The only traditional method to treat nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is vigorous diet, weight loss, and fasting. Even doing all that, most people will fail.
This is about to change because a new study in Scientific Reports reveals a common vitamin that prevents your liver from storing too much fat.
What’s more, this vitamin is rich in many of the foods we love to eat but are told not to for health reasons.
Since some studies have already shown that vitamin K2 could help with repairing damaged liver tissue, the authors of this new study wondered whether it could also block fat storage in the liver resulting from a high-fat diet.
To find out, they divided 42 mice into several groups, including ones that received a standard diet, ones that received a high-fat diet, and ones that received a high-fat diet plus different doses of Vitamin K2. This setup helped them compare the effects directly between the groups.
Over three months, the scientists watched the mice, noting changes in their weight, waistlines, and how much fat they were carrying around. They also took a microscopic look at their liver tissues and ran a collection of tests to check for fat levels, inflammation, and liver damage.
This is what they found:
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1. Mice on the high-fat diet became overweight, but the ones given Vitamin K2 didn’t gain as much weight. Depending on the dose, some Vitamin K2 mice were much lighter and slimmer than their high-fat diet counterparts without Vitamin K2.
2. The mice fed with Vitamin K2 had less body fat compared to those just on the high-fat diet. The vitamin didn’t change their muscle or body fluids, just fat.
3. The livers of high-fat diet mice were bigger and showed more signs of fat buildup. Vitamin K2-treated mice had healthier-looking livers, with less fat and damage visible when examined under a microscope.
4. Vitamin K2 helped reduce fat around the organs of the mice.
5. When looking at certain blood markers for liver health and fat levels, Vitamin K2 seemed to have a positive effect.
Therefore, the study suggests that Vitamin K2 could be a promising way to fight off the fat buildup in the liver caused by a high-fat diet, at least in mice. It seems to help keep weight, fat levels, and liver health in check without harming other parts of the body.
More research is needed, especially in humans, to fully understand how well Vitamin K2 works against NAFLD and how much we should take to be healthier. But this study is definitely promising.
And you will be happy to learn that vitamin K2 occurs in some foods that most people actually like, unlike vitamin K1 that is abundant in leafy green vegetables.
Foods rich in vitamin K2 include cheese, full-fat yogurt, egg yolks, liver, kidneys, natto, sauerkraut, and miso.