Notes About Vitamin B12

Vitamin B12 is a vitamin almost everybody should buy if they adopt a vegan diet. This is because most people live in a very sanitized world and don't eat food with much dirt on it, and vitamin B12 is produced by bacteria that live in dirt and other places. One of the main ways cows and other plant-eating animals obtain vitamin B12 for their bodies is by eating food with dirt on it. This vitamin B12 then gets stored in the flesh of these animals which is why animal flesh (a.k.a. meat) contains vitamin B12. Also, in our high-tech food production systems, animals are often given food with vitamin and mineral supplements so the animals that are killed for food may have gotten some of their vitamin B12 from pills.

It is very inexpensive to buy vitamin B12 and it is very easy to find it in stores. It is also added to a lot soy milks, rice milks, and immitation meat products or vegan energy bars. You can find vitamin B12 at pretty much all drug stores that sell vitamins (like London Drugs or other major drug stores). At London Drugs, it costs about $5 for a bottle of 100 vitamin B12 tablets with 100 ug (micrograms) of vitamin B12 in each tablet. Adults need about 2.5 ug of vitamin B12 per day but only a part of a vitamin B12 pills gets absorbed so you should consume more than 2.5 ug of vitamin B12 per day (perhaps 5 to 50 ug per day). But you don't need to eat 100 ug of vitamin B12 per day so you can buy a pill cutter at a medical supply store (just look in the yellow pages) and cut your vitamin B12 pills into half pills or quarter pills. This way you can make one 100-pill bottle of 100 ug pills last for an entire year, making it so that you pay about $5 per year for vitamin B12 pills (which is clearly affordable for pretty much any person).

You may also want to buy multi-vitamin-mineral pills, but you don't need to do this since all necessary nutrients, except for vitamin B12, are available in plant foods that are easy to find in stores. But sometimes people don't have time to make sure that they are eating food that contains enough of all the nutrients they need to eat and so they may not be getting enough of certain vitamins or minerals (and this applies to people eating vegan diets, meat diets or any kind of diets), so a multi-vitamin-mineral pill can help out in situations like this. Most multi-vitamin-mineral pills contain vitamin B12 so if you consume a multi-vitamin-mineral pill which contains vitamin B12 then you won't need to also consume a vitamin B12 pill.

It is very important that people consume enough vitamin B12. Vitamin B12 is responsible for proper nerve function and people who become severely depleted of vitamin B12 can become very disoriented and have other major health problems. Fortunately, human bodies are very good at storing vitamin B12 and people can sometimes store enough B12 in their body to live for several years without eating vitamin B12. But if you don't eat sufficient amounts of vitamin B12 for a long time, your blood levels of vitamin B12 will drop which can cause some major health problems. For instance, if you have low levels of vitamin B12 in your blood, this will cause the amount of homocysteine in your blood to increase which will increase your chances of having major heart problems. There have been studies done on vegans who don't consume vitamin B12 supplements that have shown them to have low blood levels of vitamin B12 and high levels of homocysteine, so it makes sense to not let yourself get into this situation.

Some people claim that they can get vitamin B12 from tempeh or spirulina or various other plant foods but studies have shown that these foods often don't contain any vitamin B12 and sometimes they contain chemicals that are similar to vitamin B12 (called vitamin B12 analogues) that can reduce the ability of your body to absorb actual vitamin B12.

It is worth noting that humans tend to lose some or all of their ability to absorb vitamin B12 through their stomach as they get older. But humans can also absorb vitamin B12 under their tongue, so it may be a good idea to sometimes dissolve some B12 pills under your tongue (to do this just put a pill under your tongue and chew on a small bit of food like an almond to get your saliva flowing and then let your pill dissolve for a bit and then swallow the dissolved pill with some water).