I felt the urge rising in me, somehow, to write another post about our all time favorite topic B12.
A couple of months ago in my strolling the web for more knowledge around vegan nutrition, I stumbled upon a fascinating study by an equally fascinating professor Bärwald, or, to name correctly, Univ.-Prof. Dr. Ing. Günter Bärwald. www.baerwald-prof.de . He is an expert on fermentation technology.
Infact, Professor Bärwald has his office about 15 bike-minutes from where I live in Berlin, though I haven't had the chance to meet him in person, we engaged in email communication and he answered all my questions very patiently.
You see, Professor Bärwald and his team in the 1940s were one of the first people to ferment Vitamin B12 with the help of bacteria. The interesting difference was to the standard way B12 is produced today, they fermented it in foods, that is, the foods they created contained active, good B12 simply because the process of fermentation that was used and the type of bacteria.
In case you're wondering what the significance of this is, well, this makes him almost as important to veganism as late Donald Watson.
It means, out there, forgotten, is a method to get vegan B12 in a food production method of fermentation, which eradicates one of the most dominating perceived weaknesses of the vegan diet: That it doesn't contain relevant amounts of bioactive B12.
Yes it does, it *can*. _IF_ you ferment with the right method and use the right bacteria, namely Propionibacterium Freudenreichii and Pr. Shermanii. Most of us will have consumed foods that were fermented, like sauerkraut, beer, miso, soy-yogurt or a newer one, the Bionade beverage which unlike beer is fermented not with yeast but with bacteria as well.
The fact that bioactive B12 can be fermented in a food, rather than as a supplement which follows a different route of production, is of huge importance, because it takes the taint off the vegan diet that it is not complete.
Now the observant reader will now ask her or himself, well, where are these foods, and why, if such foods are possible, feasible, cheap, doable, out there buried in the desk of a friendly German professor, do I have to pop a pill for B12 and feel inferior about it?
Well, because nobody cares. The standard way of producing supplemental B12 is so easy and cheap and well-implemented, only us crazy vegans would ever have the odd desire to consume some fermented soymilk with, careful, here is the word: natural B12 in which the B12 was fermented directly.
Professor Bärwald has gone to exhibit his method at a time when our parents were Hippies but the food producers just shrugged and mentioned that "synthetic" B12 is abundant, why would anyone care for your method?
The vegan market is small, and so there has been no demand for Professor Bärwalds idea, it's demand and supply.
He is willing and ready to work with any entrepreneur seeking to launch a brand of fermented vegan beverage, for example, given the process can't be patented you'd have to pay his hourly rate as an engineer I presume. A health drink with the holy radiance of vegan approval can easily be marketed to nonvegans as well, right now, vegans are hot. We are the IT-people. Our vision rules supreme so to say.
Now why, and here I arrive at the headline, you might ask yourself, do I need to consume B12 at all? Well, because if you can read this, chances are you are human and humans need to have B12. You do have bacteria in your gut which make B12, but they are too far down and no absorption takes place so far down, close to the exit. Now since B12 is interestingly produced by bacteria, and you are vegan, you need to ask yourself, if you're capable of rational thought, where does my B12 come from?
For nonvegans the answer is easy: They shoot an animal in the head and eat its body. In the victim, the bacteria usually reside further up in the digestion tract, like the rumen in cows, there the B12 is absorbed into the bloodstream and ends up in the flesh. So their bacteria source of B12 is by exploiting and or killing another animal.
Since we don't do that, where do our B12 bacteria reside? Well, so far, nowhere acceptable. You could drink from old water puddles, plenty of bacteria there. Problem is that there are plenty of bacteria you do not want to ingest... You could do it like gorillas and rabbits, who both practice different forms of Coprophagia, because shit is, well, amongst others a rich source of B12 and other Vitamins all produced by bacteria in the gut. For rabbits and gorillas not being as fortunate as cows, the bacteria are too far down the tract to be absorbed, thus the need to recycle some food.
If you are serious about being natural, that certainly is an option to source B12 as natural as it gets. As a vegan your chances are very low to infect yourself with bad bugs like salmonella and other nastiess, so, enjoy.
Everybody else will resort to supplements, whose B12 also starts out with bacteria. We are human, we simply need B12. Plants don't need B12, so they have not evolved with a method to absorb or produce it. All claims of plant/algae based foods containing B12 are either false or contain evil added B12 which was produced by people in white coats and funny cloth covering their mouths.
So, to sum it up. There is a method to get vegan foods containing good B12 simply by a special fermentation process that has been in the drawer since WWII, but until a willing entrepreneur is found to build upon that, you better pop your pill. Very simple.
However, next time someone claims the vegan diet can't "naturally" contain Vitamin B12, send them to the study section of Professor Bärwalds website.
And so I vanish again....
