Slim Fast drops Coumadin INR results

My sister and I took our dad in for his INR check at the Alaska Heart Institute. It was rather bad this week, at 1.5 and so me and the nurse tried pinning down just what might have caused it. Usually it is medication changes or some kind of dietary change that will cause a major change. Well, this time it turned out to be dietary, but not the sort we had been thinking. Rather than my dad having ate salads or something else high in vitamin K that can mess with the coumadin and throw the results off, it was Slim Fast.

I had made my dad three strawberry flavored Slim Fast drinks over the previous week and those had apparently caused the drop in the INR test results. So he was given a new dosing regime to take on the coumadin, one that will allow him to continue to drink the occasional strawberry Slim Fast.

It's not like my dad *needs* the Slim Fast, if anything he would need it for weight gain, but it is a good weight maintaining product and he loves to have the occasional glass of strawberry milk, so this is good. Plus he needs more calcium because of his osteoporosis, so I won't complain if he likes the strawberry Slim Fast (I don't really like it much myself, so at least someone's drinking the can we have of it). I just had not realized it would mess with his INR results.