The Benefits of Vitamin D3 +K2 For Men

When it comes to your health as a man, there is so much more than simply looking at how many calories you’re taking in and your grams of carbs, proteins and fats.

While these are both critical elements that will, in part, dictate how your body composition shifts, there are other micronutrients that also influence both how you look and how you feel.

Vitamin K2 and D3 are two of them.

These are two nutrients that many men are actually deficient in, therefore supplementing with them becomes very important.

Let’s take a closer peek into the benefits of each so you can see why you should be focusing on them.

Vitamin K2

When most hear the term vitamin K2, they tend to immediately think about a blood clotting vitamin. And while vitamin K is associated with helping your blood clot, it can do so much more.

There are actually more than one form of vitamin K, which is critical to know so you can understand why K2 is actually super important.

When we start looking at the research between vitamin K1 and vitamin K2, we see that vitamin K2 presents some additional benefits that vitamin K1 does not.

Namely, Vitamin K2 can help boost bone and heart health and works through reducing blood vessel calcification. The same cannot be said for vitamin K1(1).

Maintaining strong bones with age is of critical importance as is ensuring that your heart remains healthy. So much of the ‘heart heath’ focus is placed on reducing cholesterol levels but there are many factors that come into play influencing your heart health profile

We’ve also seen some research pointing to the fact that vitamin K2, if sufficient levels are consumed on a regular basis, may also help to reduce recurrent liver cancer and improve overall survival.

Of concern to men in particular is the fact that vitamin K2 may also help to lower the risk factor for prostate cancer, which is something that every man growing older should have on his mind (2).

Vitamin D3

Next we need to consider vitamin D3. Vitamin D is often referred to as the ‘sunshine’ vitamin because the body can make it on its own if you are out and about in daylight.

However, the amount of sunlight you need to meet your needs and the corresponding risk of skin cancer is often too great so instead, people put their focus on supplementing instead.

You may wonder what the difference is in D vitamins. D2 is a vitamin that is derived from plant-based sources whereas D3 is derived from animal-based sources.

It’s thought that vitamin D3 provides an overall more powerful effect over the body, therefore it’s the one you want to target.

This is why it’s essential that if you’re going to get a vitamin D supplement, you choose to get one that contains vitamin D3.

So what can vitamin D3 do for you?

First, we’ve seen that it can be beneficial for helping to fend off heart disease in many (3). Put vitamin D3 combined with K2 and now you have a winning recipe to keep your heart as healthy as possible.

It’s also been stated by research that vitamin D3 may also help to lower your risk of developing the flu as well, which I’m sure we all can appreciate (4).

More applicable to men, vitamin D3 is also a great way to help regulate your testosterone levels. We’ve seen a direct connection between vitamin D3 status and total free testosterone in the male body (5), so it pays to get more of this nutrient in.

If you are not focusing on these two nutrients yet, now is the time to get started.

The good news is they are available in the highest quality form in an easy-to-take supplement, so you don’t need to concern yourself with making sure you’re eating example foods needed to get them in with your diet.