Quote:
Originally Posted by nickynoodles  Steve,
I'm interested to know your views on getting enough Vitamin B12 in a Vegan or Raw diet. My (possibly naive) understanding is that B12 is important for cell division and blood formation, but the only good quality sources of it for humans are meat, dairy or man-made products. All of the Vegan / Vegetarian sites seem to say that you should either take supliments or eat fortified foods.
From http://www.vegansociety.com
"If for any reason you choose not to use fortified foods or supplements you should recognise that you are carrying out a dangerous experiment"
My wife is veggie and I considered going veggie, but I wanted to see some 'proof' that a vegetarian diet is a natural state for a human. To me, this seems to suggest the opposite and that we're natrually omnivores.
Anyone have any thoughts on this? .... |
I honestly don't know the answer (lots of people like to pretend that they do), but I do have a great resource to share. It's extremely comprehensive, and while it could potentially be a comprehensive resource that is inaccurate or mistaken, at least that's better then most of the short articles you can find on B12 that seem to make a whole lot of assumptions.
Here's the link:
Vitamin B12: Are You Getting It? : Table of Contents
Interestingly, I went out and got
the blood tests mentioned in the resource I link to above, and all my levels were normal. In fact, my B12 levels were far above normal!
Now that could be attributed to the B12 supplements I've started taking (in pill form) for reasons I won't elaborate on (no secret, it'd just off-topic), or it could be the fact that all the meat and other foods I ate in the years before I went vegan just gave me a very good store of B12. Or it could be something else entirely! There are many, many relating factors, so it's really, really hard to tell. But anyway, I thought I'd throw that out there.
I'm currently a vegan, FYI... been vegan for just over a year. Suffice to say my vegan diet is far from perfected, and I believe I have a lot of room for improvement. I don't eat garbage and junk food, but I do need a larger variety of certain foods, but I'm working on that.
Note: For your sake, don't take what I say or even what I link to as "the gospel truth". I'm not telling you this to cover myself, but to not mislead you and have you go off and do things to your health that may have adverse effects just because I've mentioned something or linked to a resource that seems to have all the answers.
So many people make statements as if they have all the answers (even Steve seems to do it on occasion as well, although I don't think that's his intention, just an artifact of interpretation), but from what I've seen, nobody *really* knows anything. If you knew the nature of reality, perhaps *then* you could draw some decent conclusions, but till then, it's all guesswork.
I highly advise you to think with doubt when you experiment with diet/health. Don't only doubt what seems unlikely, but also doubt those who doubt what seems unlikely as well as your own beliefs and the lenses you use for interpretation.