Sep 22, 2026 · 1 hr 14 min · 24 segments
Shortly after birth, many newborns are given vitamin K to help their blood clot properly and reduce the chances of hemorrhage. Increasingly, especially here in the US, parents are refusing this…
[gentle music]So the story of vitamin K, like we mentioned, it has a lot of different parts that we could go into, but the main one that I'm gonna focus on today is vitamin K in newborns, because it's a huge part of the vitamin K story.
But this is This Podcast Will Kill You, so I can't just do that one thing.
And I think to really understand the vitamin K in newborns story, we have to first understand what vitamin K actually is and what it's doing in our bodies.
And then we can look at why newborns are so weird and, like, different than adults and what we can actually do about it.
I also know that a lot of people listening might be hearing a lot about vitamin K in a completely different context, and that is the world of supplement bros who can't stop talking about K2, so I promise we can talk about that at the very end.
It's a fat-soluble vitamin, and we've talked about vitamins a lot on this podcast.
They're basically just something that is essential for life in minute quantities, and they are substances that we use as either, like, enzymes or cofactors in a lot of our biological processes.
Much of the time we have to get vitamins through our diet, and that is also true for vitamin K.
And a fat-soluble vitamin just means that we have to have fat in our guts while we're absorbing that, like it won't absorb without fat present, and we don't just, like, pee it out the way that we pee out water-soluble vitamins.
The most common one that we use in medicine and that we have and that we get from our diet is vitamin K1, which is also called phylloquinone, and this comes from plants.
[gentle music]So the story of vitamin K, like we mentioned, it has a lot of different parts that we could go into, but the main one that I'm gonna focus on today is vitamin K in newborns, because it's a huge part of the vitamin K story.
But this is This Podcast Will Kill You, so I can't just do that one thing.
And I think to really understand the vitamin K in newborns story, we have to first understand what vitamin K actually is and what it's doing in our bodies.
And then we can look at why newborns are so weird and, like, different than adults and what we can actually do about it.
I also know that a lot of people listening might be hearing a lot about vitamin K in a completely different context, and that is the world of supplement bros who can't stop talking about K2, so I promise we can talk about that at the very end.
It's a fat-soluble vitamin, and we've talked about vitamins a lot on this podcast.
They're basically just something that is essential for life in minute quantities, and they are substances that we use as either, like, enzymes or cofactors in a lot of our biological processes.
Much of the time we have to get vitamins through our diet, and that is also true for vitamin K.
And a fat-soluble vitamin just means that we have to have fat in our guts while we're absorbing that, like it won't absorb without fat present, and we don't just, like, pee it out the way that we pee out water-soluble vitamins.
The most common one that we use in medicine and that we have and that we get from our diet is vitamin K1, which is also called phylloquinone, and this comes from plants.
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