Written by Christopher Kelly
Oct. 25, 2015
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Julie: Hello and welcome to the Paleo Baby Podcast. As always, I'm Julie Kelly and today I'm very excited to be joined by Beverly Meyer. Beverly Meyer is a gluten-free Paleo nutritionist and natural health practitioner. She's also a blogger and a podcaster and many other things. She's been in practice for a long time and she's got lots of wonderful expertise to lend to, lots of conversations that we have here at Paleo Baby.
But today, I wanted to talk specifically about an issue that I get asked about a lot both from people I work with and just also from friends and family, always asking about what types of vitamins and minerals are important for them to be supplementing with. And one of the biggest things that come up in conversation is whether or not people should be taking vitamin K, what vitamin K does, how it can help with lots of different things. Beverly is quite the expert on vitamin K, so I wanted to have her on to talk about this specifically. Welcome, Beverly. I don't want to take all of the limelight in the beginning here but I'm excited to have you on.
Beverly: Thank you. That was a great introduction. I'm really happy to be here. I tell you where my passion for vitamin K2 came about is -- I'm 63 now and just very short two years ago discovered that the shape of my face, I have a very narrow palate, like pretty much you look around everybody does. It's almost -- You look at a picture of an Eskimo and you're like, "Oh, how did humans ever have such broad cheekbones or the Tibetans?"
But you look at us and we have very narrow chins and jaws and crowded teeth and teeth extractions. Anyway, I found out that a part of the reason I was having such terrible anxiety problems just sitting in a chair reading and my heart rate was completely out of control. This went on for years. But that it had to do with the pressure of my misshapen V-shape as opposed to a U-shaped jaw kind of pushing back against some of the nerves in the brain stem and stuff.
So it was like a massive aha. I've been looking for this for decades. And as soon as I start wearing a particular kind of mouth guard just enough to pull my jaw forward a fraction of an inch, that heart rate stuff just turned down like a volume knob. That's when I started studying how, why -- I knew this but it wasn't personal. So why are we growing now several generations of people with very narrow faces and pointy chins and crowded palates that require dental extractions or root canals or braces? So that's how I got into this whole vitamin K thing, as a personal experience with my own mouth.
Julie: That's really interesting. Just for people that aren't super familiar with vitamin K2, do you want to talk a little bit about what its role, its primary roles in the body and just a little bit of background about vitamin K and maybe a little bit about different forms and one specifically, I think, that we're referencing mostly today would be vitamin K2.
Beverly: Yes. So like the B vitamin family, you have B1, B2, B3, B6, B12, whatever. They're very different substances. They have very different roles in the body. And vitamin K, there's vitamin K1, there's vitamin K2. I'm sure there are other vitamins Ks out there on the horizon I'm not familiar with them but their jobs are very different. Vitamin K1, we get from basically green vegetables and some fermentation action in our gut makes it also.
It helps regulate -- it's the master regulator of how much our blood clots so that if we cut ourselves, we don't just bleed to death. Something has to tell the body, "Whoa, clot that poppy up right now." So we want the right balance of vitamin K1. And then there are many people that are on blood thinners which is -- That's another story. But to try to thin their blood to help keep their arteries, keep the blood moving faster through their arteries which are clogged up from a lack of vitamin K2 which is what we're going to talk about.
So that's kind of K1. You get it in vegetables. You make some of it in a healthy gut that can ferment it with your own good bacteria and it has to do with blood clotting. And we can convert a small portion of that to K2 but really pretty insignificant. All right, there's five fatty acids, fat soluble vitamins: A, D, E, K and what I call vitamin F, which are the Omega 3, 6 and 9, the fats.
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So the fat soluble vitamins are like a herd. They travel together. They work together. They reinforce each other. And if any of them are missing, the whole herd is compromised. That's a really, really important point that all of this obsession with taking vitamin D the last decade -- I mean, it's good that we're realizing we need vitamin D from sun or supplements but it's really, really, really bad that vitamin K2 didn't come along for the ride.
