Golden Years Walking Buddies


Here is a test to determine if you are a nutrition nut like me.  Did you get excited last week when you saw that one cup of kale provides 1,327% of your recommended daily allowance for vitamin K?  If you did , we will likely be out there taking mountain hikes together in our seventies,  so I need your phone number. 

I thought about that number 1,327 all week; couldn’t get it off my mind.  Maybe it’s because I constantly look up numbers like that for different foods and I have never come across one even close to that.  So what will my body do with all of that abundance of vitamin K ingested when I eat fresh kale?

To begin with, the first shot you ever got was probably vitamin K1 because it is given routinely to babies at birth to help clot their blood.  K1 is found abundantly in dark green vegetables like kale, collard greens, spinach,  and to a lesser degree in parsley, broccoli, asparagus, and lettuce.  It’s contribution to blood clotting is pretty widely known, but vitamin K is being called the “forgotten vitamin”  because science has been slower to look into it’s many other important contributions to our health and life.

For instance, K2 made by bacteria and found in fermented foods like cheese, Japanese “natto”, organ meats and egg yolks, has been found to keep calcium in the bones and out of the arteries.  You see, vitamin K is needed to get calcium into the bones, and then it also helps to keep it there so that it doesn’t drift back out.  Calcium that is consumed but not kept in the bones can settle in the lining of the arteries to your heart, making them stiff.  (1) 

A study of 4800 elderly Dutch citizens showed that “persons with the highest dietary intake of K2 (primarily originating in low fat Dutch cheeses Gouda and Edam) had the least evidence of calcification of the aorta.” (2)  Another study sited in the Journal of Nutrition 2004 concludes that their “findings suggest a protective effect of (K2) intake against coronary heart disease, which could be mediated by inhibition of arterial calcification.” (3) Great sources of K2 are butter and meat from GRASS FED cows, hard and soft cheeses, patte, and good sources are egg yolk, organ meats in (nitrite free) salami, chicken and beef. (4)  Take note also that K is a fat soluble vitamin and is much more efficiently used when served with some source of fat from plants or animals.

Honestly I never knew what vitamin K was growing up and we certainly didn’t eat any kale, although thanks to mom we did eat plenty of cooked spinach. Now I understand a little more why the makers of the Popeye cartoon chose to make him love cans of cooked spinach! I’ve also learned to use the bean balance in order to buy organic meat and butter from cows fed with grass.  I hope you will join me in my quest to use K-rich cooking ingredients because I’m going to need some healthy walking buddies in the golden years.

I’ve made a way for you to include/hide kale or another dark green in every entree this week.  For Beautiful Fruit Green Salad simply replace some of your lighter salad greens with some kale and marinate it in the dressing for 20 min. before adding all the rest.  One Dish Tamale Pie hides an entire bunch and Spontaneous Black Bean Burritos have a place for any shredded green, so use all or part of a marinated (any dressing or oil and vinegar) dark green there.

Let me know how you liked the recipes!  (You can respond right on the recipe at this site, or comment on the blog http://otlane.blogspot.com/ )

molly's avatar

Molly

(1) http://www.naturalnews.com/031013_vitamin_K2_health.html
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11684396
(2) & (4)  http://www.newswithviews.com/Howenstine/james59.html
(3)  http://jn.nutrition.org/content/134/11/3100.long

Extra Reading :  http://www.westonaprice.org/fat-soluble-activators/on-the-trail-of-the-elusive-x-factor-a-sixty-two-year-old-mystery-finally-solved#foods

                  http://www.springboard4health.com/notebook/v_k2.html

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