Vitamin K2 and it’s Crucial Role in Health and Fertility with Dr. Kate Rheaume-Bleue – #15

0:27 Charlene Lincoln: Welcome back to another episode of The Fertility Hour. I’m really excited for our next guest. I just finished her book and I learned so much that I’m excited to have author and naturopathic doctor, Kate Rheaume. She is a graduate and former faculty member of The Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine. Dr. Kate lectures internationally on many topics related to health and wellness, and is a frequent guest on radio and television across North America. She is the author of the best-selling book Vitamin K2 and the Calcium Paradox: How a Little-Known Vitamin Can Save Your Life. Welcome, Dr. Kate.

Dr. Kate Rhéaume-Bleue: Hi. Thanks, Charlene. Glad to be here.

1:16 CL: Thanks for being here. So anyways, I finished your book and I need to read it again. I mean, there’s so much information there and really, we are just having a short conversation about it. I was raised drinking gallons of milk. We just kind of keep it up in our house and dairy, and now, there’s a whole conversation around dairy and then there’s another conversation about calcium because it was always a concern. “Oh my gosh, you need to supplement with calcium. You have to supplement with calcium.” Then the first question is, if you were to say “Well, I’ve kind of started eliminating dairy.” “Well, where do you get your calcium?” It’s almost like a panic-type question. So, you’ve written this book. How did you title the book The Calcium Paradox? What does that mean?

KB: Well, calcium is truly a double-edged sword. We know that we need it in our bodies but we need it to be in the right places. And if it ends up in the wrong places, it can be dangerous and even deadly. This is more common than you might think and as well, that thing about the calcium paradox or as in North America consuming so much milk, for example, and actually having quite high calcium diets and, yet, we have more osteoporosis and bone disease than some cultures who have quite low calcium intake diets. We know that calcium is not the whole story when it comes to bone health. It’s been an important and overlooked part of the puzzle when it comes to heart health and there’s a lot of implications on that.  

3:01 CL: I see, okay. You talk about it quite extensively in the book. So obviously, we need calcium in our bones. Is that still an agreed upon fact?

KB: Of course.

3:14 CL: Okay. So we’re taking calcium and supplementation, a lot of people are consuming dairy products. Where does the calcium end up that we don’t want it to go to?

KB: So once we’ve absorbed the calcium, it can go to our bones, that’s what we hope, but it can also end up depositing in a number of places around the body. Most dangerously, it can end up depositing in our arteries. If that is in the three major arteries that feed the heart, the coronary arteries, this is an important factor in coronary artery disease which is the major killer/major cause of heart attacks and which is the number one killer in the western world essentially. It can also lead to hardening of the arteries. So this is a different type of calcium build-up in the arteries in which they become stiff and less flexible. So really, calcium is very problematic when it comes to heart health but it can also deposit in our joints, heel spurs, joint tissue calcification, kidney stones, crunchy bits of calcium here and there, breast tissue calcification. It can kind of end up in many different places, depending on our, say, genetic propensity and other factors.

4:29 CL: So then the second part of the title “How a Little-Known Vitamin Can Save Your Life”, what’s the little-known vitamin and how could it have this benefit for us?

KB: It’s vitamin K2. And our body, because we’ve always had to deal with calcium and having naturally, in fact, such high calcium levels in the body, and this is something that people aren’t necessarily aware of, we maintain a high calcium level almost all the time. We need that for our heart to beat, for our nerves to function, for our muscles to work. So if you don’t have calcium in your bones, it’s probably not because you’re not getting enough or you don’t have enough in your blood. So we’ve always needed a way to deal with calcium and make sure it doesn’t end up in the wrong places. The body has a very sophisticated system and to deal with this but it relies in large part on a nutrient called vitamin K2 that has essentially been misunderstood, overlooked for a very long period of time, but it really is the key to prolonging this whole calcium removal system and so that’s why I wrote the book.

5:41 CL: Honestly, being in the nutrition field, I really did not know anything about K2 and then when I started looking at Weston A. Price’s work, that’s what introduced me maybe 5 or 6 years ago. So it is a little-known vitamin as you were saying, I guess. It’s getting more publicity as of late. But how did we become deficient? How did it sort of disappear out of our diets?

