Vitamin B-12

My friend Charmane Johnson recently wrote about issues involving Vitamin B-12 deficiency: http://www.professionalfiduciaryservice.com/healthy-brain/

B-12 is an extremely important vitamin for humans. I take it everyday myself. As Charmane notes:

….A deficiency of vitamin B12 can limit your ability to think clearly about anything. B12 is an organic compound, made from carbons and essential for our normal metabolic function and health. Also, like most vitamins, B12 plays a wide variety of roles in our metabolism which includes, the manufacture of red blood cells; a deficiency leads to a characteristic kind of anemia; is needed to support the normal function of nerve cells, and to manufacture myelin, the insulating material that surrounds some of our nerve cells and speeds neural transmission; Vitamin B12 is required for the replication of DNA….

Lifelinknet.com is an excellent source both for nutritional supplements like B-12 and also for information about their products and the nutritional needs they address. At their product article for their B-12 supplement, it is explained that B-12 supplements are especially important for vegetarians:

http://lifelinknet.com/siteResources/Products/Xobaline.asp

Vitamin B12 is made only by microorganisms, not by plants or animals. This means that animals must obtain this vitamin either from their diet or from microorganisms living in their bodies. For example, cows get their vitamin B12 from gut-dwelling bacteria. Since the vitamin is stored in animal cells, carnivores can get their vitamin B12 by eating meat, even though they don’t themselves have B12-producing gut-dwelling bacteria. Herbivores that lack B12-producing bacteria (such as human vegetarians or pet animals) will develop B12 deficiencies unless they use some kind of B12 supplement. In fact, it has been found that 60-70% of vegetarians have vitamin B12 deficiencies! Left untreated, such deficiencies will eventually do permanent damage to the body.

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Jan Tucker