I Don’t Prescribed Vitamin K (K1 and K2) with Vitamin D3.
A lot of patients and friends asking me if we need to supplement Vitamin D3 together with Vitamin K2 to improve the level. My approach is no. For those of you who know me and my practice, you know that I always try to give the least supplement with multiple benefits so that you won’t have to take too many unless you really need to. You also know that I believe every one of us needs multivitamin because every chemical pathway in our cellular level depends on micronutrients – that is multivitamin and mineral. So multivitamin is our foundation, we must be optimally nourished, before adding other nutrients.
I don’t like to add anything that is not testable because then you would never know if you are actually deficient or not. Vitamin K is one of them. We can’t easily test it. Furthermore, Vitamin K – like Vitamin E – is a group of compounds that work in harmony. K1 and K2 must be in balance. So to my logic, if K1 and K2 can’t be tested, how do I know if we were deficient, and then, how do I maintain the harmony if I only supplement one of them? With nutrients, balance is everything. There’s a risk to taking supplemental Vitamin K when you haven’t been evaluated for that and found to be deficient. And with Vitamin K, you can’t be evaluated. However, True deficiencies of K1 or K2 are extraordinarily rare. Most people do not need to supplement with K because it’s in practically every popular food people eat, such as eggs, chicken, salads, vegetables, kale, cheese, popular fermented foods, and more. Furthermore, vitamin K2 is produced by our microflora.
So my take is, if we can get it from food easily and we also make them, why supplement? If we still want to supplement, I’d rather supplement with probiotic and prebiotic to optimise our microflora. Optimal gut microflora has enormous function including producing vitamin K2. This is back to my forever approach, one supplement covering multiple benefits. Remember, each supplement has its excipients (the stuff our liver would push out), the more supplements we take, the more excipients we ingest, the more our liver needs to work. If we talk about genomic, many of us – including me, my husband, and my three boys – have less than optimal liver detox pathway. But this is for another blog:-)
Vitamin D and K work together to raise calcium levels in the body, so taking them together will cause more calcium to be retained in our body, and this might not be right for us. This could lead to kidney stones, heart disease, muscle pain and sleeping issue.
Vitamin K is the opposite of blood thinner, it can thicken the blood. So taking vitamin D3 together with vitamin K is not good for those on blood thinner, because then it will negate the action of the blood thinner. With this fact, does it mean you can’t increase your Vitamin D level because you can’t take vitamin K? Of course not! The more reason for me to not supplement vitamin K together with Vitamin D.
Don't get me wrong mind you!, I absolutely agree that Vitamin K has a lot of health benefits – It would not be a topic if it does not! But Vitamin K is easily accessible through food and by taking care of our microflora (also by eating the right food), so eat your Vitamin K foods and be kind to your gut bacteria.
Finally, check the right type of Vitamin D. There are 2 type of Vitamin D you can test. One is 1,25 (OH) D – the active form that is controlled by your other hormone (PTH), the other is 25(OH) D – the storage room. The higher 1,25 D level, the lower the 25 D level might be so ideally you measure both at the same time. In Vitamin D deficiency, 1,25 (OH) level go up, not down. If you have to choose one, when trying to diagnose Vitamin D deficiency or toxicity, 25-OH- D is the correct test.
You only need Vitamin D to increase your Vitamin D level!
Stay well everyone!
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