Welcome to Straight Talk on Health. I’m your host Dr. Chet Zelasko. Straight Talk on Health is a joint production with WGVU in Grand Rapids MI. I examine the practical application of health information. Nutrition. Exercise. Diet. Supplementation. I look at the science behind them and let you know whether it’s something to consider or not. You can check out other things that I do on my website Drchet.com and sign up for my free emails.
I read a lot of research papers. I usually begin with my health news feed, check out what’s being passed around in social media, and then check out the journals I subscribe to, plus the inevitable questions I come up with all on my own. For example, in one of the podcasts on what experts omit when they criticize supplements, they mentioned that vitamin K could interfere with someone taking a blood thinner like warfarin. So I check it out. Sometimes, that results in something that would only take 3-4 minutes to explain. I’ve decided to put together a few in what I’ll call Research Shorts. Let’s get started.
Many of you probably don’t remember the US Senator who criticized government funded studies 5 decades ago William Proxmire. While he’s gone, another senator, Tom Coburn, picked up the mantle in 2010 by criticizing research on greenhouse gases from cows. While the research was not about flatulence—cows don’t fart—it was about belching—which cows do, evidently a lot, the cows emissions were found to contribute to methane production which can impact out atmosphere. Not to be outdone on noxious emissions, the Australian researchers decided to ask the question: how many times per day do Australians pass gas.
An Australian research group created an app where people could report how many times a day they fart. Seems ideal for a group of 10-12 year old boys; they would make it a competition. Especially when you call the app Chart Your Farts. Alas, the researchers must have realized that and set the lowest age limit at 14 years. The researchers promoted the app over various media to the extent that over 6,000 people qualified and participated in the study. The average number of gaseous explosions? 5 per day for both men and women although some women may disagree with that number for their husbands.
What was interesting is that flatulence followed eating several hours later. Also, the more fiber a person reported eating, the more gas was produced. It makes sense. What does fiber do? Feed bacteria and other microbes that live in your gut. How do they make energy and perform their job? Fermentation and fermentation produces gas. It’s completely normal. One more interesting result. The age group that farts the most? 26-45 year old men. My life is now complete.
Next up is confusion about the fat soluble vitamin K and blood thinners and anticoagulants. The issue is about how vitamin K can be used by the body in the process of attempting to prevent blood clots. While I’m going to explain the facts to you now, please make sure you check with your physician before you change any food intake.
Warfarin is a common blood thinner. It directly interferes with the production of vitamin K and this can prevent the blood from clotting—which is beneficial to prevent strokes. The problem is that in order to use vitamin K from foods or supplements, a person has to have a pretty consistent intake of vitamin K. Varying vitamin K intake day to day can cause issues with the international normalized ratio AKA (INR) blood test which tests how long it takes for your blood to clot.
While that can be an issue, having a vitamin K intake that is too low actually causes more problems with the INR. Several studies have shown that maintaining a diet intake between 100-150 mcg per day seems to keep INR tests stable.
Moving to anticoagulants, vitamin K is not an issue at all. You can eat all the veggies you want—which is good for you anyway—and it will not interfere with an INR test because you won’t need it.
One more thing? Vitamin K comes in more than one form. Vitamin K1 is related to clot formation while vitamin K2 is used in bone formation. One more time, talk to your physician before making any changes to your vitamin K intake when you are taking medications to reduce coagulation and prevent blood clots.
Moving on. Some scientists just like to play with numbers. Another researcher from Australia examined the nutrition, sleep, and exercise data from the UK Biobank study. He and his research group tried to find which individual or combination of lifestyle choices would increase lifespan as well as health span. Remember, health span is the time without a diagnosis for a degenerative disease like CVD and T2D among others.
In this study, the researchers had a sub-group of over 100,000 participants wear a watch which recorded movement and sleep between 2011 and 2013. The participants also filled out a dietary assessment with their intake of vegetables, fruits, grains, meats, fish, dairy, oils, and sugar-sweetened beverages. The data were analyzed and presented in tertiles of moderate to vigorous activity, further divided into tertiles of sleep, and the into tertiles by diet score. The range of health span and lifespan were presented for each category within all those tertiles. Just looking at the chart, the more exercise, the more sleep, and the better diet increased health span.
The researchers played with the categories to find out the minimum necessary to get to a point where someone could gain extra life span compared to those in the lowest tertiles in each. The minimum combination, and it’s the combination that’s important, to gain one extra year of life is adding 5 minutes of sleep, 2 minutes of at least moderate activity, and eating half serving of vegetables every day compared to those who did the least in each category. Contrast that with getting an extra 25 minutes of sleep to get that benefit with no change in diet or exercise. It all seems to be interrelated. But these are just playing with numbers which scientists are want to do. It’s really nothing more than that.
But it does illustrate one thing. Maybe we make heath span too complicated by changing to many things at once. Maybe a more “chill” approach would be better. Eat a little better. Eat a little less. Move a little more. Every day.
Let me finish with this story. I was working out in my yard one morning. I was trimming a bird’s nest spruce. Over time, other plants had grown underneath it. I was squatting from my hips to reach the ground as opposed to squatting from my knees. A woman walking her dog asked my if that hurt my back. I said no. She said you’re lucky. I would be in bed with a sore back for a week if I did that! And she was gone.
What I would have told her is that I would also be in her position except that for the past 30 years, I’ve developed a consistent core stretching and strengthening routine that allows me to do that type of squatting from the hip. Consistent is the critical thing. If I let my routine slide for more than 3 days or so, I’m just as susceptible to that same muscular spasm and soreness in my lower back. You have to work on your body to keep it serving you well.
That’s all the time I have for this episode. If you like this podcast, please hit the share button and tell your friends and colleagues about it. Until next time, this is Dr. Chet Zelasko saying health is a choice. Choose wisely today and every day.
References:
JAMA Net. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.15637