Julie: It's almost like is it going to take us a decade per fat soluble vitamin to realize which ones are important?
Beverly: Yeah. And, of course, Weston Price was all over this stuff, Dr. Weston Price, the dentist that traveled the world and lived and interviewed and studied indigenous peoples on all different continents, all different climates, all different diets, people eating only their own ancestral food whether it was crickets or walruses, whatever it was. He studied what they ate and how they knew what to eat. At puberty, the woman starts to needing this food. And also the men at puberty, the men start to eating this food.
Okay now, you're pregnant, we know you need this certain kind of oyster. And they had this incredible knowledge. But anyway, out of all of his years of research, what he realized that regardless of where people lived and what they ate, the reason why they were so healthy had -- He was a dentist. So they had broad cheekbones, perfect teeth, no dental work, nobody extracting molars and all this. They had broad wide jaws and faces and teeth, wide palates, no fertility problems.
And that when he worked on their diets, what he saw was that they had ten times on average the amount of vitamins A, D and the mysterious activator X than the people he could study at that time in the '30s and '40s when we were still kind of already eating natural foods really. But it was ten times the amount of A, D and the activator X, which it wasn't until a few years ago that Chris Masterjohn first wrote and said, "Hey, that's vitamin K2." So Weston Price figured this stuff all out decades and decades ago. So we're all a little bit late to the party on this.
Julie: Yeah, definitely. I think the other piece to that puzzle -- I mean you mentioned that it was in the '30s and '40s when we were still eating a relatively natural diet. Unfortunately though, what my husband and I hark back to all the time is the lack of variety. That even when we were still planting our own gardens and victory gardens and people are still, not shopping at supermarkets, we still have this kind of huge reduction in diversity of plant material that we eat in this country specifically, which I think you do see when you look at the groups of people especially like Weston A. Price was looking at or you look at aboriginal tribes or you travel to countries where, underdeveloped countries where they're still eating lots and lots of varieties because they're still, in large part, they're still foraging. So you get this increased variety.
So I think it made it possible to get that many vitamins, those fat soluble vitamins. Or ten times the amount is probably a lot easier to get than when you have a lot more variety. Because how much kale can you really eat?
Beverly: Yes. And so he's saying that people then eating fresh pressed flax and ox tail soup and whatever that they were ten times less than the indigenous people in A, D and K. And that's where he came up with the vitamin -- Excuse me, the cod liver oil was a great source for the vitamin F, the Omega 3s, and 6s and 9s -- we do need some 6s -- and the A and D but that it always had to be taken with the high vitamin butter oil which had the mysterious activator X which, of course, is vitamin K2 but it's actually a pretty low dose source.
And so the natural sources from historical times, we do get K2 now and then from pastured egg yolks, from animal livers like goose liver and the emu. So apparently, for whatever reason, gooses and emus, certain species make a lot of K. Fish eggs, which of course would have been a huge part of our diet all over the globe, the fish and fish eggs.
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So the organs, the wild eggs, the fish eggs, the pastured eggs, and then also, of course, we had intact intestinal bacterial systems that could ferment all of that and create some of that high dose K2 for us.
Julie: Right. So you also think that kind of the degradation of our guts is probably also contributing to poor absorption and production of vitamin K.
Beverly: Right. And what Weston Price saw was that -- When he went back to the people he had studied and they had begun to introduce just one thing like a vegetable oil or some kind of other type of bread or something and then immediately their facial structure started to change. And he documented this with thousands of photographs. It's really quite amazing that in an extremely short period of time, their faces narrow, their teeth began to twist and rot and they began having fertility problems and so on.
So introducing the wrong kinds of foods damages the gut, makes that malabsorption, that leaky gut, whatever it is doing that very quickly turns that around. So we can get some K2 from food but we really also -- it really, really is something you want to supplement. I have a huge inventory of supplements in my clinic but my motto is food first. And I really work hard with clients until I get their diet where I feel it's where I want it. And then we can look at what's happening.
