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Thread: The importance of B12

  1. #1

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    Default The importance of B12

    Read here.

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    Ex-admin Korn's Avatar
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    The article from Poona in India he is using to emphasize his point, is strange. It's a well known fact that B12 deficiency is more wide spread among plant eaters than meat eaters, but why would the incidence of Vitamin-B12 deficiency among pure vegetarians in India suddenly gain 'epidemic proportions'? There are at least 150 millions vegetarians in India (any numbers, Manish?), most of them lacto-vegetarians. Due to the 'westernization' of Asia, I would think that the number of veg'ns there have decreased, not increased. I saw an article once, suggesting that about half the population was B12 deficient - even if almost all Indians eat a lot of milk products, which contains B12. I found one interesting thing in the Indian article, however:
    "Also, consumption of extremely pure water rid of all bacteria could be one reason," says Hiremath.
    This article also confirms that B-12 deficiency is common among both vegetarian and nonvegetarian Indians: "Nonvegetarian subjects who reported regular consumption of eggs, poultry and mutton were often found to be vitamin B-12 deficient."

    According to the article from Times of India, nearly 70 per cent of vegetarians have vitamin B12 deficiency. With hundreds of millions vegetarians in the world, and millions of vegans, of which many do not take B12 supplements, we should see ten thousands of cases of veg'ns with symptoms of severe B12 deficiency.

    We have tried for almost a year to find a visitor who have had a personal cases of B12 deficiency with no success. Yes, there are cases out there, but compared with the number of people who actually live on a plant based diet, the numbers are extremely low.

    Severe B12 deficiency coupled with alarming MMA and homocysteine levels is no joke, and I recommend all who have been vegan for some time to test themselves. I just don't understand why some sites seem to be so obsessed only with the number of vegans who have low values of B12, and at the same time seem to have no or little interest in finding out what the 20 or 30% of plant eaters that do not develop deficiency have in common, or put more emphasis on the large number of people who eat way more B12 than they need develop B12 deficiency.

    if Vitamin-B12 is absent in a pure vegetarian diet, as Jack Norris' reference article claims, why then does 'only' (less than) 70 per cent of vegetarians have vitamin B12 deficiency - according to the same article? Remember that in India there are millions of people who have never been eating meat, so they haven't built up a B12 pool in the liver from earlier days as meat eaters.

    When talking about B12, it is important to distinguish between ('true') vegetarians and lacto-vegetarians. It makes sense that a combination of less use of milk products in India (if this is the case, congratulations! ) combined with drinking ' extremely pure water rid of all bacteria' will cause more cases of B12 deficiency. Commercial, organic vegetables are also hard to find in India, and the tap water is highly chlorinated. But when will someone initiate research on the millions of plant eaters, Indian or not, who do not develop symptoms of B12 deficiency?
    I will not eat anything that walks, swims, flies, runs, skips, hops or crawls.

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    I personally know several vegans who either have very low levels of B12 or developed deficiency, sometimes very severe. The latter include cases of losing consciousness and being hospitalized or neurological disorders such as neuropathy. So I'm sorry, but I don't buy that B12-deficiency-is-rare-in-vegans argument. I've seen it first hand too many times.

    I might give you a hint why we haven't had any visitor with diagnosed B12 deficiency yet. Most vegan who are being diagnosed with it simply drop out of veganism. They either regress to meat-eating or vegetarianism. This is very common scenario. Don't expect them to subscribe to veganforum.com as they probably lost their interest in veganism altogether. Most people here do supplement B12 or consume B12 fortified foods so it comes as no surprise that they are (relatively) healthy. Others are vegans for period of like 1-12 months which is too short to develop this kind of deficiency. That is probably also why "'only' (less than) 70 per cent of vegetarians have vitamin B12 deficiency".

