Amy Nett: I’m not too familiar specifically with the DaVinci Labs products, but I do generally like the combination of A, D, and K. The way I normally do that is I have patients taking cod liver oil, so they get vitamin A. I like cod liver oil because you’re also going to get some folate and some minerals. You’re going to get some omega-3s in there, and it’s sort of the whole foods source.
I will then either use maybe Thorne vitamin D and K drops. It’s a combination of D and K together. But sometimes I have patients who really need higher levels of vitamin D, or maybe they need higher levels of vitamin K2. Let’s say it’s a patient with cardiovascular disease or maybe a patient with osteoporosis. I’m going to want to use a higher dose of vitamin K2. Because remember, the dosing range on vitamin K2 is pretty variable where a maintenance dose is something like 180 mcg, but there are studies looking at cardiovascular disease where the reduction is in the milligrams, like maybe 15 mg, maybe 30 mg.
So again, for vitamin A, I just use cod liver oil. You get a little vitamin D, but then I most often will parse out. I’ll have the patient on a liquid vitamin D3 or a softgel for vitamin D3 because I find that the range depends on the time of year, how much sun exposure they’re getting, and just each individual. We have such different needs for vitamin D, so I tend to separate that out, maybe have patients anywhere from 2000 to 6000. That is the most typical range that my patients are on. Then for vitamin K2, if the patient doesn’t need, if the patient’s fairly standard and doesn’t need really high dose of D or K, then you can use a Thorne combined D3 and K2 product. Otherwise, Thorne also makes a vitamin K2 liquid dropper, and if you do about one drop per day, that’s about 1 mg, so it’s a higher dose of vitamin K than is needed.
You can also do like a softgel, which is going to be about 180 mcg. It’s sort of your standard dose there. I think those are all the options. I”m not at all against the DaVinci labs product. Again, I’m not familiar with it, but I think you’re on the right track in terms if you want to have patients on A, D, and K. There are different ways of approaching it, and some of it is how many supplements is the patient willing to take. If they’re willing to take all three, then you can do the cod liver oil, the D3 drops, and the K2 drops. If they’re really not, at this time, they don’t have the bandwidth, then I think you can absolutely get away with that.
Then I always recommend that patients take their fat-soluble vitamins with their fattiest meal of the day. If they’re eating avocado or eggs at one meal, that’s probably when I’m going to tell them to take their fat soluble vitamins because I think you’ll get some increased digestion and absorption when you’re taking it with fats in your meals.