This is page 5 of an 8-page Article. Please begin at Page 1 here, to fully understand how vitamin K2 gives you strong bones & teeth.
Clean & Feed with Green to Heal
It’s interesting that my other dairy addictions — like yogurt, ice cream, and chocolate — all fell away over the years.
Only hard cheese and cream — both sources of vitamin K2 — stayed with me. I personally believe that if you want a food, it must have some nutrient your body wants — excluding junk food, that’s addiction!
In my heart, I’m not happy eating cheese or cream. I don’t enjoy pushing a calf away so I can suckle on her mom. Mother cow certainly does not want me suckling on her!
I’ve seen all the cruelty it entails. Even with organic free range cows, where do the male calves go? As Joan Baez sang, “On a wagon bound for market, there’s a calf with a mournful eye.”
Off and on I may take a K2 supplement, about 600 mcg/week total. I’m not keen on supplements so it’s more off than on!
My experience — where I built strong bones and teeth *after* the age of 45 by eating living leafy greens — proves to me that any study which says we humans can’t absorb more than 200 mcg a day of vitamin K1, is NOT using blended and juiced LIVING greens, picked minutes before you eat them.
200 mcg of K1 will convert to, say, 20 mcg of K2. That’s 5-10% of our daily K2 requirement of 100-200mcg/day.
There’s obviously synergistic co-factors in eating LOTS of LIVING greens. These secret phytochemicals help with absorption of K1, and with converting K1 to K2. No one’s researched it yet. But I and Dr. Cursio in the 1930’s know it to be true. The great apes and bison are on our side! They feed their bones and teeth living greens.
If you buy your greens from the store — so they’re not growing in the moment you eat them — and if you eat salads, then I can’t say it will work. The leafy greens must be alive and they must be eaten in huge quantity that only juicing and blending give you.
Your juicer and blender break down the chloroplast membranes where K1 is locked in. They release it for absorption.
LARGE amounts & LIVE, that’s the secret of my slogan: Clean & Feed with Green to Heal 🙂
Second Anecdotal Study Questions the Research
It’s fascinating. As soon as blenders hit the US domestic market in the 1930’s, a natural hygiene (raw vegan) medical doctor, Dr. Christopher Gian-Cursio, discovered that vegans need blended leafy greens for their teeth and bones![24]
Dr. Cursio worked in upstate New York with the vegan Penepent family over several generations. He discovered in the children that, by giving them blended leafy greens, he reversed teeth and skeletal problems.
In a 1976 interview with Dr. Stanley Bass, Dr. Cursio reports:[24]
“Then I made my shift into more green stuff, blended salads early. I saw the difference. The children were better. Instead of pigeon-chested or chicken-chested, they were fine-chested. … I don’t think there’s a dental carie in the whole group.
We have here problems that came up in the children when I followed the strict fruit program with nuts, and minimal amounts, compared to what I use now, of green stuff.
These children, the skeletal development wasn’t right, the dental arches were not well-formed, teeth came in crowded because of it.
It was only after adding green stuff that I started to see in the pregnancies that followed, and also in the children that were grown, that came from these pregnancies, the difference.”
Pigeon-chested means they had skeletal deformity, so long as they were vegan WITHOUT blended greens. When they ate blended leafy greens, their bones healed and grew normally.
The 2002 McKeown study says it’s impossible.[16] They claim you absorb a maximum of 200 mcg a day of K1 from food, at which point blood levels plateau. So even if you eat blended salads, you don’t absorb more than 200 mcg of K1 from them. Therefore you can’t get enough K1 to convert to K2.
Dr. Masterjohn uses this study to conclude: “we cannot support our skeletal system with vitamin K1 regardless of how efficiently we may be able to convert it to vitamin K2.”[30]
I DISAGREE. I say, swamp your body with K1 and ALL its cofactors that accompany it in a living green leaf. Carboxylase will use it in the absence of K2. Who knows, perhaps your body doesn’t even waste energy on converting K1 to K2? Since K1 is just as good as K2 at switching carboxylase on.
Your body is INTELLIGENT. If a metabolic pathway does not work, it will find another way to do the same thing. All biochemists know this. If you don’t eat enough unsaturated fat to fill all the positions in your cell membranes, your body will use saturated fat instead.
In 2003 Braam et al. gave K1 supplements of 1 mg/day (1,000 mcg) to women aged 50 to 60. It “retarded postmenopausal bone loss by 35-40% during the entire three-year study period.”[5]
At 10% absorption, and a 10:1 conversion rate of K1 to K2, their 1 mg of K1 gives only 10 mcg of K2/day. Not enough to activate osteocalcin. Yet it’s obvious the osteocalcin WAS being activated!
Granted it was a supplement, and the other research refers to food. I still say it’s proof that K1 goes a lot further than the scientists say it can.
Dr. Cursio’s multi-generational vegan patients, and myself, prove that leafy greens (K1) build strong bones and teeth. We are living proof that the body converts K1 into enough K2 (or uses K1 itself) to whip osteocalcin into action — so that it deposits calcium into bones and teeth.
