If you’ve been a reader of mine for a while, hopefully you know that vitamin D is crucial to help prevent heart disease—our number 1 killer.

Heart disease is largely caused by inflammation, and vitamin D’s anti-inflammatory properties help reduce your risk.

But there’s another nutrient that’s just as important to protect against heart disease, although most people aren’t even aware of it. 

Vitamin K!

Here’s why:

Vitamin K—vitamin D’s special partner

It’s important for you to understand that all nutrients work in partnerships in your body—no one is an “independent contributor.”

For example, calcium and magnesium work together to regulate your heartbeat.  Calcium causes your heart to contract, and magnesium tells it to relax between beats. 

Sodium and potassium regulate the fluid levels in your body.  Sodium causes your body to retain water when you need it, and potassium makes your body excrete excess water as needed.

Well, vitamins D and K carry out a very important, life-saving role in your body! 

In addition to fighting heart disease-causing inflammation, vitamin D also helps your body absorb calcium—that’s why it’s so important for your bones.

At the same time, vitamin K (in the form of K2) guides the calcium where it needs to go.  This is VITAL because if all that calcium that vitamin D helps you absorb doesn’t get to your bones and teeth, it can hang out in your arteries, causing calcification and encouraging plaque buildup!

Which INCREASES your heart disease risk!

At the same time, if your bones don’t get the calcium they need, you may be looking at osteoporosis.

In addition, excess calcium that doesn’t get guided by vitamin K2 can also accumulate in your organs, and when this happens in your gallbladder—you guessed it—gallstones may be your new friend!

This is why it boggles my mind that SO many healthcare practitioners push calcium, calcium, calcium for osteoporosis prevention, with no acknowledgement whatsoever of the carefully orchestrated partnership between calcium, vitamin D and vitamin K, and how they can affect heart disease risk.

Are you low in vitamin K?  Chances are good that you are

It’s a well-known fact that vitamin D is a common deficiency due to our shunning the sun and slathering ourselves in toxic sunscreen, which thwarts your body’s efforts to make vitamin D from sunlight.

But many people are running low in K2 as well!  Current estimates state that up to 85 percent of us don’t have the K2 levels we should. 

One of the main reasons for this is our heavy reliance on meat and dairy from grain-fed animals.  In addition to being low in omega-3 essential fatty acids, products derived from grain-fed animals are low in vitamin K2.  Grass-fed beef and the dairy products from grass-fed animals, on the other hand, are higher in vitamin K2.

Another reason for low levels of nutrients in general is our guts are completely out of whack.  When your microbiome is topsy-turvy and harmful microbes have the upper hand, trust me, your nutrient absorption is in the tanker. 

And things like stress, eating lots of sugar and refined carbs and lacking sleep can destroy your gut flora population and leave them waving the white flag of defeat.

Plus medications play a role too.

Many medications—including the blood thinner warfarin, statins and anti-tuberculosis medications—can impair your body’s ability to absorb K2.  In addition, antibiotics can alter your gut microbiome and reduce the ability of your gut to synthesize vitamin K2.

Get what you need—in the proper amounts!

The good news here is you are reading the words of a holistic nutrition coach—one that understands the important partnerships of all essential nutrients, while at the same time is not affiliated with or influenced by any organizations (like the American Dietetic Association) that receive funding from the sugar and processed food industries!

I simply tell it like it is.

And if you want to optimize YOUR vitamin D and K levels, I have carefully designed Optimum DK Formula with FruiteX-B just for you.

In addition to perfectly paired amounts of Vitamins D3 and K2, Optimum DK Formula with FruiteX-B also contains the mineral boron (that’s what FruiteX-B is) which helps prevent bone loss (which is crucial for osteoporosis prevention) and helps to reduce blood levels of homocysteine (homocysteine is also a heart disease factor)!

Absorb those precious nutrients!

Getting nutrients you need from your foods and high-quality supplements is only half of the equation.

The other half is that your body has to absorb those crucial nutrients!

And your body’s ability to efficiently absorb nutrients is a direct reflection of the health of your gut microbiome. 

Unfortunately, many people have gut microbiome bacterial populations that are the exact opposite of what they should be!  Factors like eating refined carbs, drinking soda or tap water, many medications (especially antibiotics and birth control pills), smoking and stress can all throw your gut out of balance and leave you short on nutrients (as well as gassy, bloated and constipated).

But a super-potent probiotic formula like Super Shield Plus can help repopulate your precious microbiome and bring it back into a healthier balance.  Super Shield Plus provides 15 superstar strains and 20 billion CFUs in every capsule that are ready to get to work restoring your gut flora, supporting nutrient absorption and paving the way for more regular BMs too!

Now you know the truth

The truth is, your body needs a variety of nutrients to fight disease. 

You can’t concentrate on one to the exclusion of all others—you have to respect the delicate yet crucial balance of nutrients that Nature requires to create health in your body.

And I am happy to guide you on the best path to prevent disease and promote optimal health!

To your health,

Sherry Brescia