KB: There’s two main sources of vitamin K2 in our diets. One is grass-fed animal food. You will find a small amount of vitamin K2 in regular animal foods, egg yolks. It’s a fat-soluble vitamin, so yolks, butter, these kinds of things. But much more so when the animals are out eating grass, so on the pasture eating their green leafies, we get a lot more vitamin K2 in our foods. Since we’ve removed animals from the pasture and they’re largely grain-fed, that our K2 intake took a big hit at that time.

The other source of K2-containing foods are certain types of fermented food. So some but not all bacteria have the ability to make vitamin K2 and so that means that some fermented foods, but not all, are good sources of K2. So, the invention of the refrigerator hasn’t been our friend in this department because once we started using fridges, we started consuming a lot less fermented foods. The concept of eating fresh fruits and vegetables every day is just not something people did before fridges were common in every house. We just ate more fermented foods. And in North America, we don’t have a lot of tradition around eating fermented or cultured foods and so this is another big reason why vitamin K2 is not high in our diets.

7:33 CL: If someone was making sure that all of their meat was grass-fed and I know it’s very important, grass-finished, right, and then they were eating eggs that were pastured, would that be sufficient amount of K2 in our diets?

KB: Well, it depends. During the summer time depending on where you live, it might be because remember, the grass obviously growing in most parts of the world only in a certain season, a few months out of the year. And in fact, it gets a little complicated but the rate at which the grass is growing in fact even has an impact on how much K2 you’re going to get into your food. So there is a natural seasonal variance in that. And we have to remember it’s a fat-soluble vitamin. So just choosing grass-fed meats, in fact meat is quite lean and typically low in fat so you again have to emphasize the egg yolks, the butter, these kinds of things. So under optimal conditions at the right time of the year, you might be able to meet your K2 intake just with grass-fed animal products alone. Fermented foods do provide a much more consistent source that you can take advantage of year-round because there’s less variance. For example, when I talk about cheese, the milk that went into the cheese doesn’t need to be grass-fed. That has nothing to do with it. it’s the bacteria that make the vitamin K2 and some bacteria make it and some don’t. So some cheeses are high and others don’t. So it is possible with very careful food selection and if you’re very lucky to have grass-fed foods, to meet your intake of K2 with diet only, but it’s challenging and we need to do more testing to find out more foods that contain K2. There are likely more than the few that we know of.

9:25 CL: In your book you talk about supplementation and you talk about two types of K2, one being the synthetic form and one being a natural form. You make a great point about pastured animals and pastured products at only certain times of the year where they’re sufficiently pasturing on actual grass. The other times of the year, then you’re able to supplement. Can you talk a little bit about the supplementation?

KB: Yes. So when you go to buy vitamin K2 supplements, you’re right, you will find two main types of them on the shelves: something called MK-4 and something called MK-7. So they’re naturally occurring different types of vitamin K2. You don’t to get bogged down with that, you don’t need to worry about getting all the types or whatever. Just any type of vitamin K2 will do. The MK-4 and MK-7 are often sometimes referred to as synthetic versus natural because the MK-7 in the natural form is produced by bacterial synthesis much in the same way as fermented food, and the synthetic version isn’t. Regardless of your feelings on synthetic versus natural, they’ve both been tested, they’ve both been the subject of extensive research and both found to be safe and effective. There’s a bit of a difference though in terms of the dose. As far as we know the MK-4 form needs to be taken in a higher dose, according to the research that we have currently. Whereas one of the advantages of the MK-7 forms is that it can be taken in lower doses and a single daily dose, so that seems more convenient, which is why I tend to move towards that. But as long as you can find some vitamin K2, you’re doing better than not having any at all.

11:04 CL: Could you recommend a couple lines of K2 supplementation for us?

KB: I’m always reluctant to do that because I don’t want to miss out any good products that may be out there that either I’m not aware of, and I’m also up here in Canada so we don’t have the same brands that you do. So the one I tend to take is Natural Factors. I know that’s available in Canada and the US. I hear from people who have good results taking the Mercola brand, the Life Extension brand, but there’s a few others that aren’t coming to mind right now. I think there are several good ones out there.

11:39 CL: Okay, and I know all those can be found on Amazon, so that’s kind of the easy thing. Okay, so when people are listening to this and I don’t know how much are audience knows about, I mean, there’s a big debate about cholesterol right now. That’s a huge topic in the health field. When you were talking about heart disease and calcium in the arteries, but doesn’t cholesterol cause heart disease? Can you talk a little bit about that?

