My friend Patti Kimler has great info on vitamins D3 and K2. She writes, “Let’s talk about Vitamin D3! First of all, it’s not a vitamin, it’s a hormone. Second, you probably don’t have enough of it floating around in your body. And third, it’s being proven to the be the greatest immuno-regulator that your body has to work with. If you put on a tank top and shorts and go outside for 20 minutes in the sun (without sunscreen), a fair-skinned person’s body will manufacture 10,000 IU’s of Vitamin D3. When your blood is tested, a healthy person should register around 100 units of Vitamin D3, but that number is likely to change. (A person like me with MS should have a D3 count between 150 and 225). The Vitamin D Council (I bet you didn’t know there was one), has been trying to get the FDA to raise the RDA of Vitamin D3 from 600 IU’s to at least 1000, but it’s been slow going. Immuno-regulator? What the heck is that? When you have an auto-immune disorder/disease, like MS, your immune system (usually the T-cells that are manufactured in your lymph glands) attacks some part of your body that it should recognize as part of your body but doesn’t. D3 is being shown to be the light that switches on and shows your body what it’s doing, so it stops! All over the world, D3 is being used to treat everything from autism, rheumatoid arthritis, HIV, ALS and many others.
In Brazil, MS has nearly been eradicated by D3. And we’re not just talking about halting the disease in its tracks, we’re talking about reversing (healing) the damage that was done. Are you excited yet? I am! So why aren’t we hearing about it here in the US?
There’s a companion vitamin that D3 must have, and without it, it can become toxic. Vitamin K2! Here’s how it works… Vitamin D3 sort of opens up the absorbency of your bones so they absorb calcium and other nutrients. But when you take a large dose of D3 (>10,000 I.U.’s), your bones end up leaching calcium into your blood, where it has a toxic effect. Your bones get pretty pissed off too, and you can end up with things like osteoporosis. When you take K2 with your D3, your calcium stays in your bones and there’s no toxic effect.
The studies that are done in the US always (intentionally?) leave out the K2. The person in the study takes the big dose of D3 (and the calcium supplement that they want them to take), and the person ends up with calcium toxicity. Here’s what I do:
I take 50,000 I.U.’s of Vitamin D3 daily. With it I take a K2 supplement that has 1000 mcg’s of K1 (the clotter), 1000 mcg’s of K2 (the lesser) and 300 mcg’s of K2 (premium). I take 1 of the K2 pills for each 10,000 I.U.’s of Vitamin D3, so I take 5. Yes, my superb family doctor is keeping an eye on my blood (he’s THRILLED that I’m doing this), though my Neurologist doesn’t care. If you want links/brands for the K2 supplement, let me know. Please don’t wait for a doctor to take you by the hand and lead you to D3/K2- it ain’t gonna happen. My superb family doctor (Dr. Michael Tunick, I love you!) is a very young D.O. (not M.D.!) who believes that when the body is in balance, it heals itself