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Comment by csmeder | Hacker News Reader

As some one who doesn’t eat fortified foods this brings up questions. Is the balance of vegetables and meat I’m eating lacking in vitamin B1 or other key vitamins? Looking up the top sources of B1 the only one that is a staple of mine is beef (100% grass fed).

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Eat more mushrooms. I do a mushroom-heavy soup about once a week, usually lentils with an entire package of crimini mushrooms sliced up.

Keeping a variety of unsalted tree nuts and seeds nearby to conveniently snack on is good as well.

Edit:

For B12 in particular, it appears Shiitake and Lion's Mane mushrooms are best. They're not competitive with animal B12 sources, but every bit helps and mushrooms don't add much in the way of calories to a diet.

Personally I consume canned wild, unsalted sardines in water fairly regularly for Omega-3s and B12 specifically. They're small and have a short lifespan, which is desirable for a variety of reasons with seafood. i.e. Low on the food chain, and less time spent in a potentially toxic environment accumulating nasties like mercury. Sardines are considered a sustainable superfood by many. It's way better nutritionally than tuna, you eat the whole fish, even the bones.

Interesting going to add this to my diet

If you're referring to the Sardines, if you can handle the taste of room-temperature fish broth, drink the juice from the can, don't drain it. That's where most the omega-3 fatty acids end up from the cooking process.

Some of the better brands like what's found at Whole Foods here in CA will even include a notice on the package about not draining the liquid. The Henry & Lisa's stuff [1] in water is quite good, but can be relatively pricy.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Henry-Lisas-Natural-Seafood-Sardines/...

> They're not competitive with animal B12 sources,

Interestingly, the B12 people get from animals is probably from supplements they were given.

https://www.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/7ujsaf/the_b12_in_me...

I didn't know that.

A similarly surprising fact is the Omega-3 fatty acid actually comes from algae the fish eat. As a result there are vegan-friendly algae-derived supplements as an alternative to the popular fish oil ones.

On a brief vegetarian experiment I used a methylcobalamin sublingual B12 supplement, but it had strange and totally unique side effects. After a week of daily use, and this was consistently reproducible, my neck would become very stiff and painful to turn. I don't know why, but it didn't take much of a leap for me to connect this stuff diffusing into my system from under my tongue and the surrounding neck tissue being effected. I find it preferable to just eat sardines regularly.

> This essential micronutrient is produced mainly by plants, including phytoplankton, bacteria, and fungi; people and animals must acquire it through their food.

Key here is beneficial bacteria and fungi, which a lot of our foods are increasingly poor in.

Would the washing of all our "anti-bacterial" cleaning products into the oceans and water ways be killing off the invisible foundation of the food chain: Bacteria and Fungi.

Molds (Fungi) and Bacteria are something Humans have been at war against with their cleaning and pesticides for decades...

Phytoplankton eat bacteria, correct?

very interesting idea

I also wonder to what extent thiamine is recycled in nature, apart from thiaminases, if an predator high up the food chain dies and floats/sinks in the sea, will all the accumulated thiamin be recycled? in what pathways is thiamine consumed in say a human? what would increase or decrease the metabolic consumption (not eating) of thiamine?

Wikipedia's Thiamine / antagonists section:

>Thiamine in foods can be degraded in a variety of ways. Sulfites, which are added to foods usually as a preservative,[34] will attack thiamine at the methylene bridge in the structure, cleaving the pyrimidine ring from the thiazole ring.[13] The rate of this reaction is increased under acidic conditions. Thiamine is degraded by thermolabile thiaminases (present in raw fish and shellfish[12]). Some thiaminases are produced by bacteria. Bacterial thiaminases are cell surface enzymes that must dissociate from the membrane before being activated; the dissociation can occur in ruminants under acidotic conditions. Rumen bacteria also reduce sulfate to sulfite, therefore high dietary intakes of sulfate can have thiamine-antagonistic activities.

Is this perhaps due to sulfate pollution (bunker oil?) and acidification of the oceans?

The heavy fuel oil sulfur pollution situation has improved in Europe massively since 2015 when the emissions controls started. By now we should see an effect.

When Indians who follow a strict vegan diet started migrating to the western world, a lot of them would begin to suffer from pernicious amaemia, a disease caused by deficiency of dietary vitamin B12. Similar diseases are present in India but appeared to be less common.

Most published research are rather diplomatic about this phenomenon[0]. However, reading between the lines, the reason appears to be the lack of fecal and insect contamination in food supply, which accidentally eliminated a lot of exogenous micronutrients not present in plants.

[0]:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11470726

B12 deficiency doesn't cause pernicious anemia, pernicious anemia is a cause of B12 deficiency, its a GI absorptive disorder (lack if intrinsic factor).

I use the term loosely in reference to all types of anaemia arising from cobalamin deficiency, as the NIH and Mayo clinic do[0][1]. After all, lack of IF is only one of the many causes and the symptoms are similar regardless of aetiology.

[0]:https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/vitamin-defic... [1]:https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health-topics/pernicious-anemia

> Phytoplankton eat bacteria, correct?

No, phytoplankton are basically microscopic plants, they don't eat anything per se, they are autotrophs which use inorganic substances in the environment and get their energy from sunlight.

> Key here is beneficial bacteria and fungi, which a lot of our foods are increasingly poor in.

Aren't the beneficial bacteria and fungi that are meant to inhabit our own guts supposed to be enough?

Historically, maybe. But they do their work in the colon where it's too late for most nutrients to be absorbed without a "reconsumption" step humans generally no longer practice.

Do you eat yeast? It's good for that sort of thing; I mean, you can get it drinking unfiltered beer, too, but personally I kinda like how nutritional yeast tastes, and I'll use it as a condiment.

Nutritional yeast on popcorn is quite tasty, add some aminos and you have a great alternative to salt and butter.

It's also in Marmite.

A very interesting question. E.g. I feel like would love to eat 100% natural yet given what I know so far (which, on this subject, is hardly scientifical so there is hope it is false but I hesitate to rely on this hope so I take supplements) it is impossible to get all the micronutrients your body needs for highest-possible health and performance in the long term nowadays (unless, exaggerating just slightly, you eat some pounds of every known exotic fruit every day).

You can log what you eat here on an average day and find out: https://cronometer.com/

Is there a reason you don't eat fortified foods?

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