![]() Discovered in 1929, it was named vitamin K not as part of the alphabet scheme, but because the Danish researcher Henrik Dam found that it prevented chickens on a fat-free diet from bleeding out. It does its work in your liver and other tissues, including your brain, pancreas, and heart, as well as your skeletal system. Vitamin K is primarily involved in blood clotting, bone metabolism, and building proteins. The absorption of vitamin K and other fat-soluble vitamins is best optimized when you consume them with some dietary fat. And excess (unused) amounts in your body are stored in your liver and fatty tissues. Vitamin K is a fat-soluble vitamin, which means it doesn’t dissolve in water. What happened to F, G, H, I, and J? Did scientists not know the alphabet song? Is vitamin K really not a big deal? This article covers what vitamin K is and does, how much you need, and the best places to get it in your diet. But then what happened? The next (and as it turned out, final) alphabetic vitamin is K, seemingly an insignificant afterthought. You’re undoubtedly familiar with the first five vitamins to be identified and named: A, B, C, D, and E. In a paper on malnourished pigeons, Kennedy wrote of two chemicals, which she called “fat-soluble A and water-soluble B.” And just like that, we had a naming system for these newly-discovered nutrients, which came to be known as vitamins. In 1916, a chemist named Cornelia Kennedy left her job teaching “domestic science” to female students at the University of Minnesota for a research position at the University of Wisconsin, where her advisor was trying to figure out how to put together healthy animal feeds.
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