Supplements and Vitamin B12

This morning on my way to work I decided to finish reading the China Study. Don't worry, I was in a carpool, not driving. I have learned so much from that book and it has changed the way I eat drastically. However, I have always naievely thought that the book focused only on data and findings and not enough on summarizing everything with some simple and sound nutritional guidance. It turns out that the only reason I thought that is because I hadn't read the end of the book yet. LOL, what a dork.

The last third of the book is titled "The Good Nutrition Guide" and the portion I read this morning focused on how lame vitamin supplements are. I have long preferred to get my nutrients from food instead of a pill and people give me a hard time about it sometimes, especially now that I am not eating any animal products. Campbell supports me 100%. Basically what it comes down to is that the nutrients found in foods are vast and all of the interactions that occur between them and our bodies are impossible to fully comprehend. Our bodies have evolved to be able to use raw foods optimally. Supplements attempt to dumb this down and pick out a tiny representation of these nutrients that are the important ones, but the net result in your body is not the same. Sure you need Vitamin C, but not just that one vitamin. You need it with the myriad of other things found in an Orange or Red Pepper. Some will advise that you need a "balanced supplement" to avoid such problems, but please understand that a blanced supplement is nothing like raw foods.

With all this in mind, I had one remaining question. I had heard that Vitamin B12 was the only essential nutrient that is only found in meat and that I needed a nutrient for that at least. Campbell addresses this and I did a bit of Googling as well and here is what I found. Vitamin B12 can be derived from plant sources if the plant was grown in soil rich in vitamin B12, especially if you don't wash the food before you eat it. In Americal, nearly all of our food is grown in soil that is void of B12 and even if you grow your own veges, you'll likely wash them off pretty well and lose a lot of the B12. I'm not proposing that we don't wash our veges. I'm just saying there is a consequence to doing so that I didn't know about before now. So really what it boils down to, at least for me, is that I do need some supplement to get Vitamin B12.

Vitamin B12 is literally the only essential nutrient that you can't get in a plant based whole foods diet (unless you grow your own veges and don't wash them). Everything else is plentifully available without any animal products.

A warning to vegan newbies: When I first stopped eating animal based foods, I tracked my nutrition for a few days and I was deficient in quite a few. Just because these nutrients are available in a plant based diet doesn't mean you're actually consuming them. It's worth the time to track what you eat until you have a good understanding of what you need to eat to make sure you are getting the essential nutrients for your body.