But I will often get people right on a vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin K2 combo right out of the gate and tell people often to stop taking their vitamin D if it already test -- they're separate vitamin D if their vitamin D levels are normal and then just take the combo. And I've got a couple of those on my website of A,D,K2 combo. And you could take K2 on its own as emu oil, which is on my website. It's fascinating. I never thought I would know so much about emu but this particular species of emu is extremely rich in natural vitamin K2.
Or get it in supplement form on its own if you're already stocked up on D but then don't forget the A. So it is important to supplement K2 but in babies you really -- They're going to get all they need really, when they're in age one, two and three, they're going to get that from the pastured egg yolks. Hopefully you're giving them some liver. They're getting the good healthy foods. You don't necessarily want to start supplementing the babies until about age three, I think.
There's not a lot of research on this but that's kind of what I'm seeing. And you can open an emu oil capsule or they sell it in liquid. On my website, it's in capsule but Radiant Life does sell it in liquid. And they just squish that out right on to a bite of their food or get it into their mouth. Start with just one a day from the age of three. But for adults -- And here's another thing about K2. We know vitamin A and D store up in the liver, right? We can store those particular fat soluble vitamins. But one of the big problems with K2 is we don't store it.
So it's a fat soluble vitamin. It's carried by fat. It's stored in fat. But it doesn't -- It's like a firecracker. It burns out too fast or whatever it's doing and we don't store K2. That's why you need to supplement it literally every day. And in addition to your pastured egg yolks and your fermented foods and fish eggs and if you're eating really high quality blue cheese apparently has some K2 and it's just there are not good sources.
Julie: Yeah. I don't think that that can be stressed enough. I think a lot of people think that if they're taking a supplement they don't have to worry about where it's coming from in their diet. And I think with some things it's kind of true because some things it's negligible how much you can really get from your diet anyways. But I don't think vitamin K2 is one of those things. I think you need to be getting it from your food daily and probably supplement it with daily too if you're an adult. And really just trying to find -- There's so many other reasons to eat organ meat and there's so many other reasons to eat pastured egg yolks than just the vitamin K2. So I think a lot of people need that reminder that it's something that you need to work for consistently in your diet and to supplement probably.
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Beverly: So, yeah. Those range, you're looking the 180 to 200 micrograms, MCGs, daily. So you're going to get some of that from food and then some of that from your supplement. There's no overdose level or whatever. So if you get a little extra K, that's fine. You don't want to take a handful every day. But it's not been shown to be dangerous if you take more than that. Here's the main function of vitamin K2. It's all about calcium. So the way I remember it in my own mind is three words that I put a capital K on all three, which will probably hit some spot when I say these into the microphone. K carries calcium.
Julie: I like that.
Beverly: K carries calcium. KKK. And that is, I mean, if you -- All you have to do is remember that and then you're like, "Oh my gosh. I got to remember to take my K because K carries calcium." K is the UPS truck that picks up some calcium and delivers it to the proper address. If you don't have the address on the package, your package is going to end up in the wrong place. And what this means is it's a double whammy. We get deficient at where we need the K to deposit calcium like your bones and your teeth.
[0:16:48] [Audio Glitch] want the K. But if it won't address there, it's going to precipitate into just running around randomly in your blood vessels, veins and arteries and clogging them up with calcium plaque and forming dental plaque on your teeth. Basically, it's going to clog up things. And calcium can be part of the precipitate that forms gall stones and kidney stones. If you have this loose running calcium on the one hand and a nicely delivered package at your front door on the other and that is the core of K2.
Vitamin D absorbs the K once you got it where you want it. Okay, it's in my jaw, absorb. Yes! And that's why you have to take these together. A plays a part in all of this too, so that's why the ADK combo is so cool. But that's it. K is carrying the calcium into the bones. And, of course, as we're growing, we've got a lot of bones that need growing not just the skeletal bones but the all important, the facial bones, the big wide strong solid jaws, or excuse me, they go in terms of first the cheekbones.