When researchers claim you can’t do it, I reply: “next time study LIVING greens.”
Animals prove to us you can do it. Most animals are thriving on a high leafy-green diet — unless you’re a polar bear, arctic fox, or tropical big cat.
I bet those lions chew on grass just like my cat Peaches!
Food Sources of Vitamin K1
The message is clear. Blend, juice, or steam a big quantity of leafy greens daily. You already know you must do that for vitamin A. Salads won’t work, you’d be chewing for hours!
Davis & Melina recommend you eat 600 grams of leafy greens a day.[44] That’s 21 oz, say 1-1/3 lbs. Dr. Joel Fuhrman says a pound a day.[45] And Victoria Boutenko advises on her DVD Greens Can Save Your Life (#ad) to eat two big bunches a day, which weigh a lot more than a pound!
You can eat this much only when you blend, juice, or cook them.
I find it impossible to eat so many greens! My average is 300g a day. All my greens are ALIVE when I eat them, so I absorb a lot more. It’s not what you eat, it’s what you absorb.
Remember that K1 is tightly bound to the leaf’s chloroplast membrane. It’s not very bio-available. When you break the membrane — by juicing, blending, steaming, or fermenting — you set the K1 free.
You recall that fat helps with absorption? You absorb 5% of the K1 in cooked spinach. When you add fat to the spinach, it goes up to 13%. The K1 dissolves into the fat.[37]
Let’s look at vitamin K1 food sources.[41], [44] Perhaps these figures differ so much because cooked greens have less water? You can compact more into a cup.
| Leafy Green | Vitamin K1 in mcg | |
|---|---|---|
| (One Cup) | Raw | Cooked |
| Parsley | 984 | |
| Kale | 472 | 1062 |
| Dandelion greens | 428 | 579 |
| Amaranth leaves | 319 | |
| Swiss Chard | 299 | 573 |
| Basil | 176 | |
| Collard greens | 157 | 773 |
| Brussels sprouts | 156 | 300 |
| Beet greens | 152 | 679 |
| Mustard greens | 144 | 830 |
| Spinach | 145 | 889 |
| Turnip greens | 138 | 851 |
| Green powders (1 tsp) | 95+ | |
| Broccoli | 93 | 162 |
| Lettuce, butterhead | 56 | |
| Lettuce, cos/romaine | 48 | |
| Lettuce, red leaf | 39 | |
Dandelion greens contain 778.4 mcg per 100g (3.5 oz) — that’s 741% of the daily K1 you need.[37]
This chart convinced me to eat a lot more amaranth leaves! Amaranth is so easy to grow as micro-greens in an indoor Sprouter, or outside in your garden into bigger leaves. They taste just like amaranth 🙂 They don’t have the strong taste of parsley or mustard.
Amaranth grain sprouts are the most vile tasting sprouts on earth! Imho. I’ve yet to meet someone who enjoys them. But as leafy greens, they’re quite sweet, especially when young.
Do you see how the darker the green (that is, the more chlorophyll it has) the more K1 in it? Remember the K1 is in the chloroplast.
Leafy greens are a critical source of K1 and beta-carotene, to convert to K2 and vitamin A. It’s the reason why greens and sunshine (vitamin D) are the best way to heal a broken bone.
Are you good at converting K1 to K2? Only blood tests will tell. Remember the older you are (over 60) or the younger (under 7) the harder it is for you to convert plant nutrients into the animal form your body needs.
Focus on *Living* Greens
The more alive the green, the more K1 it has. The plant uses K1 for its energy production, in photosynthesis. When you pick it, it stops producing energy, so the K1 levels fall.
Dr. Price noticed that the more rapidly the grass is growing (that is, the greater its energy needs) the more K2 the cows will produce (that is, the more K1 in the grass).
You absorb more nutrients from a living plant than a dead one — because all co-factors are in synergistic balance in a living food. Lettuce loses 60% of its vitamin C within 24 hours of picking.
Is vitamin C needed to absorb K1, or to convert it to K2? We don’t know!
I dislike the way cooking destroys the energy in leafy greens. It’s dead food to me. My first choice is to blend or juice my greens, or munch on a raw salad.
In my experience, the best thing you can do for your health is to focus on living foods — food that is still growing when you eat it.
Bottom Line for Vegans
Are you vegan? In theory you can eat enough K2 in your diet daily, without turning to eggs, butter, and cheese.
You have four choices:
(1) Best & Easiest: Ferment your own veggies at home in a Fermentation Crock Pot (#ad) — using a starter culture that the supplier guarantees will produce vitamin K2.
At this time, Dr. Mercola is the only one world-wide who guarantees that his Kinetic Culture (#ad) will produce vitamin K2 in the quantity we need — 1.5 ounces (43g) of these fermented veggies will give you 209 mcg of vitamin K2 daily.
Body Ecology website told me in October 2013:
“We have not done any testing on vegetables made using our [Veggie Culture] Starter for K2 content. … We have no plans to conduct testing on cultured vegetables made using our starter for K2 at this time.”