Vitamin B12 - Essential For a Plant-Based (Vegan/Vegetarian) Diet

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Vitamin B12 is also absent from plant foods, at least unprocessed plant foods. It is only found in animal products such as meat, seafood, dairy products, and eggs.¹There are many plant-based (vegan) food items which are fortified with B12⎯cereals, non-dairy milks, meat substitutes, and so forth. However, these usually come in the form of a package with many other not-so-healthy ingredients in them so they’re not always the best choice.

 

So who cares about vitamin B12? Why make such a big deal out of it?

You should care about vitamin B12, especially if you’ve adopted a plant-based diet because it’s crucial for long-term, optimal health. It’s the one threat meat eaters hold over their vegetarian and vegan counterparts to try and convince them that eating this way will harm their health.

 

Today, we’re going to take a look at the B12 topic to give you an understanding of what there is to fear and what there isn’t. You will also learn about how to avoid a B12 deficiency by implementing one easy, inexpensive step.

 

There’s nothing to fear in the end if you take the proper step to maintain adequate B12 levels on a plant-based diet. You’ll also be doing your body a favor by adopting this lifestyle because it prevents so much needless suffering overall.

 

Vitamin B12 (cobalamin) is a water-soluble vitamin produced by bacteria.² These bacteria, and the B12 they produce, often live inside other animals and are transferred to humans when they eat animal proteins.³

 

Humans make vitamin B12 as well, via their own large intestine, with the help of bacteria living inside of the colon. A rather extreme experiment provided proof of this as far back as the 1950s. An English researcher had collected feces from vitamin B12-deficient vegan patients.¹ The researcher then made a water extract of these stools and fed it back to the patients. The patients’ B12 deficiencies were subsequently cured, proving the fact that the bacteria in their large intestines was perfectly capable of making B12 usable by the human body. But the problem remains that even though B12 can be made in the human colon, it is obviously not well absorbed there. Otherwise, the B12-deficient patients in the experiments wouldn’t have been deficient in the first place.