This article is from the book, Prevention's Healing with Vitamins , by The Editors of Prevention Health Books. To send a link and summary of this article to a friend, click here . U nless you were born within the past couple of minutes, your chances of having a vitamin K deficiency are pretty slim. You can even manufacture your own vitamin K . About half of the vitamin K your body needs is normally produced by your own intestinal bacteria.
Babies are the big exception.
They lack the bacteria necessary to produce vitamin K , and they're usually not up to a diet of green, leafy vegetables for quite a while. And although breast milk has a small amount of the nutrient, it's one of the few instances in which breast milk is simply not enough. So babies are generally given a shot of vitamin K at birth. The only other folks who need an extra boost of supplemental vitamin K are those who have a digestive disease such as cystic fibrosis, says James Sadowski, Ph.D., chief of the vitamin K laboratory at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston. But there are some folks who are afraid that they get too much vitamin K .