Vegan Nutrition

When you follow a vegan lifestyle, there are many questions you probably scared. Where do you get your protein? Why do not you eat dairy or eggs? How can you get your calcium if you do not drink milk? If you are knowledgeable about vegan nutrition, you can easily answer these questions with pride.

But there is a question that plunges a little further, it is much harder to answer, and threatens the view of many vegans that their lifestyle is a more natural way for humans to eat: Why Did not herbal sources of B12?

All vitamins, minerals, nutrients or may be found in a modern diet herbal, except one. Vitamin B12 (cobalamin) can be found in herbal sources and is found in animal products. This hits a sore-spot for many vegans.

Virtually every book or article you read on a vegan diet there are long paragraphs on how and where you can find nutrients such as calcium and protein in a diet based on plants. These discussions are usually followed by a sentence like this, "Vitamin B12 is essential for your health. Since you can only get B12 from meat or dairy products if you follow a vegan diet, be sure to take a supplement of vitamin B12 per day. "

After reading a statement like that, you may be wondering, but why? The answer to this question is difficult to find, but if you search the scientific literature long enough, you can find it.

To really understand why we can not get vitamin B12 from a diet of plants in modern society, we must take a look at nature and a look back into our human history.

B12 is produced by "good" bacteria found in soil and on plants. All herbivores in nature takes its supply of B12 to the consumption of these bacteria on the plants they eat. These bacteria can make homes in the gut of herbivores that feed on them. Carnivores get their B12 by eating the bodies of bacteria and thus their prey herbivores.

Our ancestors, if you are looking for several thousand years or a few hundred years back in our past, do not wash the foods they fired from the ground. They eat the bacteria that produce B12 in plant foods they eat and obtained a sufficient supply of vitamin B12 daily life.

In our modern society, the bacteria is not on our plant-food for two reasons. Firstly, the large number of pesticides, herbicides and other chemicals used to process our food does not have a large amount of this bacteria to grow in our soils. Secondly, we wash our food very well. Thus, in our modern diet, there is not enough of the good bacteria in our foods of plant origin and therefore we must find other sources.

People who eat meat or vegetarians who eat dairy and eggs, can easily get their B12 from animal products. This is mainly due to contamination of foods of animal origin from bacteria normally present in the intestines of these animals.

Unfortunately for vegans, the only source of B12 is through a supplement. So when you pop this pill B12, we hope you'll feel better knowing you have to take only because of our own modern-day culture and not due to a vegan diet is fundamentally flawed!