KB: Yeah, I’m glad the tide is finally turning and awareness is growing that we’ve really so much been led astray in our fight against heart disease just focusing so much on cholesterol. It turns out that having high cholesterol levels in fact are not a great predictor of your risk of having a heart attack. They don’t correlate well. They especially don’t correlate well for women.  In fact, by lowering, yes you can take medications to lower your cholesterol that really do lower your cholesterol and it turns out that they don’t really impact whatsoever your chance of having a heart attack. So, that’s not good news for primary prevention in particular. So, preventing a first heart attack, statin medications don’t seem to have any impact. If you’ve already had a heart attack, statins seem to lower your risk somewhat of having a second one. But really, the whole focus on cholesterol has led us astray to some of the more, well, all of the more important risk factors which is inflammation, calcium buildup in the arteries, low magnesium levels which can affect blood pressure and other aspects of heart health, so these are really so much more important. And the presence of calcium in your arteries is an excellent predictor of whether or not you will have a heart attack, so that is much more important to pay attention to. And the good news is, if the calcium is there, whether you know it’s there or not, you can get it out. The body has a way of doing this but it needs vitamin K2.

13:45 CL: What test is performed to diagnose if there is calcium in the arteries?

KB: The most useful test is something called a coronary artery calcification (CAC) test. It can go by a few different names but it’s essentially a superfast CT s0can. There’s different types of imaging that can be used to look at the beating heart in a still image and measure how much calcium is in the three coronary arteries and then present that as a number like a quantity, and that number is quite a good predictor of your risk of heart attack within 5 years of the test. So that is something that I do recommend people get if they’re at all concerned about their heart health.

14:29 CL: I think you mentioned in your book. Is there a couple books you recommend so that people can learn more about, I guess, “the cholesterol myth” and educate themselves?

KB: Yeah. So my book deals with part of that and some of that, and certainly there are a lot of good books out that talk about the history of how we became led astray. The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz is one of them. That’s out recently, that’s quite readable and fun. Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, it’s a bigger, longer read but it really gets into the details. Another great book. I like those two. Eat the Yolks is another one as well as Eat Fat, Get Thin. These are ones that help to counteract the myth around cholesterol.

15:15 CL: And of course, your book. You did a wonderful job introducing someone to kind of re-understanding cholesterol because how sometimes I tell people is, “Well, cholesterol is more like a check engine light,” you know? It’s telling you.

KB: Yeah, I like that. And even elevated cholesterol isn’t necessarily a problem itself. You just want to make sure the cholesterol that you have is working for you, not against you, and not just focusing on lowering it. But I like the “check engine light” analogy.

15:48 CL: We talked about it a little bit but the question was what simple food lies at the heart of a grassfed movement? Talk a little bit about that.

KB: Simple foods that lie at the heart…?

16:05 CL: Yeah. Well, I’ll give you the answer. You talked beautifully about eggs in your book. When you say an egg, there’s a lot of questions because like you said in the book, there is free range, cage-free. So an egg is not an egg. I mean, you have to really define it these days. So there’s factory farmed conventional eggs, right? Then there’s the whole other opposite end of the spectrum. Why do we want to pick a particular egg and spend a couple bucks more, like what’s really the advantage of this type of egg?

KB: It really, really is different. There are so many differences between the factory-farmed egg and the egg from the truly pastured hen. And I don’t mean free-range as in there’s an open-door policy but the hens are actually out in the field eating grass and bugs and these kinds of things. There’s lots of different reasons for this and advantages for it. When it comes to K2, for example, you will get a smidgen of K2 in your regular grocery store egg and you would have to eat about a dozen of those per day, every day to have a worthwhile amount of K2 in your diet, which is of course impossible. But at the right time of the year, a pastured egg with the lovely orange yolks, just two of those in a day will give you a worthwhile amount of vitamin K2. So it just makes a huge difference of being able to get your nutrients from food or not. And that doesn’t even go into the beta carotene, the omega-3’s, the vitamin A. There’s just so much more nutrition in a pastured egg.

17:38 CL: When you start eating a pastured egg and just seeing the golden yolk and the flavor, it’s just a world of difference. It’s well worth it.

KB: It really is. Mind-opening, yeah.

17:51 CL: Do you raise your own chickens?

KB: I don’t. I’m not in an area where I can do that, but I am in an area where I’m close enough to several small farms that do that I can great eggs almost all year round.

18:04 CL: Exactly. What is the relationship between vitamin K2 and vitamin D?