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    Ex-admin Korn's Avatar
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    Quote veganmike
    So I'm sorry, but I don't buy that B12-deficiency-is-rare-in-vegans argument.
    It's not really an argument. Of course there is a risk that you will develop B12 deficiency if you don't know what you're doing, don't take supplements, and not even monitor your levels or even know anything about what B12 deficiency symptoms are. Our lives are very 'anti-bacterial'. I'll start a thread later about what you can do if you develop symptoms of B12 deficiency, with many examples.... I think the one of several reasons for so few examples of B12 deficiency among veg'ns, is that if people develop any signs of deficiency, the do something with it. If people let the symptoms develop and don't do anything with it, they might not know what they should have known about the B12 issue. Which is kind of strange, because, as we know, developing B12 deficiency for a vegan can take many, many years - so they should have had plenty of time to educate themselves about the topic....

    I might give you a hint why we haven't had any visitor with diagnosed B12 deficiency yet. Most vegan who are being diagnosed with it simply drop out of veganism.
    Not if they really are vegans or know a little about nutrition. As I wrote, it normally takes long time to develop B12 deficiency, in some cases it can take up to 30-40 years. If you mean something with your veganism, or even just live on a vegan diet for your own health, I find it very unlikely that you would drop veganism due to a case of B12 deficiency. Developing B12 deficiency doesn't prove anything about veganism at all, it proves something about your own lack of interest or ability to stay healthy as a vegan, so dropping veganism as such wouldn't make sense.

    They either regress to meat-eating or vegetarianism. This is very common scenario.Don't expect them to subscribe to veganforum.com as they probably lost their interest in veganism altogether.
    I have never seen it, but I'm sure there are some cases. I choose to trust that people are not so foolish that they stop being vegans because they didn't know that there are many reasons you could develop B12 deficiency, some of them describedhere already (and many more to come.)

    But: a reason that could make people drop veganism if they developed B12 deficiency, is the attitude supported by some vegan sites, which main B12 'philosophy' seems to be 'you might become sick if you become a vegan, please take some pills'. I think it's a great insult against veganism to tell people this without also providing all the available information about all the B12 reducing elements in their life and background. I want our site to be a place that makes people understand that there are many reasons that the B12 issue is important. The (current) level of B12 in most plants is only one among dozens of reasons that low B12 levels is a problem for maybe 70% of all vegans and maybe 30% of all non-vegans. If I ever get time to write the book I want to write about veganism and B12, I don't think any person who read it would drop veganism if he developed B12 deficiency at some point - ho would do something with it, and not blame the plants or lack of meat for his conditions.

    Most people here do supplement B12 or consume B12 fortified foods so it comes as no surprise that they are (relatively) healthy.
    That might be correct - in the survey we had at 'veganforum 1', about 50% of the long term vegans that participated in the survey took B12 regularly.

    70% vegans with low B12 deficiency is a lot. It means that the way they live provides too little B12 and/or that the B12 they consume (or could have consumed) is reduced. Some people even suggest that it means that the defined low threshold for B12 deficiency is set too high. The homocysteine issue might suggest that it is set to low. But 70 or 80% doesn't surprise me, because there are so many reasons vegans could lack B12 in addition to the fact that they don't eat the blood and cells of other creatures (that has gotten their B12 from plants). I've been looking at these numbers, and I'm surprised they are not higher - not because of the plants vs. meat-issue, but because the many other attempts to kill bacteria and B12 in our society. When I say 'only' 60-70-80%, it's because the remaining group, 20-30-40%, is so big that there are thousands, if not millions of people out there that could provide really valuable information about how not to develop B12 deficiency when being a veg'n. When some major vegan sites and persons stick to a 'symptom treating' attitude to the B12 problem instead of performing proper research on the many reasons that B12 is a problem for both vegans and non-vegans, they are shooting themselves in the foot. As a result, some people might even start to eat meat as a 'treatment', because some people almost defined being vegan as the 'disease'.

