Undoubtedly every new vegetarian asked a questions if a vegetarian diet can provide all the essential nutrients to the body. Although the answer is generally “yes”, you still have to ensure that to achieve optimum health your diet has to be properly planned.

Recent studies indicate that vitamin B12 deficiency is very common among vegetarians and might be affecting over 90% of vegans.

The symptoms of B12 deficiency develop gradually over several months and sometimes years. Typical symptoms can include loss of energy, blurred vision, poor memory, hallucinations, inability to maintain balance, weakness and excessive fatigue, depression, mood swings and irritability. Long term vitamin B12 deficiency can lead to irreversible nervous system damage.

If you’ve been a vegetarian for a while and didn’t pay much attention to your nutrition, you might even experience some of these symptoms. Fortunately in majority of cases these symptoms are reversable and if you plan your diet properly from the beginning you’ll enusre that your body gets sufficient amount of nutrients.

So where does vitamin B12 come from? It’s a product of bacterial fermentation that happens either naturally in the animal digestive system or can be reproduced in a laboratory. Because bacteria is the source of this vitamins we do not require animal products to produce B12.

There has been a lot of misconceptions that such foods as seaweeds and tempeh are high in B12. However it was established that vegetable foods can provide only inactive analogues of B12 which can actually prevent the absorption of the active vitamin B12.

As there are no reliable and adequate plant sources of B12, vegetarians have to rely on dairy and eggs for this vitamin. For example a cup of milk or yogurt can contain up to 1 mcg (microgram) of vitamin B12 and one egg can contain 0.6 mcg. It’s important to keep in mind that the more processed the product is the less B12 it will contain. Sterilization and boiling will destroy ½ of the B12 in the food.

Vegans should include foods speicifically fortified with B12 such as cereals, milk and meat substitutes and nutritional yeast. It is important to read the label to ensure that your intake will be adequate. Vitamin B12 supplements are also available in health food stores.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 28th, 2007 at 11:32 pm and is filed under Food, Vegan, Vegetarian. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.