KB: This is very important. These two work together. They are partners in a very important way, in a number of ways. But the simplest way to explain the relationship is the big role that we have for vitamin D in terms of calcium, it has of course lots of roles in our health, but when it comes to calcium, vitamin D helps us absorb calcium. Once the calcium is absorbed, vitamin D has no control over where that goes. So it might go into your bones or it might land anywhere else. As a matter of fact, a symptom of vitamin D toxicity, which isn’t common, but when it happens, how that manifests is by calcification all around the body in inappropriate places. Vitamin K2, however, will take the calcium that we’ve absorbed, make sure it gets into the bones and doesn’t land in the arteries and even take that out of there. So for anybody who’s taking vitamin D, vitamin K2 is really important.

19:10 CL: Thank you for clarifying that. You talked about one theory and it was called the Triage Theory of Aging. I hope I understood it correctly because, I mean, our audience is people who are interested in natural fertility, they’re trying to conceive. I kind of looked at that Triage Theory of Aging and I said, “Oh, this kind of explains some fertility issues people are having.” Did I understood it correctly that it would sort of tie in? Talk about what that is, what’s the theory.

KB: Right. So the Triage Theory of Aging or you could say the Triage Theory of Health or Disease or anything like this, is that if the nutrients coming into your body are in limited supply or not every nutrient is available in optimal amounts, then the body has to triage or make a decision of where it’s going to use certain nutrients. So that means that some aspects of our physiology may get the short end of the stick and if over time you’re consistently not getting optimal levels of nutrients, that can result in diseases that will manifest over time. This absolutely is relevant to fertility because fertility tends to get the shortest end of the stick typically. If nutrients aren’t coming in at optimal levels, that is one of the first things that the body will give up and it’s essentially saying “Hey, you know what, maybe now is not a good time to have a baby because we’re just not getting in enough resources that we’d like to. We’re going to channel these over to more survival things and you can consider making babies later.” So, absolutely the Triage Theory really does apply to fertility.

20:56 CL: What it someone’s listening and saying, “But I take heaps of vitamins.” I mean it’s kind of going back to you need all these co-nutrients to absorb. Can you talk about that a little bit more? Because sometimes people, I’m guilty of it, you research it on the internet, “Oh, this is good, this is good, this is good,” and you just end up taking a lot of different supplements. You’re like, “How could I be deficient? I’m taking a ton of stuff.”

KB: Yeah, agreed, agreed. Just because we’re taking a ton of stuff, that doesn’t guarantee that we’re getting things in the proper ratios. In many cases, we don’t necessarily know what those are. There is still for sure a lot we don’t know incredibly around nutrition but we’ve made lots of advances and supplements can be extremely useful to get nutrients that are difficult or have become impossible, in fact, to get through our diets for a number of reasons. Like we’re no longer eating organ meats which were the sources of really important nutrients for fertility and general health and things like that. I could say for sure for vitamin K2, yes, it should be balanced with vitamin D as well as some A. I know vitamin E plays an important role and other fat-soluble nutrients for fertility and yet we don’t necessarily know what’s the connection here. But you’re right, there’s still a lot we don’t necessarily know although we are making advances for sure.

22:24 CL: Going back to the Triage Theory, in your book you were talking about DNA and mitochondrial issues with the vitamin deficiencies that were happening. The reason I bring that up is my partner Dr. Iva Keene with The Natural Fertility Prescription, what she really finds clinically with working with her patients is one of the number one issues with fertility today is mitochondrial issues and of course, poor sperm quality which we’ll talk about in a minute. So I’m trying to kind of tie that in but I just remember reading about that and thinking, yeah, those vitamin deficiencies, so even if someone was able to get pregnant, it could often end in miscarriage because there are those chromosomal issues happening because of the deficiencies.

KB: Right. We were just gaining an appreciation for the role of the mitochondria and various problems that you can have with the mitochondria if they’re not working optimally in a variety of health conditions, and fertility is one of them. There is also some preliminary information to suggest that vitamin K2 does play a role in the mitochondria which is of course the energy-producing center like the batteries of every cell in our body, so that’s quite fundamental to the function of each individual cell. If for some reason that’s not working well, then you can see all kinds of problems.

24:01 CL: Can you discuss, and I hope I’m pronouncing this right, osteocalcin production on vitamin D as being essential to male fertility?

