Why We Need Fat-Soluble Vitamins A, D, E & K2
Video Transcript
Welcome back to the third video in our series Your Health is No Big Thing—It’s a Million Little Things. Today we will be discussing the fat-soluble vitamins, A, D, E, and K2, which are essential for your health and well-being.
Even though the fat-soluble vitamins work especially well as a team, each vitamin has its own special roles to play in the body. Let’s start with Vitamin A, also known as retinol, which was discovered in 1907 by Elmer McCullum when he noted that cows fed a steady diet of wheat went blind and gave birth to dead calves. After he added yellow corn, which contains Vitamin A precursors, to their diet, the cows stopped having these health problems. People with traditional knowledge understood this idea as well. In ancient Egypt and China Vitamin A rich foods such as liver were eaten raw to prevent and treat blindness. Vitamin A was given the name retinol to recognize its association with the retina and blindness.
Today we know that Vitamin A is important in regulating gene expression in the body. What is regulating gene expression and why is it such a huge deal? Every cell in your body has an identical set of 22,000 genes. Turning on or off specific genes when a child is developing in utero is what makes a heart different from a liver. The daily regulation of gene expression in your body is also a very big deal because it helps the body adapt and regulate systems in your body to keep you alive and healthy.
Beyond its importance for vision and gene regulation, Vitamin A acts on the immune system to reduce infections. In the 1950s it was known as the “anti-infective” vitamin because it was used as a supplement to prevent and reduce lung infections in children. Vitamin A helps regulate immune cells, known as T-cells, needed for protection from invasions of harmful bacteria and viruses. Eating foods high in Vitamin A can help turn on genes that kick your immune system into high gear to prevent you from catching colds and getting sick.
Remember in the second video we learned that Vitamin A activates genes to lay down collagen to make bone. Vitamin A also plays a role in healthy reproduction and is involved in the production of sex hormones testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, DHEA, and many others. At my age, I could use some of that!! You probably could too! Good sources of Vitamin A include whole milk, butter, eggs, cream, and organ meats.
We tend to think of vitamins in simplistic terms. We associate Vitamin A with good eyesight and Vitamin D with our bones. The reality is that Vitamin D has at least 1000 known receptors in the body and has many important uses. It helps to prevent bone loss and works to support the functioning of the immune system. Studies have linked deficiencies in Vitamin D to an increased risk of viral infections and influenza.
Vitamin D can be made in the body, first beginning with the absorption of sun rays by the skin and converted in the liver and then the kidney to the active form of Vitamin D3. We can also obtain this important nutrient from foods such as egg yolks, fatty fish, and animal fats. That’s important in the winter and far northern climates where the sun doesn't shine most of the year. Note that both vitamins A and D are found in the same fatty foods—not surprising as they need each other to work efficiently. Vitamin D plays a vital role in preventing rickets and osteoporosis, depression and mental illness, arthritis and chronic pain, muscle weakness, heart disease and high blood pressure, diabetes, and autoimmune diseases. So, do you recognize any of these common complaints? Vitamin D does so many things to keep us healthy that it is important not to be deficient in this vitamin.
Now on to Vitamin E, with its strong anti-oxidant properties to protect our cells from inflammation due to environmental toxins. Vitamin E has a powerful impact on our immune system by reducing our susceptibility to infectious diseases. It is also an important nutrient for healthy reproduction and cardiovascular health. Last but not least, Vitamin E helps prevent non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) which has become one of the most common contributors to cirrhosis of the liver, increasing the necessity for liver transplants. This is a completely preventable disease with dietary changes. Where does non-alcoholic fatty liver disease come from? It is caused by the high-fructose, sugary, refined carbohydrate, and nutrient deficient diet consumed in this country, better known as the standard American diet—or SAD. Some really delicious ways to add foods high in Vitamin E to your diet are to cook with spinach, broccoli, avocados, squash, kiwi, trout, shrimp, sunflower seeds, almonds, and olive oil.
Our last fat-soluble vitamin, Vitamin K2, is somewhat confusing as it has only recently been recognized as a separate nutrient from Vitamin K1, which is known for its effects on blood clotting. Vitamin K2 has been shown to help in mineralizing bones and is now being used in various supplement formulas to prevent and reduce bone loss in the elderly. It prevents calcification of the arteries, which is the hardening of blood vessels by calcium mineral deposits, and prevents the formation of kidney stones. Vitamin K2 regulates calcium metabolism by placing the calcium where it belongs in the bones and teeth and not in your arteries or kidneys.
One of the more surprising benefits of K2 is that it protects us from heart disease. The Rotterdam Study, started in 1990 with 4,600 men and still ongoing with more participants, showed that Vitamin K2 reduced calcification of coronary arteries that contributes to cardiovascular disease. You can see from my chart below that high levels of vitamin K2 in the diet result in a 51% lower risk of coronary heart disease mortality. That means that eating fermented cheeses, which are high in vitamin K2, reduces your chances of dying from heart disease! How peculiar that the very foods that contain Vitamin K2—butter, aged cheese, poultry fat, and liver—are the same foods the medical establishment blames for causing coronary heart disease.
In the brain, Vitamin K2 supports production of healthy fats that help prevent neurological degeneration. On autopsy, lower levels of vitamin K2 are found in the brains of people with early-stage Alzheimer's. Hmm it doesn't sound like a good idea to be deficient in this vitamin either!!
Are you starting to see a pattern here? Vitamins A, D, E, and K2, have been proven by science to be vital to our health. Most of the fat-soluble vitamins are found in eggs, butter, cheese, liver, and animal fats—the very foods that are being demonized as unhealthy!
Somewhere along the line we lost our way and are being taught that eating fats makes you fat. The current medical wisdom is that fats contain “empty” calories and should therefore be avoided in order to prevent weight gain. Instead avoiding fatty foods has created critical deficiencies in all of the fat-soluble vitamins and consequently is ruining your health!! As we just learned, fat-soluble vitamins profoundly affect our health in multiple ways, from gene expression to osteoporosis, from prevention of heart disease to regulation of the immune system. And much MORE!
I think it is time to start eating real fats from real foods to bring fat-soluble vitamins back into our diet. Another one of those million little things you can do each day!
Coming up next is a little biochemistry lesson about the structure of fats—what they are exactly, what they are made of, and where they get those funny names.
Until next time, this is Dr. DeLaney reminding you to eat real foods!