    We need clothes - they don't grow on trees, they are man made. In a way they are not part of nature in it's original form, they are part of 'culture', not 'nature'. Eating B12 supplements are not in conflict with a natural lifestyle: it's an addition to a natural lifestyle, just like building a house on a beach. Building that house doesn't mean that the beach will go away: and wearing clothes doesn't mean that you are not naked beneath the clothes. I have no problems with building houses or wearing cloths or plant based B12 supplements. But I think parts of the vegan movement is on the wrong the track and might even be a part of the relatively slow increase of the number of vegans - because they 'forget' to inform people about all the B12 reducing elements, and instead only focus on a meat industry-like kind of approach to the B12 issue: "There's a much B12 in meat (nobody is discussing how much of this that is B12 analogues) and not a lot in plants (and then they emphasize that there are B12 analogues in plants) - vegans needs pills!"

    Do you believe that if people would live a 'natural' life, be more exposed to good bacteria including B12, eat fresh, organic food, not use amalgam, not drink coffee, not drink chlorinated water or plants that have been watered with chlorinated water, avoid fluor, not use oral contraceptives, not drink water from tubes copper tubes, not eat so much cooked, frozen and canned food as they do, not use sugar, avoid tobacco and alcohol, not have a possible history of B12-eating parasites from animal products/pets, not have a storage of mercury in their bodies from eating fish, not be exposed to pollution from cars, not use microwave owens, eat more of the plants that are most rich in B12, possibly include fresh algae and seaweed in their diet, if they never had used antibiotics and consumed a lot of other B12 reducing chemicals, if their colons weren't totally polluted by a life on a very unclean diet, would get enough sunlight and natural calcium and even had started life with a healthy mother that let them continue breastfeeding as long as they wanted (OK, I'll stop here ) .... do you still think they would need B12 supplements in order to remain healthy? Do you think that there's something wrong with nature, and that if there is a God, she put all the nutrients we need in water and plants, but forgot about B12? ;-)


    Most vegan who are being diagnosed with it simply drop out of veganism.
    I'd say that if you start to eat meat because you develop B12 deficiency as a vegan, you weren't a vegan in the first place.

    Some sites only focus on a very ego-centric kind of dietary veganism, respect for animals and their right to live a good life doesn't get much bandwidth at all. Some of them even write something a la "the most important thing you need to know about B12 and veganism is that you need to take supplements - preferable several times a day." No wonder why people don't read any further. It's a perfect way to make veganism look silly to newcomers.

    The most important thing you in my opinion need to know about B12, is that due to a large number of reasons, lack of B12 is something that needs focus, and millions of people - most of them (of course) meat eaters, have low B12 levels. People on a diet lower in B12 than the average population will of course be more affected by all these B12 reducing elements than people with an average or high B12 intake from meat. Most plant eaters belong to that group (low B12 intake) - but this does not mean that they can blame it on the plants if they develop deficiency. If people would have been 'educated' this way, they wouldn't 'simply drop out of veganism' if they were diagnosed with B12 deficiency. And, as I said, I think and hope most vegans are so conscious about nutrition or really mean what they mean about causing death and suffering for animals that they won't drop eating vegan food even if they would develop B12 deficiency. Even most meat eaters don't drop meat even if they frequently get diseases that are associated with eating animal products!
    I will not eat anything that walks, swims, flies, runs, skips, hops or crawls.

  5. #5

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    I hear the 'I know several vegans that had B12 deficiency' thing often but haven't met one yet. Maybe now would be a good time for people who say they know several vegans that have had B12 deficiency to hook them up with the forum and give us real data on what happened. I find it hard to believe that none of them have ever opened their mouth to help other people that could suffer B12 deficiency, plus it would be nice to see what diagnosis the doctor came to, and what methods the doctor used to test them for B12 deficiency. Maybe they could write an article or short summary of how this happened and a notable vegan organization could publish it since I've yet to see that happen either. There must be some B12 deficient vegans that want to tell us their story since they are so common.

