Skin alert: Vitamin K1 for your skin. Is it good?

Vitamins are good for us! So much that we all tend to take boosting mixes with a complete set of them (plus minerals, plus this and that…) - just to make sure that we don’t miss anything. Swallowing these super-mixes (often I wish supplements manufacturers were more considerate and were making SMALL pills, so that I don’t choke!) comforts us because then we know it arms us to face stress, fatigue and all kinds of abuses.
In fact vitamins are so good that some companies started putting synthetic vitamins in high concentrations in skin care products. That’s right! What’s good for the body should be good for the skin! And a new era began of everyone looking for vitamins-boosted creams.
Bad news for those of you who think it’s better for your skin to use new vitamin-boosted creams: it looks like not every single vitamin is good to put on your skin. Or at least, that’s what French equivalent of FDA deducted from recent studies on Vitamin K1!

"Cosmetic products that include vitamin K1 can represent a serious threat to human health…". That’s a statement from the French Health regulator AFSSAPS. Following the discovery it recently put a total ban on the production and distribution of the vitamin K1 for cosmetic products. In fact, if you take anti-coagulants or treatments for hemorrhaging conditions, using cosmetics with vitamin K1 is putting your health at risk.

All this fuss began because in the past few years AFSSAPS has been overwhelmed by reports of severe allergic reactions to creams and lotions containing vitamin K1. Six of the sufferers were so severely affected that hey had to be hospitalized. Scientific studies carried out separately in Italy and Spain showed evidence of sensitivity to this vitamin.
But what prompted these very severe cases of allergic reaction to vitamin K skin care products?

• Is it the amount of vitamin K in the product?


• The synthetic origin of the vitamin?


• The way the natural vitamin K has been extracted and processed?


• Something else?

Whatever it is, think twice before using a Vitamin K loaded cream or lotion and remember that you can get plenty from natural source like olive oil, cooked broccoli, leaf lettuce, watercress and parsley.

Enjoy your salad!

To read more about Vitamin K visit the very good Linus Pauling Institute Website at:
http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/infocenter/vitamins/vitaminK/index.html