Things They Don

Rat poison is an interesting product.   Very simple, very straight forward.   Basically, the rat eats the tasty stuff, and within hours starts bleeding out of every cut, scratch, or orifice until it dies.   Powerful stuff!   And yet approximately 2 million Americans eat rat poison every day.   Its called Warfarin or Coumadin.   The name Warfarin comes from the original discoverers in the 1940’s, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, plus the name of the anticoagulant, coumarin.   Accidentally discovered because rotting clover (where coumarin is naturally produced) was killing cattle that ate the clover.

How does it work? Dicoumarol (the final product after molds eat the coumarin from rotting clover) interferes with vitamin K; shutting down the body’s natural clotting mechanism.   We need to clot.   We have hundreds of injuries each day that we don’t know about.   Clots plug the damage until repairs can be made.   Ever bump your elbow, stub your toe, or bang your head on a shelf?   Good thing you can clot!   Or you’d be dead!   Bleedin out the wazzoo!!

Why would anyone take the main ingredient in rat poison?!? There are many reasons, but the most common is atrial fibrillation.   This is a condition in the heart where the normal electrical wirings get messed up.   The two top smaller chambers (the artria) of the heart don’t fire normally.   Instead, they fire thousands of times more than they should.   The result is that these chambers just sit there and twitch, performing no work.   The blood filling those chambers stagnates, and form clots.   And the atria turn into clot factories, sending clots throughout the body where they don’t belong.   When clots are moving through the blood stream, they’re called emboli.   You get one of these in your brain, your coronary arteries, your lungs, and you could suffer a stroke or even die!   So you take rat poison, which intereferes with vitamin K.   Vitamin K is essential to clotting; without it, no clots.   So, you’re all better now, right?   No, you’ve just created a more painful death.   Here’s how.

As is true with everything in nature, vitamin K doesn’t just have 1 job, it has many.   One that we are only now accidentally discovering is that when patients taking blood thinners that interfere with vitamin K die, and are autopsied, we find their arteries are like concrete ”with heavy deposits of calcium; very severe atherosclerosis.   Why?   Vitamin K (MK7 & MK4 versions of K2 specifically) activates a hormone called osteocalcin (produced by bone).   Osteocalcin takes calcium out of the bloodstream and pushes it into the bone where it belongs.   If you kill vitamin K with blood thinners, then the calcium in your blood stream starts depositing itself on your arteries and veins ”not good!   Plus, the bones are starved for calcium!   After years of this, you end up with atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) and osteoporosis (fragile bones).   Wonder if you actually die quicker and more painfully from receiving this miraculous rat poison medicine?   Hmmm, maybe you should have taken a fibrolytic like nattokinase (breaks up clots without interfering with vitamin K) instead of rat poison??   Something to ponder ¦

What’s all this got to do with YOU? The point is this:   Americans have a horrible artificial food supply, and the worst diets as well.   We hardly get vitamin K that is useful these days.   Where do you get it?   Dark green leafy vegetables provide vitamin K1 (which has negligible value).   It helps, but it is strongly bound up in plant fibers, so you get very little of it.   But the best vitamin K is called K2 (specifically MK4 & MK7).   The Japanese get tons of the good stuff (MK7) by eating natto (fermented soybeans); giving the Japanese 7 times higher blood levels than normal. What’s the result?   The Japanese who eat natto have lower rates of heart disease and osteoporosis! But who can eat this stuff?   I can’t even stand to smell it.   Yuck!

However, K2 also comes from organ meats and fermented foods like cheese, sauerkraut, miso, and natto.   There’s quite a bit of evidence to support the idea that K2 stops and might even reverse atherosclerosis.   Basically, if you’re 20-30 years old now, and you don’t want to have concrete arteries and hollow fragile bones, you better eat K2 now!!

And what is all the hoopla about Fosamax?? If you eat right, do you really need it??   I take high dose vitamin K, vitamin D3, boron, and strontium on a daily basis.   Bones are great!   And my jaw hasn’t rotted off (oh, just a minor rare side effect of Fosamax).   Bisphosphonates (Fosamax) does something similar to you as the proton pump inhibitors (Nexium, Prevacid, Prilosec); you get denser bones, so your bone test looks good, but the bone is brittle.   Dense bone is not as good as well constructed matrix bone.   The Israelites figured this out a long time ago while making bricks for the Pharaoh; straw in the bricks make them stronger.   But that’s another discussion, for another day