  6. #6
    ConsciousCuisine
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    I have never seen a B-12 deficiency in anyone and have yet to see any verifiable information on anyone else who claims to have known of this occuring to themselves or anyone else.
    I had all of my bloodwork done last year and everything looked great! My iron was a bit low, but my Doctor (who is very knowledgeable about and supportive of Alternative Healing) says that is actually healthy and preferable.I already knew that, but it's good to have confirmation from a Medical Doctor of what Alternative Medicine has known all along...Nature knows best, and when we stick close to what makes sense and are "natural", we fare well!

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    Quote phillip888
    I hear the 'I know several vegans that had B12 deficiency' thing often but haven't met one yet. Maybe now would be a good time for people who say they know several vegans that have had B12 deficiency to hook them up with the forum and give us real data on what happened. I find it hard to believe that none of them have ever opened their mouth to help other people that could suffer B12 deficiency
    What I was just writing just disappeared, but said that I do know a few; my son, a naturopath, a raw foodist. Those three have no data to say what happened except that the MMA tests revealed B12 deficiency and now pernicious anaemia. What can they possibly 'open their mouths to say' except they didn't take a B12 supplement, believing that eating what they considered the right food, they didn't think they needed a supplement. My B12 levels are fine, but then I do take a supplement.

    CC, don't be too cocksure, because in the case of my son, for example, he also believed that by consuming all organic foods, and maintaining a vegan lifestyle that when we stick close to what makes sense and are "natural", we fare well! Like veganmike I also don't buy that B12-deficiency-is-rare-in-vegans argument.

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    Quote eve

    CC, don't be too cocksure, because in the case of my son, for example, he also believed that by consuming all organic foods, and maintaining a vegan lifestyle that when we stick close to what makes sense and are "natural", we fare well! Like veganmike I also don't buy that B12-deficiency-is-rare-in-vegans argument.
    I can see why you wouldn't believe it is rare, being that you have known 3 who have experienced it! Did your son use fermented foods and nutritional yeast or was he a "purist", forgoing these things as they are "live" and not "raw" ? What were his symptoms? How did he finally find out he had a deficiency? How deficient was he? I am curious, because I am not opposed to supplementation when it is necessary, and I believe that due to many factors that we can and can't control, some people have systems that need extra support in these areas. I just have never seen B-12 deficiency myself and would like to know your personal experiece with this. Thanks!

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    Hello CC, to answer your questions, no he didn't use fermented foods and nutritional yeast, or supplements, but relied on all organic fruit, vegies, etc. He found out about the deficiency because he was persuaded to take the MMA test for the first time ever, and it revealed B12 deficiency and pernicious anaemia. I can't recall how low, but he refuses to take supplements, still believing he can beat it by eating a good vegan diet.

    I agree some people have systems that need extra support - in many areas actually. So many vegan naturopaths etc seem to deny the influence of genes, and insist that eating a balanced vegan diet will forestall any problem. Take high cholesterol - for almost 40 years I've eating nothing containing cholesterol, but have very high cholesterol that the doc said is inherited. I take a statin to keep it under control.

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    Quote eve
    Take high cholesterol - for almost 40 years I've eating nothing containing cholesterol, but have very high cholesterol that the doc said is inherited. I take a statin to keep it under control.
    Here's where I say thank goodness for modern medicine and our ability to use technology to aid us when we have tried everything else and still need more support. I like knowing I can rely on diagnostic testing etc. with a client who wants more specific (scientific) confirmation of where they are at healthwise for themselves, for instance.

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    Actually it's really odd to hear of someone that has it. The current rate of pernicious anemia is less than .0125% of the population. That means you've met three people with the same disease when statistically you should never meet one. Did your son show any of the symptoms like soreness, numbness, or lack of energy?

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    Quote eve
    CC, don't be too cocksure, because in the case of my son, for example, he also believed that by consuming all organic foods, and maintaining a vegan lifestyle that when we stick close to what makes sense and are "natural", we fare well!
    It's not really possible to live a natural lifestyle in an unnatural society. It doesn't help much to eat organic food if the plants have no B12 in them.