KB: This is really interesting. So osteocalcin is a protein that’s produced by the bones that we just always kind of thought was simply produced by the bones for the bones and that was the end of the story. But now we know that this protein produced by the bones has far-reaching effects in the body, at least a couple of areas that we know, and fertility is one of them. So osteocalcin is a nutrient that seems to help with male fertility and increasing sperm counts. Wherever you see osteocalcin, you think about vitamin K2 because we know this is a nutrient that is required typically to activate that osteocalcin and get it to draw calcium into the bones. But even since publishing my book and fairly recently there have been a couple new studies coming out to confirm that vitamin K2 by different mechanisms helps to boost testosterone levels and increase sperm count. So for male fertility, we know this is really important.

25:16 CL: It’s kind of that everything is so interconnected and it used to be more kind of like an eastern or alternative holistic kind of tagline, but everything is so interwoven and connected. I thought that was really fascinating that they’ve made those connections.

KB: Agreed. It’s really exciting to see the research come out to confirm those findings and even show further results in terms of fertility, for example. Because you’re right, everything is connected so sometimes that leads to a feeling of the more we know, the less we know. But the other side of it is we are actually making discoveries that have useful, practical, meaningful implications that we can take advantage of right now for fertility.

26:03 CL: I just want to point out with your book, we are talking about fertility but in your book you talk about liver cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, aging, wrinkles. I know there’s more. What are some of the other diseases that you cover in there?

KB: Children’s health was a big one. Oral health, cavities was one. Actually, even since publishing my book, there’s been a lot of really interesting information coming about vitamin K2 and psoriasis which I didn’t write about but I found that the results so great that I try to mention that. But yeah, the cancer thing was huge, I was astonished. That’s the original research I found around vitamin K2 was for various types of cancer. Since the publication of the book, more research showing really important results for prostate cancer and prostate health for men in general.

27:04 CL: Thank you. This is really interesting. Discuss vitamin K2’s role in normal facial development.

KB: This was so interesting to me and I think the pictures in the book do say a thousand words here. It is a lot based on the work of Weston Price who did a lot of the radiographs and provided a lot of the pictures but then we since have more modern evidence to corroborate those findings in terms of vitamin K2 deficiency and its role in facial development, specifically helping to promote the development of a wide face that’s symmetrical with like a long, straight nose and typically the width of the face is important. What I think is interesting, so when I wrote the book, my understanding of the time based on the information I’d seen was a big factor in this and it still is for facial width and development of teeth happens in the womb in utero, so K2 is important then. But because the face does continue to grow until 18, 19, 20 even, I think there is now, I do believe that there is an opportunity for kids who are taking K2 and have K2 in their diets throughout life to make up for deficiency at that time and end up with a nice wide face which can mean avoiding braces, for example, these kinds of things. So, it’s very helpful.

28:34 CL: It’s so interesting because if you’re not educated on it and you have children and the overcrowding of the teeth or whatever, the canine teeth, there’s no room for. You don’t think twice about it. You just think, “Oh, my kid is going to need braces,” and there’s nothing about nutrition. Because you talk about in your book first trimester deficiencies of K2. I’m sorry, I kind of forgot what you had mentioned about that, but was it leading to like the narrowing of the face and the overcrowding of the mouth, etc.?

KB: Yeah, that seems to have an impact even that early on. So we know it’s important before pregnancy for fertility, at least for sure for men, possibly for women, we don’t know how. But then first trimester early on for fetal development but as well a development of those facial bones and structures and even the little tooth buds that are starting to form. So it does make a difference even that early on.

29:38 CL: We really, really, really emphasize the prenatal nutrition and I love how you cover that in your book and you talk about first and second-born children that there’s one example of a young girl, actually the first born where the mother did not have optimal prenatal nutrition. There was the narrowing of the nose, the narrowing of the face, the overcrowding of the teeth, the small narrow palate and then her sister which had the high-quality fats in their diet, the pastured meats, all the optimal nutrition completely different. Palate, teeth were completely straight. Just like Weston Price found in these tribal traditions, and it wasn’t about flossing and brushing though as you emphasize in your book, I mean good oral hygiene is important but we’re finding out about dental hygiene it’s so much more about our nutrition.

