 Calcification is when blood vessels turn into bone, obviously something that should not be happening, certainly not a natural process. As you can imagine, our hunter-gatherer ancestors did not suffer from calcification, nor did they suffer from atherosclerosis, the buildup of fatty streaks in the arteries. Calcification and atherosclerosis are two separate diseases, but tend to come hand in hand, as these fatty streaks can calcify furthering the narrowing of the arteries, eventually leading to heart disease. They are both driven by inflammation. Calcification requires several other factors to occur, but atherosclerosis is solely caused by inflammation. The biggest culprit is omega-6 fatty acid, linoleic acid. Linoleic acid occurs in vegetable oils, better known as seed oils, soybean oil, rape seed oil, canola oil, it's in margarine, so when you consume large amounts of omega-6 fatty acid, linoleic acid, the lipids, the fats in your body, literally turn into linoleic acid, which your body does not recognize and attacks it. This results in it getting stuck in the arterial wall. Heart disease patients have very high levels of linoleic acid in their arteries. This is exacerbated by sugar, high carbohydrate diets, smoking, environmental pollutants, all of these things result in more omega-6 fats getting stuck in your arteries. What we have to take away from that is inflammation and the driving factors for atherosclerosis also contribute to calcification. Calcium is dangerous, exogenous calcium that is. Exogenous means outside of not normal. So any calcium that is obtained outside of a natural context is dangerous to humans. Why is the calcium RDA, the recommended dietary allowance so high when bone is less than 10% calcium? There is no source of calcium in nature that we obtain in high amounts. Dairy is a relatively new addition to our diets only in the past few thousand years and most groups of humans didn't really subsist off of dairy. And plant foods don't contain calcium in an available form. Calcium in plant foods is bound to oxalate oxalic acid so much so that if you compared the amount of calcium in spinach to a steak you would be getting far more calcium from the steak because the steak doesn't have those oxalates, those substances that bind to calcium. One pound of meat has approximately 44 mg of calcium. That is plenty adequate for what we need. The calcium RDA being at a thousand milligrams is because we lack certain nutrients in our diet that are required to absorb calcium. So the three main issues that lead to calcification are vitamin D3 deficiency, a lack of these vitamins in general, and inflammation. Vitamin D3 deficiency causes excess calcium in the bloodstream. As you can imagine consuming exogenous calcium would exacerbate this greatly. So when your vitamin D3 is low that raises your parathyroid hormone which causes calcium to be shifted from the bones into the blood. It decreases the excretion of calcium so you can't urinate out calcium and it increases the absorption of calcium in the stomach. This basically means you have an incredibly large amount of calcium circulating in your blood likely more than any human has ever seen in hundreds of thousands of years that we've ever existed because vitamin D3 is crucial to life. We would have to be out in the sun obtaining vitamin D3 in order to procure food. Vitamin D3 actually releases calcium in the urine and it lets calcium be absorbed in the bone so it's essential for regulating all absorption and excretion of calcium. What also happens is gene expression and cell differentiation become compromised. Our genes, the tens of thousands of genes in our body dictate how every single molecule functions. These genes cannot be utilized without certain precursor nutrients. In the case of vitamin D3 it is involved in genes specific to calcium metabolism. Cell differentiation is these cell components, the proteins, the sugars, the fats actually forming into cells. If you don't have adequate vitamin D3 cells will not differentiate and form properly. If a cell wants to turn into an osteoblast if you don't have enough vitamin D3 it's not going to happen. The second issue is a lack of vitamins in general. This ties into the gene expression and the cell differentiation we just talked about. When humans grow trees if the tree dies we don't really blame the tree's genetics We say okay was it the weather conditions, was it the soil, did we not use the right fertilizer? We have to start looking at humans the same way instead of blaming genetics. The vitamins, the minerals, elements, fatty acids in our diets determines how our genes are expressed and how our cells are made. If we don't have the building blocks we're not going to be healthy, stuff like this happens and these vitamins are synergistic so you need certain vitamins to absorb vitamin D3, you need certain vitamins to absorb vitamin K, elements, minerals, fatty acids, everything comes hand in hand. Vitamins can also help deal with inflammation. There are antioxidant pathways such as the glutathione pathway that require certain vitamins so you're increasing inflammation by not having these vitamins as well. And we spoke about the inflammation earlier. In the context of calcification impairs cell function greatly which results in imbalances that we'll touch on later. Before we actually understand how our blood vessels calcify it helps to understand how various cells in our skeletal system function. You