Introduction

Dental health is largely dependent on your body's ability to remineralize teeth.  On the surface, that may sound too scientific or perhaps too vague.  But with time, and a thorough understanding of how minerals work, you can come out a winner in the fight against cavities and gum disease.

The often ignored secret in dentistry is that the same imbalances that lead to cavities also lead to heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and perhaps all chronic illness.  This concept can be made memorable by adding some dramatic flare, like: "Cavities cause cancer."  It's not true, but it's also not false.

When you become a master at managing your minerals, you can dramatically decrease or perhaps eliminate your risk of cancer and other chronic disease with the wonderful side-effect of eradicating cavities and gum disease too.

Mastering minerals starts with balancing electrolytes such as magnesium.  Please read the magnesium article first if you haven't already.  Once you have accomplished the recommended goals with magnesium, then it's time to move on to the fat-soluble vitamins, specifically vitamin K₂.  Luckily, optimizing your vitamin K₂ levels is easy.

What is Vitamin K₂?

Vitamin K₂ is a relative newcomer to the family of the fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K).  Its history and discovery is interesting and educational.  You can read more about that here:  Weston Price: Vitamin K₂.  It was once confused with vitamin K₁, but K₁ and K₂ have different functions.  K₁ is used by the body to manage blood clotting, while K₂ is used to manage minerals.

What's all this about "Mineral Management?"

As mentioned in the magnesium (Mg) article, off-balance or uncontrolled calcium is a main contributor to chronic disease.  Our miraculous bodies employ multiple strategies to help balance and control our calcium (Ca).  Ca and Mg are biological antagonists which means raising one lowers the levels of the other.  We use minerals to balance other minerals.  We also use vitamins, and we even use hormones to control minerals.  Managing minerals is so important to life, that our bodies have plans and backup plans to do this. Even our backup strategies have their own backups.

Taking magnesium will lower our calcium.  In general, we WANT our calcium lower -- brought back into balance.  When calcium is off-balance, it is inflammatory, it calcifies tissues (think artery walls), it makes cells hormone (e.g., insulin) resistant, causes fatigue, and it even feeds cancer cell growth.

Sufficient levels of vitamin K₂ along with vitamin D and vitamin A, will help manage calcium by taking it from places it doesn't belong (artery walls for example), and putting it just where it does belong (teeth and bones).

Natural Sources

The fat soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K) work together and generally come together.  Foods rich in these vitamins are unfortunately considered taboo today.  But they are still healthy parts of some remote tribes and cultures.  Organ meats such as grass-fed beef liver, grass-fed dairy products such as butter,  egg yolks from pastured chickens, and fish eggs are the best sources.  In fact, Weston Price found that cultures still indulging in these foods tend to be the healthiest of people in the 20th century..

Vitamin K₂ is made by bacteria (specifically bacillus subtilis) in the intestines of animals.  It is then stored for use later in organs and fatty tissues.  Vitamin K₂ is orange in color which is why egg yolks from pastured chickens are so beautifully colored.  In Japan, Natto, a fermented soybean dish, is a cultural staple rich in vitamin K₂.  And that's about it for natural sources.  If you don't eat liver or enough of any of these foods on a regular basis (several times a week), then supplementing vitamin K₂ may be needed.

Green Pasture makes a Weston-Price-inspired supplement that blends together fermented cod liver oil and high-vitamin butter oil. The result is a great source of balanced vitamin D, A, and K for optimal tooth and bone health.

Companies like Ancestral Supplements or Heart & Soil also provide good quality beef organ supplements.

Supplementing and Dosing

If you prefer to supplement directly, there are many options. Based on research by scientists at MicroBiomeLabs, the ideal dose of vitamin K₂ is 320 micrograms of the MK-7 form for an average adult weighing 150 pounds.  Extrapolating from this, we can figure out our individualized recommended daily dose:

Your Weight	Amount of MK-7
50 pounds	100 micrograms
100 pounds	200 micrograms
150 pounds	300 micrograms
200 pounds	400 micrograms
250 pounds	500 micrograms

These numbers are quite precise, and supplementing is never so exact.  So just use these as estimates and choose the nearest easy-to-achieve dose that matches your weight.

Because vitamin K₂ is fat-soluble, supplementing can be done just once daily.  The best time is in the evening, say somewhere around dinner time.  It doesn't matter if it's before, during, after, dinner, or before bed.  Your entire daily dose can be taken at once and should not cause any GI symptoms or have any other negative effects.  It does not need to be divided into smaller doses like magnesium does.

How it works

Vitamin K₂ is used by cells that regulate your teeth and bones (odontoblasts and osteoblasts).  These cells take in vitamin D to start making a very important protein that will eventually control the minerals flowing thru the tooth or bone.  This protein will detect exactly where the minerals need to be placed and insert them into the hard tissue matrix.  However this protein will only work correctly if it's activated (modified by carboxylation) by vitamin K₂. This is why vitamin K₂ was originally called "activator X" by Dr. Price -- because it "activated" the process of mineralization..

Suggested Brands

Vitamin K2
Type	Form	Source -- Brand	Dose per cap	Additional Sources
Beef Liver	capsules	Ancestral Supplements
Cod Liver & Butter Oil	capsules	Green Pasture
Cod Liver & Butter Oil	gel	Green Pasture
Full Spectrum	gelcaps	Innovix Labs	100mcg	iHerb	Amazon
Organic & Vegan	gelcaps	Sports Research	45mcg 100mcg 180mcg	iHerb	Amazon
With Cofactors	capsules	Microbiome Labs	160mcg	Ask for our discount code
High Dose	capsules	Microbiome Labs	300mcg	Ask for our discount code
Liquid Drops	liquid	Mary Ruth's	25mcg		Amazon