The cheekbones. That's where the calcium and the K are working, is to lay that vitamin D down, excuse me, that calcium and collagen matrix down to grow those strong sturdy white cheekbones. But basically, the cheekbones are what hold your whole mouth and jaw up. The jaw hangs off your cheekbones. So if your cheekbones don't grow right, they're too narrow, they're not sturdy enough, then the jaw gets progressively more narrow, the palate turns more to a V instead of a U, the soft palate on the top of the roof of your mouth gets squashed, the teeth get crowded in. It leads to a lifetime of all kinds of bizarre problems that we, "Oh, well, we'll just get braces." No.
Julie: Yeah. Why do you need braces in the first place? I think that's really important. I think there's a lot of people that kind of always forget to ask the why or hearken back to where did this come from in the first place, what was the cause of this, and can we do anything about it?
Beverly: Yeah. Why is my favorite word as a clinician. But why did you break your leg? Well, because I fell down. Okay. Why did you fall down? Do you need new glasses? Do you have a balance problem? Were you doing something -- Were you trying to run stairs at night without any lights on? Why did you fall down? And then why did the bone break?
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There's always deeper levels of why. Why do I have diabetes or whatever? Yeah, okay. So I'm with you on the why.
Julie: No. It's hugely important. I mean, let's take it a few steps further. I mean, what else is the lack of vitamin K2? How else is that wrecking havoc in people's lives? What else do you see it really creating problems for? I mean, it's never just one thing. It's never just the vitamin K2. Obviously, there's lots of other things that go with it. But specifically, I mean, there's lots of people, I think, that are suffering from some of these problems and they don't even realize that it could be as simple as a deficiency in these fat soluble vitamins specifically. So what are some of the other kind of big 'gotchas' that you see in terms of the lack of vitamin K in the diet?
Beverly: Well, one of the other obvious ones as you get older but even as you're growing up and you don't know it is osteoporosis. The bones aren't getting the right structure and so brittle bones. So it's not just enough for women to suddenly start wolfing down vitamin D.
Julie: Or calcium supplements.
Beverly: And for gosh's sakes, taking calcium without any D or K, you're going to develop plaquing in the arteries. I live in Texas and we're on top of limestone aquifers, which is great. That's where we get our waters. It rains and then it seeps down and then it's in big limestone caverns under the ground and we pump it out. Well, the water comes out really hard. It's full of limestone. We have some of the highest calcium in the world.
And as we know here locally, that clogs your pipes, your plumping up of your house. Your dishwasher, your sprayer on your faucet doesn't have quite the force, your toilet is slow to fill up, whatever, and it's because our pipes get clogged up with calcium. Well, the exact same thing is happening in your veins and arteries. And that's where you get into things like kidney stones and gall stones and so on. But also, if you're not getting good circulation where the calcium is getting stuck in capillaries and veins, arteries and blood vessels, you're going to have hidden things like erectile dysfunction. Not that it's hidden but people, they just don't make that connection that it's, "Hey, there's too much calcium. I'm not getting good blood flow here."
Julie: Interesting. Because as practitioners, we also are often quick to jump to that there might be something more sinister going on. Like maybe there's other underlying infections and there's other underlying nutrient deficiencies and/or detox problems that are kind of basically slowing all this stuff down. And really sometimes it can be just as simple as not having enough vitamin K in your diet.
Beverly: Well, one quick check is people think, "Oh, it's low testosterone." Well, all right. So the quick test is it's low testosterone possibly if you have no libido. You just don't have the desire. Everything is kind of uhh. It's just not happening. And then other signs for low testosterone too. But that's one thing. You don't have a desire. With the K2, you have a desire perhaps, yes, but you cannot form and hold a good erection. That's the difference. The libido is there but you don't have the blood flow.
Julie: Got it.