have osteoblasts that synthesize and build bone. Osteoblasts cannot function on their own they actually work in an osteon which is a bunch of osteoblasts working together to build bone. Osteoblasts break down bone and reabsorb the components of bone. Osteoids are what make up bone tissue. They compose 50% of the bone volume and 40% of the bone weight. The rest of the bone is these other various cells. Osteoids are composed of 90% collagen, the remainder is conjoined in sulfate which is a substance commonly found in cartilage like tissue and osteocalcin. Less than 10% of the bone is calcium. Why aren't we obsessed with collagen instead? Vitamin D3 regulates osteoblast function. The proliferation, the creation, the differentiation, the changing, the mineralization of osteoblasts is dependent on vitamin D3. This ties back to the gene expression stuff and the cell differentiation. If we don't have vitamin D3 osteoblasts cannot be created and functioned properly. Osteoblasts are regulated by osteoblasts. So when osteoblasts are not functioning properly, you won't have the proper amount or function of osteoclasts. This is where we see bone imbalances, it's becoming pretty clear how calcification can occur. Vitamin D3 has been shown in studies to actually form osteoclasts. Vitamin K2 is also involved in this whole gene expression cell differentiation thing as are probably dozens of other nutrients that I don't have enough time to speak about today. Vitamin K2 is different than regular vitamin K. Vitamin K1 occurs in plants and is not utilized well by the human digestive system. Vitamin K2 occurs in fermented foods as well as animal foods in several different forms. The primary forms are MK4 as well as MK7. So vitamin K2 in the form of MK4 has a high activity in blood vessels and organ systems. Vitamin K2 in the form of MK7 has a lot of activity in the skeletal structure. In some of my day of eating videos I always mention that our ancestors consumed raw, cooked and fermented animal foods. The reason they consumed fermented animal foods is because of the vitamin K2 content these indigenous people were smarter than us. They knew the importance of these nutrients in development. But vitamin K2 has been shown to inhibit osteoblast apoptosis. Apoptosis is cell death and it causes osteoclast apoptosis. This isn't necessarily specific to what we're talking about. This just shows that vitamin K2 does have a regulatory effect in this process. It's important to consider vitamin K2's role in gene expression and cell differentiation with all of these other vitamins. So what we just spoke about occurs in the bone, in the skeletal system. What's interesting is there are similar mechanisms in the vascular system but none of these cells. So vascular smooth muscle cells utilize genes specific to bones to calcify themselves. These vascular smooth muscle cells turn into calcified vascular smooth muscle cells using these genes. Something is going wrong. There are too many osteoblast-like cells and not enough osteoclast-like cells. The reason we're saying like cells is because these cells aren't osteoblasts and osteoclasts. These are vascular muscle tissue that lines the arterial wall functioning like those bone cells. So what ends up happening is calcium metabolism, as you can imagine, is completely messed up and cells start calcifying. This compromises the osteoclasts because osteoclasts are regulated by the surrounding cells. If these cells can't communicate with each other, there's going to be imbalance. It also causes an imbalance here. So calcification occurs and these cells start releasing these substances. Interleukin is an immune-regulating glycoprotein. Interleukin actually tells the body to produce osteoclasts. The issue is osteoprotegerin is an osteoclastogenesis inhibitory factor. So another substance is being produced that is inhibiting the creation of these osteoclasts. Osteoprotegerin is actually regulated by estrogen. So I'm led to believe there might be some sort of hormonal imbalance as a result of our modern diets and lifestyle that is causing this to be released and not letting the interleukin create more osteoclasts. Matrix-glock protein is also released, MGP. It is a calcification inhibitor, but it is inactive without vitamin K2. When MGP is inactive, it is called dephospho-uncarboxylated matrix-glock protein. So calcification goes up. You get all of this MGP, all of this inactive protein that's loaded with calcium and you get a lot of inflammatory cytokines. They're just components of cells that are floating around. Vitamin K regulates MGP as well as osteocalcin, which is the component of osteoids. So without vitamin K, we cannot have proper bone formation. This is why they are injecting infants with vitamin K right now. As a result of us not having vitamin K2 in our modern diets. Another substance that is released is Fetuin A. Interleukin stimulates the release of Fetuin A. Fetuin A is a glycoprotein that has a very high affinity of binding to calcium. People with high levels of Fetuin A in their blood have lower calcification. Statins actually lower Fetuin A. So if you have arterial calcification and you're using a statin, you're actually inhibiting your body's ability to decalcify the arteries. This is because statins inhibit acetylcoenzyme A, which is important for so many processes in the body. They don't just lower your cholesterol. So low levels of Fetuin A and high levels of inactive MGP are