| Eating Vegan: The Elusive Vitamin B12 | |
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A long-standing myth about veganism is that animal products are the only dietary sources of vitamin B12. Here’s a little information about this critical vitamin as well as some easy ways to work it into your diet. According to the Mayo Clinic, vitamin B12 is important for nerve health and red blood cell creation. B12 is also critical for making DNA. Certainly, it’s not a vitamin you want to be deficient in! An average adult needs about 2.4 micrograms of B12 per day. Luckily, there are several non-animal ways to get that vital B12 into your diet, from superfoods to fortified ones: Nutritional Yeast Brewer’s yeast can also provide B12 and is similarly versatile. Check the package, though – its B12 content can depend on the environment in which it’s grown. Spirulina Some of spirulina’s B12 is actually a B12 analog, which your body can’t use in the same way. Usable B12 comes from spirulina grown in an environment containing cobalt and is sometimes referred to as cobalamin. Other sea vegetables are sometimes touted as a good veggie source of B12, but again, it’s not always in a form your body can use. Fortified Foods Have I missed anything, vegan people? I’m always looking to incorporate more B12 sources into my diet! Source: GO Media - Written by Becky Striepe - Image Credit: Creative Commons photo by shnakepup Comments
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One of the reasons for the continued promotion of non-supplementary sources of B12 is that there are prominent examples thereof: rural Chinese people for example, some of whom are, for all intents and purposes vegan, don't display the symptoms we would usually attribute to B12 deficiency.
Indonesians who consume tempeh regularly also don't seem to suffer from deficiency; it is thought that this is due to B12 producing bacteria that grow on certain kinds of mold that grow on the tempeh.
In both cases though, industrial production and processing of food in developed countries dramatically decreases the amount of bacteria, molds, etc. that grow on our foodstuffs, and so we cannot rely on these same sources.
Some people also think that the human gut (or even mouth) contains sufficient concentrations of the necessary micro-organisms to produce ample B12; this is far from proven though, and is likely not to be the case.
Vegans who do not want to use supplements (even though supplementary B12 almost always comes from the same place you would obtain it if you ate unwashed vegetables, moldy tempeh or animal liver: micro-organisms) can still choose to consume fortified breakfast cereals, fortified soy milks (almost all of them tend to be these days), or fortified meat substitutes.