The vitamin most multis leave out

Look at the back of an ordinary multivitamin and you will usually find vitamin K missing, or there in a token amount, or there as K1, which is the kind found in leafy greens.

K2 is the other one. It turns up in animal fats, in hard cheeses, in the yolks of eggs from hens that ate outside, in liver, and above all in natto, the fermented soybean dish eaten at breakfast in Japan, which has around a thousand micrograms of it per hundred grams and nothing else comes close. For most of history it came into people through those foods without anyone knowing it had a name. Then we stopped eating organs, stopped eating fermented food and moved to grain-fed everything, and K2 all but disappeared from the diet in about fifty years.

Vitamin K contributes to normal blood clotting and to the maintenance of normal bones. Our belief about K2 specifically is that it is the traffic controller for calcium. It helps calcium go where you want it, into bone and teeth, and helps keep it out of where you do not, which is the lining of your arteries. That is why we would not put calcium and D3 in a pouch without it, and why the three of them sit together in the formula.

If your multivitamin has no K2 in it, that is a gap, and it is one most people have never been told about.