Canthook

If you've never heard of phylloquine, you're not alone. I probably have heard of it, but I didn't take much notice.

It's also known as Vitamin K-1.

Yesterday, I would have told you that Vitamin K was for clotting, and unless you don't clot easily, you don't need Vitamin K in your diet. Today, I don't know if that's true or not, but it's definitely not the whole story, due to some research I've been doing on Medline.

Medline is a database maintained by the US Government, of most medical research by reputable scientists. It has a dot-gov URL. Government agencies aren't always truthful with us, but in this case, the database contains every article published in a wide variety of respected scientific journals.

To many users, it's not particularly useful, because most of the articles are presented as abstracts - think "reader's digest condensations - of the scientific research, and they use all sorts of $5 and $10 words. That's because the abstracts are written to explain the research to other researchers. It's pretty dense reading.

But if you search on the right keywords, you can see whether there's a lot of interest in a given subject, and what people are finding. Some studies are preliminary, trying to decide if further research is justified. When it is, a bunch of scientists typically do more focused studies, reporting the results, and when those studies are reported, still other scientists repeat the most interesting studies under slightly different conditions, trying to determine if the results are solid, or if they are flukes.

There's a lot of research on phylloquine, and it looks pretty interesting. One recent study from Germany looked on phylloquine and at menaquinone (vitamin K2) on prostate cancer. It turns out that K2 may fight prostate cancer, and for some reason K2 from dairy products works better than K2 from meat. (That alone should tell us that generics aren't necessarily as good as other meds. On the other hand, they might be better....) Phylloquine, on the other hand, has absolutely no effect on prostate cancer.

Another study, in Hong Kong, looked at use of phylloquine to treat poisoning. A 40-year-old woman swallowed four bags of rat poison, and showed up at a hospital four days later. (Pete Seeger said "I don't know why she swallowed the fly; perhaps she'll die.") They apparently saved her life, but they were mostly curious about how to tell when they were through treating her with K1. They decided that more research was necessary. (If you'd like to volunteer to swallow rat poison so that they can do more research, I suggest you need to head for Princess Margaret Hospital in Hong Kong.)

The bulk of the research has to do with the effects of K1 in less dramatic situations than cancer or suicide.

T. Neogi, et. al, from Boston University School of Medicine looked at hand osteoarthritis and vitamin K. They gave vitamin K versus placebo to patients, and found a 47% improvement rate with vitamin K, as measured by joint-space narrowing on X-rays. That's inconclusive; they suggest more research is needed.

Jean Mayer of the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center at Tufts did a lot of tests on people, questioning what they ate, and the state of their diabetes. Those who consumed more K1 had greater insulin sensitivity. Results were conclusive: potential beneficial role for phylloquinone in glucose homeostasis. That means you should eat your broccoli if you have diabetes.

A group led by CR Tirapelli in the Department of Psychiatry Nursing and Human Sciences at the College of Nursing of Riberirao Preto in Brazil injected K1 into male Wistar rats. They found that it reduced mean arterial blood pressure. Well, actually, it shot up immediately, but afterwards it settled down to a lower blood pressure. Maybe it went up because the rats didn't like getting poked with a needle? In any case, it might help your blood pressure if you eat your broccoli - assuming you're male, and you're a rat.

D. Drury and coworkers at McGill University's Montreal Children's Hospital assert that cystic fibrosis patients always have subclinical deficiencies of vitamin K. They were trying to decide how much K1 to give as a supplement. Their research came to the startling conclusion that giving either 1 mg daily or 5 mg daily helped improve the "Vitamin K status". Wow. Vitamin K is water-soluble, and you need it daily. It turns out that 100% of their test subjects rose to the normal range with supplementation within a month, so 1 mg daily is sufficient.

The first 24 articles in the search have 2008 publication dates on them. It appears K1 research is "hot". You're likely to read quite a few articles in women's magazines about vitamin K1 and health next year.

But what can you do with these results? Increasingly, studies tell us that if you want vitamins, you need to get them from vegetables, not from pills. In fact, some studies indicate that people are healthier if they don't take vitamin pills.

Just for kicks or maybe because hope lives eternal in an idiot, I went looking for K1 pills online. You can get 100 500-mcg pills for $3.19 at Outlet Nutrition, if you can get their website to work. I ended up phoning them; there's a $5 minimum order, and postage adds another $5. I decided against ordering the pills.

It turns out that spinach, Brussels sprouts, Swiss chard, green beans, asparagus, broccoli, kale and mustard greens are all very good sources of K1, as are green peas and carrots. Vitamin content drops rapidly after a plant is picked, so your best bet might be buying frozen green peas in loose form (as opposed to a solid block), and thawing them a little at a time, for use on salads. Cooking isn't going to help vitamin content.

I really like broccoli, but I usually cook mine, and often it's 3 days between the time I visit the farmer's roadside stand and the time I eat them, which isn't going to do me much good. Good luck!

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
blood pressure - broccoli - diabetes - english peas - medline - nutrition - osteoarthritis - phylloquine - rat poison - vitamin K