Vitamin B12 supplements are necessary for vegans, and also for anyone with digestive issues and for older adults. If someone suggests eating eggs or other animal foods to correct a vitamin B12 deficiency, keep in mind that B12 isn’t created by animals – it’s generated by bacteria.
Supplements made from bacterial sources of B12 are a more direct form of B12 than animal foods. Also, the amount of animal foods you’d need to eat in order to absorb enough B12 is pretty huge. With the health downsides of animal foods (hormones, antibiotics, cholesterol, saturated fat) along with the environmental impact and ethical considerations, supplements seem to me to be the best option as an overall package.
Our bodies can store up to 2 years worth of B12, so deficiency doesn’t happen right away. Many vegans who don’t supplement may find themselves deficienct after a year or two, and not understand why since they didn’t change anything.
Early Symptoms of B12 deficiency:
- unusual fatigue
- faulty digestion
- no appetite
- nausea
- loss of menstruation
- tingling hands and feet (start of serious deficiency)
If you let a B12 deficiency go on from there, it can result in permanent nerve damage and get very serious, causing blindness or deafness. Also, homocysteine levels will be high (risk factor for heart disease, stroke and complications during pregnancy) long before any of the early symptoms show up. If children don’t get enough B12 during childhood, their levels can be corrected but the period where they didn’t have enough can have permanent effects on their brain and nerve functions.
You can be tested for B12 deficiency by your doctor, and the most accurate method of testing is a urine or blood test called a Methylmalonic Acid test (MMA). It can detect deficiency much earlier than the standard blood test most doctors use to test for serum cobalamin levels and pernicious anemia.
Since anemia doesn’t show up until about 2 years after a deficiency starts, and the risk of damage to your brain and nervous system happens before anemia you want to make sure you don’t let yourself get to that point. Also, standard blood test results may not be accurate if folic acid levels are higher than normal, or if there are B12 analogues (forms that your body can’t use) in your system.
Vegan Sources of B12
The long-term vegan cultures that are used as examples of veganism providing all necessary nutrition are actually getting their B12 partially from the small insects on their greens and produce. The other advantage they have is that manufacturing regulations are not so strict on sanitation, so the naturally fermented foods they eat have bacteria to produce B12.
Testing on commercially-produced fermented foods (i.e. tempeh, sourdough bread) in North America have shown very low levels of B12. Yeasts may or may not have B12, and algaes may only have an analogue of B12 that isn’t able to be used. Greens powders list a large amount of B12 in their nutritional labels, but it’s from algaes so may not be usable by our bodies. There hasn’t been proper testing done on these things to see whether or not they are both absorbed and used by humans.
Although these sources could have some usable B12, since deficiency of vitamin B12 is so common among vegans who don’t supplement, and since it’s a deficiency that can have pretty serious consequences I go with the ‘better safe than sorry’ strategy and make sure that I have a B12 supplement.
I haven’t gotten over the negative associations of eating insects, so that’s out for me. It is possible to get B12 from foods you’ve fermented yourself, but it’s hard to know if you’ve been successful. As we age, our body’s ability to break down and absorb nutrients decreases, and this applies particularly to vitamin B12. Older adults, even those who eat plenty of animal products, need to supplement B12.
B12 is are one case where supplements are actually absorbed more easily by our bodies than whole foods, and are often manufactured from bacteria rather than synthetically. Since the B vitamins work together and compete against each other, you can run into problems if you take a higher dose of just one of them.
Taking a supplement as a B Complex is generally the way to go, rather than a B12 supplement in isolation.
Since B vitamins stimulate energy and the nervous system, it’s better to take them in the morning and early afternoon so that you don’t get wired before going to sleep.
You can take B12 as one large weekly dose, or more often in smaller doses, whichever schedule works better for you. Our bodies only absorb and utilize part of what we ingest, so you need to ingest much more than the RDA as a supplement.
Vitamin B12 is a nutrient that you can’t overdose on, because your body flushes any excess in your urine. If you notice bright yellow urine after taking a supplement, that means you’ve taken more than enough. My opinion is that it’s an inexpensive supplement that is incredibly important, so I’m happy to take more than enough to be safe.