Beverly: I mean, right there, anybody listening to this podcast, I swear you know more than your doctor on this entire topic with that 20-second little tip right there. So if you don't have K to carry calcium to the right place, into your jaw bone and into the other places that you want it to go, little bit goes into muscle and the nerves, all these places where we need calcium, then it's going to possibly end up clogging up your arteries and causing potential for heart disease and high blood pressure and erectile dysfunction.
Think about other places that have really tiny capillaries and things like your eyes, your eyeballs. If you can't get good blood circulation, good nutrients into your eyes, those are tiny, tiny little blood vessels in there. So it's all about the narrowing of the arteries. And, boy, this is one of the biggest beeves, people on high blood pressure medicines that, first of all, their doctor does not know how to properly take their blood pressure.
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And I tell clients how to properly do it which basically just means you utterly and deeply relax, no talking, no moving, you're a little Raggedy Ann doll in your chair for five minutes before you pump that blood pressure up [0:25:24] [Audio Glitch] an accurate reading. Not when you're jumping up and down on the way to the doctor's office. I'm sorry, that's just bad schooling. Okay, fine.
So we have an adequately diagnosed high blood pressure and then they blame it on salt, which can be true. Commercial salt is so poisonous to us that our blood will hold extra water to try to dilute that man-made sodium chloride toxin. But the other thing they're not really thinking is that if you've got some hardening in the arteries, some early atherosclerosis or advanced atherosclerosis, your supple flexible snake like arteries and blood vessels are becoming your hard water pipes in your house.
They're stiff, they're rigid and they're narrow. So your heart is just doing its job. It says, "Well heck, I got to get this blood pumped. I better crank up the pressure to get it through these little narrow pipes." It's like, no, the blood pressure, that's not the problem. That's just the symptom.
Julie: It's the smoke, not the fire.
Beverly: Yeah. That's me. You can get me started on any topic and off I'm going to go with that.
Julie: No, I think that's important. I mean, we talk a lot about fertility and pregnancy and erectile dysfunction obviously will play into fertility problems. I think that's another really important angle to approach it from, is a lot of times people think it's very simple but these things they affect us on so many different levels and I think it's important to explore those.
What about, I mean, what about that specifically? What about with fertility and pregnancy and vitamin K? I mean, obviously, the effect of growing a child and trying to prevent passing down this vitamin K deficiency is really important. Consuming enough during pregnancy, I think, is obviously pretty important. But do you know of or can you speak to issues that may result with fertility in lack of vitamin K?
Beverly: Not directly because I haven't studied that aspect of it so much but again, Dr. Price, he was very clear about that that if, like I said earlier, that within one generation of people just slightly hedging off their diet, their faces got narrow, their hips got narrow, their fertility rates started to drop. They would have more stillborn and whatever.
It is important that if a woman wants to get pregnant or wants to grow healthy bones as a teenager, everybody from not quite cradle to grave but say three years to grave, really should be on vitamin K because it just has so many jobs in building and growing and maintaining and circulating the blood and doing all these other things and helping to set up the pattern of what the child's face, building that palate right from the embryo that the palate is -- babies already born with broader cheeks. And, yes, you can start supplementing the youngsters or teens or whatever while the palate is still flexible and growing and the jaw is moving and the teeth are coming in.
We're still highly happy to have, "Oh, vitamin K2." And maybe wear the right kind of palate wideners in your mouth. There are certain types of dentists that will give these, pediatric dentists and so on that will start you wearing these wideners to gently push out. But as far as fertility specifically, no, I don't know.
Julie: Yeah. It's just one of those things that is, I think, pretty clearly implicated. I mean, if you -- even just carrying a healthy pregnancy. I mean, I think back to my last three weeks of pregnancy where you feel like your whole insides are all just kind of hanging out because you just--
Beverly: Because they are.
Julie: Yeah, because they are. But I just remember the feeling in my pelvis. It's one of the most excruciating feelings walking around like that. And I just remember thinking being so grateful that I had strength and I had strong bones and I've never broken a bone and I had the ability to carry it.
