You Need To Meet All Your Micronutrient Needs with Brenda Davis R.D.

step six you need to meet all your micronutrient needs and we’ll talk only about the micronutrients we’re talking vitamins and minerals here that tend to be an issue for people on plant-based diets so b12 iron zinc calcium vitamin D and iodine and we’ll just do a very quick slide on each to give you a quick summary of what you need to know about and in becoming vegan both of the books we created this thing called the vegan plate and if you follow this guide you’ll meet your needs for all of these micronutrients so first of all vitamin

Vitamin B12

b12 number one plant sources are not very reliable sources of vitamin b12 although there are some exceptions for example seaweed contains both inactive and active b12 and when you dry seaweed you tend to convert some of the active b12 into inactive b12 and inactive b12 can actually take up residence on b12 receptor sites preventing real b12 from getting in there and they can actually contribute to a functional b12 deficiency in that regard now chlorella and a FA which is a blue-green algae may have more usable true b12 but the studies are very in the very early stages and you know done on one or two people and so we can’t say yet that these are just rely on these things only and you’ll be fine but you still need to even if you’re using those I would still take a supplement as well fermented foods and organic vegetables are not reliable sources of b12 now in Indonesia they’ve confirmed that they have reliable b12 in their tempeh but they don’t use clean stainless steel vats to produce their tempeh like we do in North America or Europe so we can’t rely on things like that for b12 a mushroom maybe sources especially if they’re grown on human manure but generally we want to wash them well and we’ll wash a lot of the b12 off internal production is insufficient because most of our production of b12 happens in the large intestine we can absorb a little bit but most of the absorption happens in the small intestine so and you can produce a little bit if you have very poor dental hygiene and you’ve got a lot of plaque on your teeth you can actually produce some b12 but it’s probably not worth what it will do to your longevity having such bad dental hygiene so b12 production you know is just not something you can rely on in the human body so our stores and adults might last

B12 deficiency

two or three years but I’ve seen people become deficient in six months babies born to breastfed mothers who are b12 deficient can develop clinical signs of deficiency within a few weeks and they can have irreversible brain damage by the time they’re ten or twelve months old not worth ever taking a chance with trust me I’ve seen too many court cases and babies taken away from parents and all of these things please be sure to get a reliable source of b12 in your diet how much do you need for micrograms a day in two or more servings of fortified foods at least 25 to 250 micrograms a day from supplements if you’re doing daily supplements and a thousand to twenty-five hundred micrograms if you’re doing it once or twice or three times a week okay so what

Iron and zinc

about iron and zinc most studies actually show adequate iron and zinc status and in vegans as a matter of fact vegans eat more iron than what non vegetarians eat but it’s just less absorbable and so there are some ways we can improve the absorbability one is to eat vitamin C with our iron rich foods so when you have iron rich foods like beans you’ve got red peppers your dish the very rich in vitamin C and can help with the absorption of iron the other is to really watch the inhibitors so things like phytates can reduce iron absorption by over 50% tannins from tea so if you’re drinking green or black tea or even some of the herbal teas it can reduce absorption by 50 to 90 percent from a meal so you would want to separate your tea from the meal by an hour or two to prevent that in inhibition of absorption and zinc is a bit of a big deal as well and one of the best sources of zinc are the nuts and seeds that cashews and pumpkin seeds are loaded with iron and zinc so there are really really good food and if you soak your pumpkin seeds you’ll help to release that that iron and zinc and and

