SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Image 1: Who would have thought that this piece of goose liver pate contains a natural test-booster? Unfortunately even this SuperFood won't give you your 1g /day. Can you imagine how it must feel to be the shrinking violet in a family of nutritional saviours? Where your brothers C, E, not to mention the rising superstar D, get all the attention and you are treated just like another letter in the vitamin ABC? Well, I guess you don't ... but if vitamins had feelings, menaquinone , also known as Vitamin K2 , certainly would ;-) After all, even many supplement junkies know it only as "that strange co-factor of vitamin D. In part this may even be my fault. After all, I have discarded all the previous studies on its beneficial effects on heart health ( Galeijnse. 2004 ), bone formation ( Yamaguchi. 2001 ) and resorption ( Yamaguchi. 2003 ) and so-on and so-forth, as not "sexy" enough to make it into the SuppVersity news. The results of a recent study, by Asagi Ito...

Until not too long ago, scientists thought vitamin D was all about bone. Every follower of this blog knows that this is a way too narrow perspective on what turned out to be more of a hormone than a vitamin. A recent study ( Sogabe. 2011 ) on the effects of vitamin K supplementation in mice does now suggest that vitamin D's "cofactors" phylloquinone (PK, vitamin K1) and menaquinone-4 (MK-4, vitamin K2) have been similarly mistaken. Figure 1: Weight of visceral fat pad in g after 85 days of  phylloquinone (PK, vitamin K1) or menaquinone-4 (MK-4, vitamin K2) supplementation ( Sogabe. 2011 ) Japanese scientists, who wanted to investigate the effect of 85 days of vitamin K supplementation (PK: 600 mg/kg; MK-4: 600 mg/kg) on bone development in mice, were surprised to find that vitamin K did not only improve bone mass and structure, but that... the addition of PK or MK-4 significantly decreased the total fat accumulation ( p  < 0.01 and p  < ...