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But I can imagine what it would be like if you -- I don't know. I haven't tested my bone density or anything like that. So maybe I'm not as strong as I think I am. But I have to imagine there's loads of women out there that are walking around severely deficient in vitamin K and lots of other vitamins and probably don't have strong bones. I can't imagine that that's easy on the body or easy to recover from if you're lacking those vitamins. That's really interesting. Go ahead.
Beverly: Just one other thing that the whole topic of malabsorption plays a role here as it does obviously in anything. That if you have celiac, Crohn's or colitis or bacterial intestinal infections, parasites, no gall bladder and you're on heartburn medication, this whole massive domain of you're just not digesting and absorbing your food very well. These people are going to be at higher risk, obviously, of deficiencies in the fat soluble vitamins because they are carried and stored in fat. And then, of course, everybody being told not to eat fat for the last 50 years hasn't helped either.
Julie: Right. That was going to be my next point. And then there was the whole low fat thing that really is helping this whole thing along, isn't it?
Beverly: Yeah. I'm 63. I was born in '52. That's right when that 'stop eating fat' thing happened. And maybe that's part of why I was the youngest of three children and maybe that's part of why I got the really narrow face and the crowded, the V-shaped palate and my whole body is tall and narrow. And it's funny, when you do just a little bit of searching and research and understanding of what a healthy human body look is shaped more like, it's much broader and squarer than the type of -- like the models and people that you see now.
And you start looking around, you're like everybody in this room has a narrow pointed face. In fact, that must be normal because that's what we all look like now. And then someone comes in with maybe more of an indigenous culture and they haven't lost that facial structure yet because many of us are northern Europeans and what had we been eating for the last 1500 years, 2000 years is grains and dairy, whatever.
But here in Texas, we may have an indigenous Mexican, we still got that Mayan blood and those big white cheekbones and so there's all kinds of genes attached to this stuff too. But anyway, what malabsorption is obviously highly individual where that sits in the genes, that celiac and Crohn's and colitis and what activates it. And it's going to make it worse for the fat soluble vitamin deficiencies.
And if you don't have gall bladder, by the way, it's really important, I think, to take a simple supplement with just a low dose of some ox bile type of a supplement with your main meal of the day or your main two meals of the day basically for life. There's two in my clinic. One is Nutri-West and that is GB, for gall bladder, GB-Plus. It's very affordable. People can get it on the web. And Biotics Research has another one called Beta, Beta Plus.
And so when I have clients that come in without a gall bladder that's often, the first thing I'm going to do I'm giving him that ADK supplement. But I'm also giving them that even just cut the tabs in half and take a half of every meal to help that bile flow at the right time and carry those, break down those fat soluble vitamins.
Julie: Yeah, that's huge. One of the things you were mentioning too, I mean, with the malabsorption, that is kind of -- I mean, even if your jaw is malformed and you're not chewing properly, and that was another thing that I always remind people too is make sure you're actually chewing your food. Because I think a lot of people don't even realize they're rushed or whatever, they just have poor habits of eating and they don't realize that not chewing your food can actually play a really big role in whether or not you are digesting things properly, how much work your stomach has to do. It's like under a lot of stress on any way most of the time, our guts. So relieving as much of that stress as possible is really important.
Beverly: Yes. Yes, absolutely.
Julie: I just lost my train of thought, sorry.
Beverly: I have a comment I was going to make.
Julie: Go ahead.
Beverly: So remember that one. But I was going to say that -- remember I was saying earlier that you can help a teen's or child's jaw be reshaped?
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You get them on these fat soluble vitamins and minerals and they start wearing these appliances at night while [0:35:11] [Audio Glitch] or during the day or whatever to reshape that palate so they grow with a different face. But even once your jaw has stopped growing and so even older people such as myself can start a project to change the shape and structure of your jaw. So in addition to my wearing certain type of dental retainers day and night, I'm moving my lower jaw forward, which is completely changing how my upper and lower teeth meet and actually right now I'm making it harder to chew because it hits like, "Hey wait, that's not exactly lining up yet either."
