Summary

Vitamins are substances that your body needs to grow and develop normally. Vitamin K helps your body by making proteins for healthy bones and tissues. It also makes proteins for blood clotting. If you don't have enough vitamin K, you may bleed too much.

Newborns have very little vitamin K. They usually get a shot of vitamin K soon after they are born.

If you take blood thinners, you need to be careful about how much vitamin K you get. You also need to be careful about taking vitamin E supplements. Vitamin E can interfere with how vitamin K works in your body. Ask your health care provider for recommendations about these vitamins.

There are different types of vitamin K. Most people get vitamin K from plants such as green vegetables, and dark berries. Bacteria in your intestines also produce small amounts of another type of vitamin K.

Learn More

• Find a Nutrition Expert (Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics)
• Protect Your Baby from Bleeds (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
• Rare Clotting Factor Deficiencies (World Federation of Hemophilia) Also in Spanish
• Vitamin K (National Institutes of Health, Office of Dietary Supplements)
• Vitamin K (Harvard School of Public Health)
• Vitamin K deficiency bleeding of the newborn (Medical Encyclopedia) Also in Spanish

Clinical Trials

• ClinicalTrials.gov: Vitamin K (National Institutes of Health)

Journal Articles References and abstracts from MEDLINE/PubMed (National Library of Medicine)

• Article: Type 1 diabetes mellitus patients had lower total vitamin K levels...
• Article: Vitamin K (Menaquinone) from marine Kocuria sp. RAM1: optimization, characterization and...
• Article: Dietary vitamin K intake associates with reduced all-cause mortality in non-alcoholic...
• Vitamin K -- see more articles

Patient Handouts

• Vitamin K (Medical Encyclopedia) Also in Spanish