Getting Your Vitamin K in Food

Learning how to eat healthier seems to be a massive undertaking. There are so many experts out there that have all sorts of opinions on what you should and should not put into your body, and how much. They also disagree with what is the most important nutrients and vitamins. It is differently overwhelming. Getting your vitamin K in food is crucial, however, and if that is what you are trying to do, here are a couple of tips.

First of all, what is vitamin K, and why do you need to look for vitamin K in food? Vitamin K is a blood thickener that helps with clotting. Clotting is the process of your blood cells congealing, usually over a cut. People that have no clotting will continue and continue to bleed without forming a scab. Without help, they will “bleed out” and that can lead to serious problems. Having vitamin K in food also helps improve your heart health. Scientists and other experts have also been able to link vitamin K in food and improved bone health. So getting vitamin K in food is definitely something we should all be doing.

So what sort of foods are high in vitamin K? In other words, where do you go if you want to get all of the vitamin K in food that you need? Luckily, the foods that are high in vitamin K are readily and widely available, and have a host of other healthful benefits in addition to their high vitamin K content.

The foods that have the highest amounts of vitamin K are actually leafy greens. These would include such vegetables as spinach, collard greens, cale (another type of green), mustard greens, turnip greens, and beet greens, as well as brussel sprouts, which are not actually leafy greens. These foods, while generally bitter, can be cooked in such a way as to remove much of the bitterness by boiling them before sauteing with with butter and garlic. Those foods all have more than roughly 300 units of vitamin K, which is the recommended daily amount of vitamin K. In fact, cale has over one thousand units of vitamin K. Some other foods with less than three hundred units include broccoli, green onions or scallions, and some lettuces.

Getting your vitamin K in food is much cheaper and better for you than getting it from supplements. All of those foods carry other healthy benefits beyond their vitamin K content and should be incorporated into your diet as much as possible.