KB: Very much so. Coming from the inside throughout life. Since publishing the book, there have been some interesting research papers coming out to support that really kind of mind-blowing stuff looking at not just – you know, I talk about vitamin K2, how it gets concentrated in the saliva which will go into your mouth and help to keep your teeth clean. But dentists, for example, publishing theory papers about how the K2 in fact affect the hypothalamus which incredibly affects the health of all the teeth in your mouth, which we wouldn’t have thought necessarily before. So it really does play a profound difference in the face all throughout life.

31:20 CL: I thought this was so interesting. Discuss vitamin K2’s role in labor.

KB: So one of the things that seems to be the case is that vitamin K2 helps with the formation of the skull bones and particularly making sure that they’re not hardening prematurely. So if the bones are not hardening prematurely, you get a nice soft skull which makes for a much easier labor. Because they had molds and it can come out much easier versus a rounded, more hardened skull that could just make for a more difficult birth. It may also have implications for the width of the hips and things for the mom side, but it would seem that definitely from the baby’s side of things, that’s important.

32:12 CL: I thought it was so interesting in your book. You were citing examples of maybe it was Weston Price going into tribal cultures where literally women would just go out in the field and they would come back with the baby or they’d be laying next to their partner at night, birth the baby themselves, like it was kind of not a big deal but it had very much to do with them sticking with their very traditional diets and therefore the labors were very easy.

KB: Yes. They noticed that when those cultures became more in contact with modern man, you can say, or developed or white cultures and they would bring in those foods and those modern foods started to replace some other traditional foods, then you start to see more difficulty in labor. Labor wasn’t so easy and women would suffer whether it’s because of the shape of their hips had changed or the baby’s head, or both. Labor difficulties became very common and difficult labors in the way that they just simply never had been due to this change in nutrition.

33:18 CL: Okay. I have to emphasize again. I just read Dr. Kate’s book The Calcium Paradox: How a Little-Known Vitamin Can Save Your Life, I highly recommend you get this book and I got it off Amazon. I learned so much. I knew little bits and pieces of everything but when she ties to all the different diseases in the K2 research and because there’s so much emphasis in the last decade or less about vitamin D deficiency, well, you’ll educate yourself through this book about the co-nutrients that are needed to be taken with vitamin D because, like you said, there’s so much that we are still learning about vitamins and co-nutrients and how they affect our body. So this book is excellent. It just has so much information here. I really wanted to emphasize the fertility aspect of it. But there’s a lot there, it’s an excellent book.

I thank you so much. How do we find out more about you? Obviously, by reading your book but do you have a website that we can go to and read more about you?

KB: Yeah. People can reach me at www.doctorkatend.com and my book is available in all the online book retailers.

35:32 CL: Read the book. It is excellent. I read a lot of health books. I was like, “I need to read this again.” I got so much important vital information out of there. Thank you so much for your time. I loved interviewing you and like I said, I’ve learned so much. To the audience, when you read her book and you see that, like she said, the pictures are worth a thousand words and in this interview we talk about helping with fertility but also once you get pregnant, how vital optimal prenatal nutrition is and obviously, K2, vitamin D, how to get calcium into the right place. I’m so glad I read the book because I actually at a certain point, I kind of took every supplement that had calcium and I kind of stuck it in my closet because I was like, “Gosh, until I find out more information…” because all I’ve been learning about calcium is that it creates a lot of oxidative stress in the body.

KB: Unless you have osteopenia or diagnosed osteoporosis, you don’t need a calcium supplement.

36:41 CL: Okay, thank you. So getting calcium from your food but using K2 to get that calcium from your food to the right place.

KB: Exactly.

36:52 CL: I’m so glad I brought that up. When you’re talking about calcium and getting into that, you’re not talking about taking calcium vitamins.

KB: No. I don’t recommend calcium supplements for all women all the time. Some people say just because you’re a woman you should take a calcium supplement. I completely disagree with that. And when you do need a calcium supplement, you don’t need nearly as much as you think. 500 mg even if you’ve got osteoporosis is really plenty. The body can’t use much more than that. It’s just a matter of getting it and keeping it in the right places.

37:24 CL: Thank you for specifying that. All right, thank you, Dr. Kate. I enjoyed it so much. I really appreciate your time.

KB: You’re welcome. Thanks, Charlene. I appreciate it.

37:32 CL: One last thing. If you enjoyed this podcast, please support The Fertility Hour by subscribing. We appreciate it so much and we’ll bring you more high-quality content. One last question. I do have more questions. Can I invite you back for a part 2?

KB: Absolutely. I’d love to come back.

37:49 CL: Okay. Thank you so much.