Does Vitamin K2 Remove Plaque?
In this video I go over vitamin K2 (menaquinone-7 (mk7)) and its effects on cardiovascular health, especially plaque buildup and calcium removal. Lots of people take vitamin K2 with vitamin D supplements to make sure calcium stays in the bones, but is there actually any evidence to support those claims?
About the Channel: Hello, my name is Emin Janaslani and I am a licensed pharmacist in California. My channel is dedicated to only discussing evidence based supplements, medications, diet, exercise, and lifestyle habits revolved around improving our health and lifespan.
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In this video we’ll be going over vitamin K1 K2 K3 K4 I’m joking there’s only two but we’ll be focusing on vitamin K2 we’ll be looking at the current research to see if vitamin K2 does reduce plaque buildup in the artery walls and provide cardiovascular benefits so the main question is does
Vitamin K remove calcium from the arteries there’s two main processes in the body that require vitamin K2 the first one is osteocalcin which is essential for bone remodeling and build building and Matrix GLA protein which is essential for transporting calcium out of the vessel walls so having a K2
Deficiency theoretically can make bones weaker and more susceptible to breaking and it can also result in more calcium buildup in the arteries that we don’t want but we don’t care about theories I mean who are you Einstein we just care if this stuff works and saves us from
Dying all right let’s look at some studies the first big study is the rdam study the results here State the the results of this study suggest a protective effect of dietary mancinone intake against coronary heart disease in older men and women as indicated by the inverse association with all cause
Mortality high intake of mancinone does not increase the risk for other major diseases such as cancer there was no consistent Association of filo quinone intake with coronary heart disease mortality or aortic calcification okay so in terms of vitamin K1 which is filic quinone we don’t see any real benefit
From getting more from our diet we do however see benefit from more vitamin K2 intake which is menaquinone foods high in vitamin K2 mostly include leafy green vegetables like kale broccoli asparagus spinach you get the idea from this study we see that dietary intake of more vitamin K2 is better for heart health
But we have to pump the brakes a little bit is the benefit coming from those people eating more vitamin K2 or is it because food foods that contain vitamin K2 are healthier foods in general I mean it’s no secret that if you replaced french fries with lettuce you’d have a
Lower risk of a heart attack surely you can’t be serious I am serious and don’t call me shirely what we want to find out is if two people ate french fries and one was given vitamin K2 as a supplement and the other a placebo would the K2
Provide a protective effect okay so this one here is another big study combining 17 randomized control trials looking at the individual studies we can check the doses that were used it’s good to see that most of these are doing a decent amount of vitamin K2 menaquinone 7 but
Some are taking a look at vitamin K1 also keep in mind that the main form of vitamin K2 that has shown these benefits is menaquinone 7 and not menaquinone 4 so it’s good that these studies are focusing on mk7 so we learned from the other study that K1 didn’t provide much
Benefits while K2 Foods did have a protective effect let’s check the results of this one in conclusion we demonstrate from these 17 randomized control trials that vitamin K supplementation has no significant effect on changing weight reducing CRP controlling blood pressure or even factors that belong to glycemic and
Lipid status such as glucose hemoglobin A1c insulin total cholesterol triglycerides LDL HDL except hir hir is a test that can help prevent diabetes now we have this other study on vitamin K2 and vitamin D this study showed that an elderly man with an ABC score greater than 300 Au 2 years of mk7
Plus vitamin D supplementation did not influence ABC progression not satisfied okay fine here’s one more patients with no prior es schic heart disease randomized to vitamin K2 and D supplementation had no significant reduction in mean CA progression over a 2-year followup compared to Placebo so it looks like vitamin K2 suppl mentation
Does not provide any additional benefit on heart health but there might be another reason to take vitamin K2 and that is bone health here’s a study on post-menopausal women and vitamin K2 mk7 supplementation mk7 supplements may help postmenopausal women to prevent bone loss whether these results can be extrapolated to other populations for
Example children and Men needs further investigation so obviously we don’t know if this benefit will show up in males but my guess is that it will not we don’t even know if the supplementation with K2 will be beneficial for women in general this study was just for postmenopausal women and we already know
That post-menopausal women have a decent risk of getting osteoporosis so K2 shows benefit for them but will the results translate to healthy females and even males not sure but my guess is probably not now that doesn’t mean you should throw away your vitamin K2 supplement Kobe it just means that you should 100%
Treat it as a supplement and probably only consider taking it if you don’t get enough vitamin K2 from your diet but if you are getting enough K2 from green leafy vegetables and it’s probably not going to provide any additional benefit for you I hear a lot of talk about how
Vitamin D supplementation especially at high doses can cause calcification in the artery walls so a reason that most people like to supplement with vitamin K2 is because they believe it will offset the effect of high doe vitamin D now there are many forms of vitamin D
Diet AR Ergo calciferol which is D2 used by doctors 7 dehydr cholesterol which we get from the Sun Co calciferol which is vitamin D3 and these are all processed by the liver and they make calfed which is processed by the kidney and makes Cala trial Cala trial is what’s given by
Doctors for people with poor kidneys or some kind of reduced kidney function calat trial and calid are considered more potent than D2 and D3 and also the one we get from the Sun so the risk of toxicity is much greater with those two vitamin D toxicity can cause an increase
In calcification it is not dose dependent obviously a higher dose has a higher risk of toxicity but it’s not just the high dose that causes this calcification it’s the vitamin D toxicity so just because you take a high dose for an extended period doesn’t mean you will get calcification you need your
Blood levels to reach toxic levels first and you can easily measure that with a routine blood test so by this logic taking a high do vitamin D doesn’t mean you should be taking a high dose vitamin K2 with it automatically you still need to make sure your vitamin D levels are
In range and not too high and if they do get to toxic levels you need to bring them back down by getting rid of the vitamin D because vitamin D toxicity is no joke and so supplementing with vitamin K2 is not going to save you there and if your levels are within the
Normal range for vitamin D then vitamin K2 probably is not providing any additional benefit because you probably aren’t getting any add additional calcification from the vitamin D so just stick to vitamin K2 from your diet for now it doesn’t seem like vitamin K2 provides any benefit for anyone other than post-menopausal women with
Osteoporosis or those at risk of developing osteoporosis now I get it if it’s a safe supplement what’s the harm in taking vitamin K2 the side effects of vitamin K2 seem to be pretty much non-existent and minuscule so you probably won’t be doing much harm by supplementing with vitamin K2 but it
Also doesn’t seem like there is much benefit to go out of your way to supplement with vitamin K2 if you are taking a multivitamin or a vitamin D supplement then sure it’s not a bad idea to look for one that also has vitamin K2
In it probably at a dose of 90 or 145 micrograms is good enough all I’m saying is that it isn’t a good enough reason to rely on this as a way to get calcium out of your arteries now if you want to check out if another supplement is good
For heart health then watch my video on NATO Kat that I’ve linked right here here that’s it for this video thank you all for watching and I’ll see you next time