But moving the jaw forward and that's widening out just slightly little by little, widening, physically widening out my palate so that my teeth have more room to spread out and then later when it's all done maybe wear certain kind of braces or whatever to make them little rounder and make the bite better. If you're really a committed person, crazy person like myself and want to do this even as an adult even with a bad mouth like I had, you can change it.
Julie: That's interesting. My husband is British and he has a mouth full of crooked teeth. Yeah, I mean, I'd be curious to try that as an experiment. He is crazy and very dedicated so he'll get on that bandwagon.
Beverly: Yeah. And you can straighten them out without pulling some. There's no room. The little V is supposed to be a big wide U. And there's just no room in the inn. But it is a hard process. I have to tell people. I wrote several blog posts about this when I first got started. Like one called, What If It Really is All in Your Head? Which in my case, it was like, oh my god, my whole life changed in a month wearing this first little appliance that just got that pressure off the nerve or the brain stem, whatever it was pushing back on that retrognathic, that receding jaw.
And it's not like my face was deformed or anything but it's just a typical little pixie kind of face, very pointy. And oh-oh, now I lost my train of thought. Oh, yes. But it's this process of wearing unusual things in your mouth day and night. You do have to have some dedication because it's expensive, it's time consuming, it's a little frustrating. You sum up and can't talk really well, like you have to take them out if you're going to talk.
And then other times you just plop them in at night when you go to bed. So anyway, people can find some help for that on my website. Just go to my website, click on health articles. There's like 100 category tags that are right about and it's nicely organized and just go to the one that says "TMJ." That's just as good a place to start as any and read up on those articles and, yeah, that's another thing. I think TMJ is under diagnosed.
Because people think if you don't, if your jaw doesn't click or get stuck or you can't open your mouth or you have migraines, all of which are classic TMJ symptoms. I didn't have any of those. I just had a really narrow face and a lot of health problems. But anyway, people can go read through that and get some ideas how to maybe get help.
Julie: That's really interesting. Is there a general recommendation -- If I was listening to this the one thing I'll be thinking is, okay, it's clear. Everybody needs to be focusing on vitamin K2. How much, as an adult, how much should I be taking as a supplement?
Beverly: Well, there's two forms of vitamin K2. The one that is synthetically derived -- Well, there's actually three. Okay, there's MK, like Mary Kay, MK4 and MK7. And until just a few years ago, the short description of that is MK4 is great but it's synthetically derived and MK7 is great and it comes from Natto, the fermented soy beans that smell and taste completely hideous in this culture but which Asians have eaten for a long really time, a really long time. That's how it used to be. They both work but MK4 was derived from synthetic sources and MK7 was derived from a natural source. But then the emu oil came on the scene recently.
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It's heritage breed of Australian emu. It is not the same emu oil that is in cosmetics and whatever. And that is a fully natural form of MK4. So we now have three, the natural MK4, synthetic MK4, and the naturally derived from food MK7. Oh boy, that's complicated. Most supplements are going to have the MK7 form, which is fine. You're kind of aiming at 200 mcgs, micrograms, a day.
And with the emu, same kind of thing with the MK4. By the way, the emu oil gives you a little vitamin A, a little vitamin D and the Omega 3. So it kind of takes the place of your fish oil, flax oil thing too. It's a highly nutritive natural food. Like cod liver oil but it's emu oil. And it has, it is the only and best real natural source of abundant K2 on the planet. It's like ten times what the true spring grass fed pastured butter extracts have.
At that time that those studies were done on pastured butter, they're talking lush spring green pastures and the butter was orange. We do our best now by Kerrygold and other kinds of what we call grass fed but you'd have to eat a quarter pound of that a day to get which -- Okay, fine, I can eat a quarter pound of Kerrygold a day.