associated with increased cardiovascular mortality. There's a lot of stuff going wrong here, whether it's just from inflammation, a lack of vitamin D3, a lack of vitamin K2. There are so many things that we need to address to fix this issue. Recently there was a podcast with Ivor Cummins and another engineer where they were speaking about using vitamin K2 to decalcify and reverse calcification. I think that's just a component and the primary reason I made this video was because there's a much bigger picture here and people really undershoot what they have to do. Modern problem calls for modern innovation. We have to make up for years and years and years of poor health with extreme nutrient intake, what our ancestors might have gotten in optimal times of hunting or procuring animal products. So yes, we obviously do need vitamin K2 as it plays a role here. Vitamin K2 can be supplemented, it is in eggs, raw cheese, liver. We spoke about the fermented foods earlier. Vitamin K2 is very important here. Vitamin D3 is always undershot. You can supplement it, you can get some sun. A tanning bed gives you a little bit of vitamin D3. I did a video last week titled Get Some Sun Naked. If you want to know how much vitamin D3 you should be getting, definitely check out that video. I would assume most people don't get even 5-10% of the vitamin D3 they need to reverse calcification. That's why there's an asterisk here. Vitamin D3 as well as vitamin A are always greatly undershot in the amount that our bodies need for optimal health. Vitamin A can only really be obtained from liver. You could supplement cod liver oil capsules. There might be some type of plant retinol extract that might work. I haven't experimented with those things. Vitamin A, vitamin D3, all these fat soluble vitamins are synergistic and antagonistic. If you take large amounts of vitamin D3 it will deplete your vitamin A stores just like taking large amounts of vitamin A will deplete your vitamin D3 stores. You need all of these vitamins in optimal amounts. As I said, I mentioned the vitamin D3 amount in that video last week. I did a video titled, liver is a superfood about two weeks ago where I talk about how much liver we should be consuming. Inflammation of course needs to be removed. One main consideration is the omega-3 to omega-6 ratio in the diet and this also ties greatly into vegetable oils. If you feed an animal pork or chicken, soy or corn, the fat in that animal literally turns into linoleic acid. If you guys are going to say you can consume grain fed meat, conventional meat, whatever you want, if I had high levels of calcification in my arteries I would not count on conventional meat. That would not be the best way to reverse calcification as your omega ratios would still be off. Of course consuming vegetable oils would be so much worse than consuming animals that were fed vegetable oils. Carbohydrates are also an issue here. High sugar, high carbohydrate diets, I mean yeah we can deal with that but when you have extreme levels of arterial calcification we need to take extreme measures to reverse it. We need to have as little inflammation as possible and the only way to really do that is to remove most of the carbohydrates from the diet. The word animal is here because if you simply increase the amount and quality of animal foods in your diet you would likely fix all of these issues. If you were consuming high quality eggs, cheese, organ meats, meat every day this issue would fix itself. You know granted you went out in nature and got some sun. Hopefully this will help you guys reverse calcification or educate other people in how to reverse their calcification. I haven't heard anyone else talk about this so if you guys have please let me know. I spent the last 48 hours staring at my computer screen trying to figure this out so if there was someone that has a deeper understanding of this than me please let me know. All I have to say is if Frankie Boy is the best you got then you guys are in trouble. As much as I'd like to believe this could potentially be groundbreaking information I really don't think I am intelligent enough to be the only person that has ever figured this out. So guys please let me know if anyone out there you know has a YouTube channel focused around health wants to collaborate and talk about this. I do have quite a few studies that I have been reviewing that connect the dots of all of these ideas. So thank you guys for joining me. Please like, subscribe, hit that bell icon and share the video if you can. If you guys would like to support me further please check out some of the other videos I mentioned. They will also complete a lot of the information I spoke about. I do have another video titled calcium is dangerous. I will link that at the end here. I've also recently launched Frankie's free range meat my goal being to provide you guys with high quality nutrient dense animal foods. So whether you need some raw cheese for some vitamin K2, some cod liver for some vitamin A or just calories in general and high quality meat to reduce the inflammation and improve the omega ratio of your diet you guys can check out frankiesfreerangemeat.com. Go to the website check out our mission we're looking to do so many things in the future from having our own chickens, raising pork the right way, providing you guys with raw dairy products just about everything. Again, thank you guys for joining me today. Enjoy the rest of the week.