    Did he grow up with only pure water, no chemicals, no sugar, and no pollution? There's no warranty that he won't develop B12 deficiency, even if he consumed only organic foods. I'm sure eating organic helps, but there's a lot more to it.
    The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth." G. C. Lichtenberg

  13. #13
    beforewisdom
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    Supplementing with vitamin b-12 as per Jack Norris' plan probably costs less then 25 cents a week and would protect a person from all sorts of horrible diseases.

    There are no moral issues involved, no health risks involved in supplementing b-12, and the only sacrafice is an insignificant amount of money. That is balanced against strokes, heart attacks, cognitive disorders, neurological damage and a laundry list of other maladies.

    I write this with absolutely no sarcasm,.....I am amazed that given all of these things people either don't bother or refuse to follow his advice.

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    Quote veganmike
    I personally know several vegans who either have very low levels of B12 or developed deficiency, sometimes very severe. The latter include cases of losing consciousness and being hospitalized or neurological disorders such as neuropathy. So I'm sorry, but I don't buy that B12-deficiency-is-rare-in-vegans argument. I've seen it first hand too many times..
    When I was at Summerfest, that 5 confrence of vegetarians/vegans that I keep hitting everyone over the head with, Alex Herschaft of FARM( farm animal reform movement)and the organizer of the Animal Rights 200* conventions ) was brought up as an example.

    Herschaft blew off the advice for years to take vitamin b-12 supplements.

    He used nutritional yeast and fortified foods. It turned out that he was buying his nutritional yeast from a bulk bin in a natural food store that long ago stopped refilling the bin labeled as "fortified with b-12" with the actual fortified yeast.

    When he was having trouble thinking and was feeling wiped out he finally caved in and started taking a vitamin b-12.

    He was so impressed with the difference in his health, ability to think and energy levels he gave the doctors at Summerfest permission to use his story in the hopes that he would convince other stuborn people to avoid what he went through.

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    Quote phillip888
    I hear the 'I know several vegans that had B12 deficiency' thing often but haven't met one yet. Maybe now would be a good time for people who say they know several vegans that have had B12 deficiency to hook them up with the forum and give us real data on what happened. I find it hard to believe that none of them have ever opened their mouth to help other people that could suffer B12 deficiency, plus it would be nice to see what diagnosis the doctor came to, and what methods the doctor used to test them for B12 deficiency. Maybe they could write an article or short summary of how this happened and a notable vegan organization could publish it since I've yet to see that happen either. There must be some B12 deficient vegans that want to tell us their story since they are so common.
    Alex Hershaft, founder of FARM( farm animal reform movemnt):


    "From Alex Hershaft, PhD, President of FARM:

    For the last few months, I was feeling sluggish, had to lie down a couple of times a day, found it difficult to work evenings and to exercise for long periods. Under Michael Klaper, MD's guidance, I was taking protein powder, creatine, testosterone, nystatin, etc., all to no avail. I was taking nutritional yeast every day, so I knew it wasn't B12 deficiency.

    Then, one day, I came across your B12 article [Vitamin B12: Are you Getting It?] by sheer accident. I wasn't going to read the whole thing, but I glanced through it and was struck by your insistence that none of the usual sources are adequate. I still didn't believe it, but I had some old B12 pills in the fridge, so I popped one.

    The effect was almost immediate and remarkable. I have been taking them almost every day, my stamina and energy level are up, and I feel middle-aged again instead of a tired old man."

  16. #16

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    Default Re: The importance of B12

    I have to take B12 for my migraines.
    Combined with magnesium and feverfew it helps reduce them a bit.

    So when I turned vegan, I was already taking it, otherwise,
    knowing me, I think I would not have bothered taking supplements.

    I am taking a vitamin B supplement actually, that ALSo has B12 in it.

    Are you guys talking about a vitamin B12 only supplement?

    is it different?

    PS Korn, all you wrote is VERY interesting. It makes a lot of sense
    that in our anti-bacteria world, levels of B12 are a lot lower than
    they were in the past.

    Thank you for sharing and good luck with the book

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