysaccharides, displace the cholesterol from the LDL molecule and create small dense LDL. You know that it is small dense LDL that causes atherosclerosis—not LDL itself. It's when LDL becomes small and dense because it picks up endotoxins along the way, as endotoxins can't free-float in the bloodstream.
So, we always look to see what the cause of small dense LDL is and chase that down to improve the patient's health. Gum disease is very important. Patients take these mouthwashes and have all those chemicals in them, the worst thing you could possibly do because you’re just killing off the good bacteria in your mouth.
You’re replacing them with probably the most hardy ones around, and then you wonder why there are more dental caries. It doesn't need to do anything for the breath because bad breath comes from something much deeper.
So, I'm not in favor of those mouthwashes. The better thing to do is to take a good probiotic and take vitamin K2 supplementation, and you'll have a much better mouth bacterial flora.
Also, your dentine will be very good too. There’s data to show the direct correlation between dental caries and stroke as well.
In closing, I just want everyone to know that vitamin K2 is probably a small molecule, unheard of, but probably exceedingly important in our physiology.
I think that when I, as a cardiologist, see all this calcification in my coronary arteries, I'm always asking the question: why? Where did this calcium come from? What's it doing where it shouldn't be? I think those patients now—I put them all on vitamin K2 supplements.
Now, because many of you have been asking, “Dr. J, why are you putting out some vitamin D and vitamin K2?” You know, I came here because I've got a blockage in my artery. But this is the answer.
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.