[cphajduk]

I'm not sure how the comparison is made, however Vitamin B12 can only be found in meat and eggs.

If you do not have supplements or eat this type of vitamin containing protein, you risk paralysis and death with a 2+ year absence of the vitamin.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are other missing nutrients as well.

[ska]

> however Vitamin B12 can only be found in meat and eggs.

That's not quite right. B12 is mostly produced by bacteria on the surface of plants. We can't synthesize it an neither can the animals we eat. So if you eat products of animals that have been eating such plants (or these days, maybe supplements), there is a source, and especially in developed countries is often the easiest one.

It's an important vitamin, deficiency wise, and for humans there are 3 practical approaches: eat products from animals that consume B12 on plants, eat those plants, or fortify another food more directly.

The 2nd one sounds like an easy win, but is made harder by the fact that most processing (e.g. even vigorous washing ) will remove all the B12 as it is superficial and water soluble.

It's also worth noting we don't need much B12, and we don't need it every day, so managing this isn't very difficult.

[pvarangot]

There's a lot of vegan sources for B12, mostly fermented stuff like tempeh or powdered yeast leftovers from making beer. Some plants also have it. They are cheap and plentiful and usually used in a lot of vegan foods like "substitute cheese" or people blend them shakes because they are also rich in other aminoacids.

You can get all the B12 you need and even more from this while still being balanced in macro and micro-nutrients. Also B12 deficiency will usually make you psychotic or very very tired and to die from it you have to be completely depleted, if you live in the modern world and eat products made with fortifried grains, like white bread, pasta or some breakfast cereals, you will probably never go below the threshold were you cause damage.

There's also multiple protein shakes or meal replacement shakes that sell for like 2 dollars that have enough B12 for the daily recommended intake which is far far more than what you actually need as it's based on the old 2000 calorie diet thing.

[pwinnski]

I've read this before, and yet weirdly, there're literally hundreds of millions of people on this planet[0] who've never eaten meat once in their lives, and somehow they're not all paralyzed and dead before the age of two.

I'm not a vegetarian, but maybe we can avoid obviously-false statements like this. Please?

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country

[graeme]

Meat and eggs. So you need eggs. It’s also present in dairy.

So the parent’s claim is an argument against unsupplemented veganism, and your counter of vegetarianism doesn’t address that. Massive difference between the two diets in terms of needing to supplement or not.

[pwinnski]

Oh, you didn't click through, maybe. Or missed that the linked page included millions of vegans, too, in the same chart.

You can sort by any column, and see that the U.S., Brazil, and Japan have the highest number of Vegans, while Mexico and Poland purportedly lead by percentage, though those two are disputed.

[novok]

Strict vegans are the only ones that typically have the B12 issue. Most vegetarians still eat a lot of dairy and eggs so still get B12 in their diet. Also a lot of foods are 'fortified' by government regulation to avoid common nutritional deficiencies that would arise with their standard diets, so it's hard to take certain things at face value.

[cphajduk]

Yes sorry. You are right I wasn't very clear and also I didn't realize that B12 actually comes from bacteria and archaea.

The organisms that provide us vitamin B12 tend to host said bacteria and archaea within their GI.

Alternatively supplements are provided (as I mentioned). Nutritional yeast, dairy, and vitamin pills are some of the ways in which vegetarians survive. Apparently certain beans are high in B12 as well!

[pwinnski]

Beans are often a staple for vegetarian and vegan diets, so that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the follow-up!

[hamax]

Most omnivores get their B12 from supplements given to livestock.

It's the same supplements but with extra steps.

[kamranjon]

There is plenty of B12 in seaweed and mushrooms and I eat quite a bit of those - wonder if that's what's keeping me afloat.

[cphajduk]

Interesting. Turns out I just misunderstood the source of B12. Seems it comes from certain bacteria and archaea.

[jhickok]

Vitamin B12 can only be found naturally in the amounts we need in meat and eggs. With the advent of culturing there are now vegan sources at nearly every grocery store.

[yread]

It's ok you can just drink beer (!1l a day) to get B12

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11464234/

(Of course, this study is from Czech Republic where average beer consumption is something like 0.7l per capita)

[codyb]

I was under the impression alcohol impacted B vitamin absorption though, so this may not work?

I looked it up and it seems to be suggested that it does but I didn’t look long enough to find a study.

[chickenpotpie]

That is incorrect, B12 is abundant in nutritional yeast

[cphajduk]

Because nutritional yeast is fortified. Hence a supplement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutritional_yeast#Nutrition

[chickenpotpie]

All purpose flour is fortified, doesn’t make it a supplement. Did you even read your own source. It literally says that nutritionally yeast can be unfortified and it have b12

[cphajduk]

I did read it indeed, did you?

> "Yeast cannot produce B12, which is naturally produced only by some bacteria.[8] Some brands of nutritional yeast, though not all, are fortified with vitamin B12. When it is fortified, the vitamin B12 (commonly cyanocobalamin) is produced separately and then added to the yeast."

Furthermore, fortified all purpose flour is not the same as fortified nutritional yeast. In fact, what you are referring to is likely _enriched_ all purpose flour. This has vitamin B1, B2, B3, B9 and iron added to it. There is no addition of vitamin B12.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_flour