Julie: I was going to say, is that a challenge?
Beverly: And you're going to get some from your pastured egg yolk from your neighbor's yard and whatever. But anyway, so the emu oil, you're going to take, they say, two to six capsules a day. And for kids one up to the age of three. So there you go. It's kind of a 300 microgram kind of a goal. You can't overdose it. But the only drawback with the emu oil is that it's so expensive.
You can see it on my website. I think it's like $50 for a bottle. I could be wrong. But it's such a full natural food. It's like Rosita cod oil. It's such a full beautiful natural fresh raw food. But beware everybody, when you take cod liver oil -- I'd much prefer Rosita by the way -- there is no vitamin K in cod liver oil. So you're not getting the K. You've got to do the MK4, MK7. Unless you're eating just a lot of pastured spring butter and a lot of pastured eggs and a lot of fish eggs and a lot of goose liver and you have a really good fermenting bacterial machine in your gut that's fermenting all this stuff.
And by the way, some fermented foods too. That's another area my knowledge is a little weak on is high quality kimchi and other really good fermented foods, how much MK4 is in there. There is some in there. So it all counts.
Julie: Yeah, definitely. I think so as well. But, I think, like you said, I mean, it doesn't -- It's very difficult to overdo it on these things. I think it's important that people kind of look into that and make sure they find out or at least assess how much vitamin K they've got in their diet going on because I think it's too important to ignore.
Beverly: Yeah. And you may be intolerant to eggs, PS.
Julie: Oh, yeah. That's a very good point.
Beverly: Eggs and dairy, there goes the blue cheese and the eggs. Now, I should put in a plug here for extremely high quality ghee, really good ghee, like pure Indian foods ghee. The truly artisanal spring grass handmade ghees do contain some vitamin K. again, it's not a lot but it all adds up. But for myself, I'm completely intolerant to eggs and dairy. I can eat all the ghee I want and I can eat gallons of ghee but I can't touch a bite of butter.
So there's just enough milk solids in there to trigger my celiac and my gluten sensitivity which is kind of unfair but there you go. But, yes, the pure Indian foods ghee and, I think, the OMghee is also an artisanal ghee that I'm just starting to hear about.
Julie: Yeah. That's another really good one. I like that one. And then, of course, you can also make it yourself if you've got access to some good grass fed butter and you can -- It's pretty simple to make as well. So that's something I always recommend.
[0:45:00]
Awesome. Well, this has been a really great conversation. I'm really excited for people to get hold of this and, hopefully, take some action and increase these things in their diet, first and foremost, and then also look out for some of those supplements. It's been wonderful talking to you, Beverly. Where can we direct people on how to connect with you and to learn more from you? You've got a fabulous online resource. I love your website. I reference it often. Yeah, how can people learn more about you and get in touch with you?
Beverly: Okay. Well, thank you. The website ondietandhealth.com. My Facebook page, Beverly Meyer On Diet & Health, which is a long name but there it is. And then Pinterest, On Diet and Health is pretty active too. And then the podcast, Primal Diet - Modern Health. The best of the ancient real foods our bodies evolve to eat and the best of the modern healthcare that we need to try to keep our poor bodies going.
Because a lot of us really struggle with way too many [0:46:09] [Audio Glitch]. It's just sad and things can change. You get that gluten strongly out of there and those grains out of there and get started with some high quality K2 and some bitter foods and that will give you some breathing space to start seeing what else you need. Yeah, check it out. Ondietandhealth.com. And Primal Diet - Modern Health. I've got like 100 podcasts on there from years back. And they're all on different topics like progesterone or heart disease or Paleo smoothies you eat with a spoon or whatever. So it's all kinds of stuff on there. All right, well, thank you for asking and thank you for having me on the show.
Julie: You're welcome. I hope to have you back. We can talk about more of these awesome topics because you are a wealth of information.
Beverly: Thank you.
Julie: Wonderful. Thanks, Beverly.
[0:47:00] End of Audio
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