Best sources

the best sources legumes lentils are especially rich in iron and black beans lima beans chickpeas soy beans are also quite rich in iron and zinc whole grains but especially the pseudo grains are good sources nuts and seeds all seeds cashews pine nuts almonds Brazil nuts all of them are good sources mushrooms are surprisingly good sources as are peas and string beans green leafy vegetables avocados prune juice dried fruits are reasonable sources of iron and then fortified foods and blackstrap molasses do you know that a tale let’s see a tablespoon of blackstrap molasses has about the same amount of calcium as a cup of milk and about the same amount of iron as an 8 ounce steak it could be two tablespoons of blackstrap molasses but they’re very concentrated in trace it’s the only sugar that’s actually concentrated in minerals so what about calcium you know calcium a lot of people believe that they’ve got to have milk for their calcium that their bones will dissolve if they’re not drinking milk cows milk is yet to me I always think it kind of defies rationality to assume that the human species would require the milk of another species for its survival it doesn’t make milk is there to support the growth of an offspring and cow’s milk is designed to promote the growth of baby calves and deer milk and you know deer milk and moose milk have twice as much calcium as cow’s milk we don’t call them essential foods so I think it’s really important to recognize that milk is very rich in calcium but it’s not an essential food we can get plenty of calcium in other places however vegans who consume less than 2,500 five hundred and twenty-five milligrams of calcium a day have a higher risk of bone fracture compared to omnivores and the difference completely disappears when vegans get more than 525 I recommend that people aim for a thousand milligrams a day as to meet the RDA but almost half of vegans have intakes lower than five hundred and twenty-five milligrams a day so we need to strive to meet our the recommended intakes and we can use fortified non dairy products but things like tofu and almonds and dark green leafy vegetables are excellent sources except for the dark greens that are high in oxalic acid like beet greens spinach and Swiss chard for example I’ll show you that on the next slide but I want to tell you from a personal perspective I had my bone density done when I was in my late 40s but maybe seven or eight years ago and my mom had osteoporosis by that age and she’s always been a fairly big dairy consumer and my bone density was so high it was two and a half standard deviations above norm for my age they couldn’t even plot it on the charts they put an arrow at the top of the chart and and said go figure I’ve been vegan for 25 years and the doctor said you know your bones are made of steel but it’s because I’ve been really conscious of calcium and vitamin D but it’s also because I keep giving my bones a signal to stay strong by doing weight-bearing exercise on a day so the weight bearing exercises just a vital to bone health so if you look at

Calcium Absorption

calcium absorption the dairy industry likes to tell us that dairy products are the only foods that we really absorb much calcium from and that’s simply not true we get about 32% of the calcium from dairy products but we get about the same from calcium from tofu made with calcium we get about 27 25 27 percent from legumes and soy milk we get 40% plus from the low oxalate dark greens like broccoli and kale and Chinese greens and turnip and mustard greens however we get less than 20% from the spinach beet greens and Swiss chard which are very high in oxalate and the oxalates bind to these you know to the minerals like calcium making them unavailable we get about 5 or 10% from most of these foods and if you eat a salad that has kale and broccoli in it and also spinach the spinach doesn’t inhibit the absorption of the calcium from the kale and broccoli and spinach is a wonderful food it provides a lot of nutritional value so we still want to be consuming those foods so vitamin D few plant sources are reliable sources of vitamin D we need our thing our RDA is six to eight hundred IU’s per day many experts suggest a thousand to 2,000 and the other thing to mention is vitamin d2 and d3 if you’re taking small amounts like a thousand or 2,000 IU’s there’s really no difference in absorption from the plant versus the animal source vitamin D and you can get vitamin D vegan style now as well if you live

Vitamin D Vegan Style

below the 33 degrees latitude there on cold winter days you won’t produce vitamin D if you live where I live which is in in Kelowna in Canada it’s probably more like October to March or November to depending on the year but we don’t make vitamin D at all during those month and so we do need to be really conscious of that and make sure we have a source of vitamin D and finally iodine the RDA

Iodine Vegan Style

for iodine is a hundred and 50 micrograms the upper limit is 1,100 and vegans often have suboptimal iodine status I think it’s really important to recognize that this can be an issue for people especially health-conscious people who are trying not to use iodized salt you know they’re trying to lower their sodium intake and so you need to make sure you have a daily source of iodine it’s a really important nutrient and so what can we use we can use seaweed but the amounts and seaweed is our variable so we need to be just conscious of that and you know plants grown in iodine rich soil are also sources but I think seaweed is a good source or using a supplement an iodine supplement