Summer is almost here! The trees are budding, the flowers are blooming, and best of all, the garden is greening up nicely! The season of renewal is all around us. So, if you missed out on making a new year’s resolution to get healthier (or somehow lost track of that one), now is a perfect time to recommit to your health — and that can be as simple as adding more greens to your diet.
Essential Sources of Vitamin K
Green vegetables, especially the dark leafy variety, are the most powerful source of human health on earth. They’re loaded with the perfect combination of vitamins, trace minerals, chlorophyll, and oh-so-important living enzymes that can restore health in miraculous proportions. Every day there’s new research about the goodness of greens. And often that research reveals spectacular health benefits of a particular nutrient we never realized was there. Vitamin K is one of them. In fact, the next time someone asks where you get your protein, ask where they get their vitamin K! Boosting your vitamin K level is a lot more important than worrying about getting enough protein (which you can do handily without eating meat, by the way). Not to mention, there’s hardly a speck of vitamin K in meat. On the contrary, vitamin K is found in astronomical amounts in green vegetables, and that includes BarleyMax!
A single serving of BarleyMax Original contains 119% of the recommended daily intake of vitamin K. At three servings per day on The Hallelujah Diet, that’s 357% — and if you’re on the Hallelujah Recovery Diet, you’ll get 714% (six servings). And vitamin K is just one of dozens of nutrients in BarleyMax!
Why Vitamin K Is So Important
Vitamin K is best known for helping blood to clot normally. Incidentally, this is where the “K” comes from; the German medical journal that first published the findings of the vitamin in 1935 referred to it as Koagulationsvitamin. Unless you are taking a medication that alters the clotting action of your blood (like Coumadin®), eating a good amount of greens each day will give you sufficient vitamin K to keep your blood’s clotting characteristics in perfect balance. Don’t you love how God’s creation works that way?
The type of vitamin K in green vegetables is K1. There are two other forms of vitamin K; the K2 variety is found in fermented foods like kimchee; and the K3 variety is synthetic and not widely recommended. About 90% of vitamin K in a plant-based diet comes from K1. While some recommend getting more K2 than K1 (citing that K1 is not ideal because it is not as easily absorbed as K2), new research indicates that K1—or lack thereof—makes a difference in terms of bone health.
Vitamin K in Medial Studies
A 10-year Norwegian study on the intake of vitamin K1 and K2 and risk of hip fractures found that a low intake of vitamin K1—but not K2—was associated with an increased risk of hip fracture. A Japanese study on the high prevalence of hypovitaminosis D and K in patients with hip fracture showed similar results, noting that people with hip fractures had much lower blood concentrations of vitamin K1. Vitamin K1 is also known to prevent bone loss and calcification of the arteries, and may even help protect against liver and prostate cancer. It is also known to help protect nerve cells from oxidative damage. In fact, vitamin K helps to treat a variety of health conditions:
- anticoagulant therapy
- bone fracture
- chronic liver disease
- cystic fibrosis
- hardening of the arteries
- inflammatory bowel disease
- liver cancer
- pancreatic cancer
- kidney stones
- nausea and vomiting during pregnancy
- osteopenia (bone loss)
- osteoporosis (decreased bone mineral density)
- thrombosis
Perhaps best of all, the vitamin K in green vegetables can be obtained on both sides of The Hallelujah Diet’s 85% raw, 15% cooked ratio. In fact, studies at the USDA have shown that cooking does not affect a vegetable’s level of vitamin K — and in some cases, cooking actually increases the amount of vitamin K your body can absorb since cooking breaks open the plant’s cells, which releases the vitamin. If you’re concerned about getting too much vitamin K through vegetables, don’t worry. It’s practically impossible. However, if you take blood thinning medications, vitamin K intake must be monitored carefully. Fortunately, technology is on your side in this situation; there’s an iPhone app you can buy to track your intake of vitamin K. So if you’re looking to put a little spring in your health this season, go green — that is, boost your vitamin K levels by putting a few more leafy green vegetables on your plate and BarleyMax in your glass!
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