MORE K2 DEBATES. Earlier this morning Starry Night said, " from this case you
still would not feel differently from supplementation of vitamin k2 mk7? hmm.."
The case she was talking about was David Oatway he is the 74 year old he had a
aortic stenosis and calcification. He started taking k2 mk7. He also ramped up
his exercise hiked at least 5 miles a day with even some 10 to 15 mile high
altitude hikes in the Andes. He also went low-carb. So Starry Night you know it's
like POPEYE used to say, " I yam what I yam!" And he was a sailor. But I have tended to
be a medical scientist and the medical scientist in me is skeptical about that
case. I would very much love to have the idea that we can take something like M
k2 mk7 k2 and it would curve these ills that are associated with calcification
however the scientist in me looks at that one case and I agree with David
That's an N of one. There's another problem with that case and that is was
it the exercise was it the I mean was it the low-carb diet. I don't know. And again
I think we have evidence in the in the scientific literature that gives us a
little bit more information regarding calcification I actually did a video on
that that's the video she was commenting on. We'll go back and look at a couple of
clips out of that video and then I'll get a little bit deeper because I
realized that video was old technology it's where I was waving paper in front
of the webcam I can do a little bit better now. I think I can give you
a little bit more detail regarding the actual numbers
everybody's saying, "take K to get that calcium out of your - out of your arteries,
your plaques" Well it makes sense. Everybody knows that the higher
your calcium score - your AGATSTON score on a coronary artery calcium study, the
more risk you have for heart attack and stroke. Well most everybody knows
that and that is the case. However -- I went on to debate that point - it's not
right it's clearly the logic and it makes sense but a lot of things in life
don't make sense. The science would indicate that it's
plaque density and plaque volume so plaque density how do you increase
plaque density. Well for one you you calcify it number two and probably far
more important you pulled that LDL out of it that oxidized LDL and you pull
that hot liquid plaque that we've talked about so many times out of it
number two it's also volume. The higher the plaque volume the greater the
risk the higher the density the lower the risk. Don't believe that? Let's take a
look. This is a study that I referred to earlier but again I was just waving a
piece of paper in front of the screen let's go a little bit deeper. In fact -
before we do that let's let me show you how to find this study basically just go
to google and type in JACC Criqui JACC stands for the Journal of the
American College of Cardiology. Criqui is the name of the - last name of the
primary author you should get this coming up as your very first study
CORONARY ARTERY CALCIUM AND DENSITY JACC click on that and that's
what you'll get coronary artery calcium volume and density and then you can go
over here and download the pdf.
That's what I have done and I've marked up the PDF a little bit to help
show the high points - so again this is JACC out of the Journal of the American.
College of Cardiology 2017. coronary artery calcium volume and density so
again basically what they're looking at in this study the study sought to
determine the possibility of interactions between coronary artery
calcium volume or CAC which is coronary artery calcium scores CAC density with
each other with age sex ethnicity and new atherosclerotic cardiovascular
disease risk score diabetes renal function etc etc so again what they're
doing is they're comparing density and volume to later risk. How did they do
that ? They went to the Mesa study - Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis. This was a
very big study with lots of people. We'll talk about that in a minute
they measured CAC volume and CAC density and they mentioned, "Look, even in the
original MESA study, CAC volume was positively associated. You know, the
higher the volume, the greater the risk. And CAC density - the higher the density
(it was inversely related) so the higher the density, the lower the risk. How
did they do this?They took a total of 3398 MESA participants from the
original MESA study, free of cardiovascular disease but with
prevalent coronary artery calcium scores at baseline and they followed them after
the original MESA to see if they had an event. Here were the results median 11
years of follow-up 390 cardiovascular events standard deviate
with each standard deviation in CAC volume risk increased 73% so in
other words the more volume somebody had (this is on the follow-up study MESA
reanalysis) the more volume someone had in their
plaque the greater the risk. The risk of CVD increased conversely with every
standard deviation increase of density there was associated with a 28 percent
lower risk of disease so in other words the higher the density, the less likely
on follow-up these patients were to have disease one of the quickest ways to to
look at studies is to go into the actual tables. That's what we did. These are
called forest plots. Here is the way to read these. Basically you see a line that
goes down the middle and that line is the zero or average risk point in this
one it's the same thing a line going all the way down the middle now if a study
or if a a group shows higher risk they're over on this side as you see
right here higher risk is to the right of this line lower risk is to the left
of this line same thing down here now what are these two charts showing well
they're looking at (oh no this is gonna be a problem oh here we go)
they're looking at subgroups and they're looking at volume up here that's what
this ugly Vol means and density down here. Here's the thing. If they had
higher volume it didn't matter what their age gender race, whether they had
disease, or diabetes - if they had higher volume of plaque, they were at much
greater risk for having heart attack or stroke. This is for density . If they had
higher density - no matter the age sex gender
race etc - the higher the density the greater the risk. Again that's where
that study comes from. I hope you got some out of it. It's fairly simple
then, right? The higher the density, the lower the risk. And the higher the volume
of the plaque, the higher the risk -pretty simple. But if you've made it this
far, now I'll throw in something that may be a little bit more complicated.
Why then were John and I happy to see a 59 percent decrease in John's calcium
score? Here's the issue - and it brings up a core part of this whole problem. You
get a calcium score. You don't get a volume or a density. Those are what you
need. We had to assume - given John's history -that he had a major decrease in
his volume. Again what was the - K2 - John said he tried K2 in the past. It
didn't have any impact. Here's what John did he lost 30 pounds and he decreased
his blood sugar from 300 (which we documented) down to a hundred . The 300 was
going -we don't know how many hours of how many days of the week - and again he
was monitoring and got it down to a hundred he did that for month. Again
a very very different John - a very different metabolism going on inside of
him. If you've made it this far - like I said, "It's never that simple!" but
hopefully it's a lot of fun and hopefully it'll make a big difference in
your life thank you bye bye