If you do not have supplements or eat this type of vitamin containing protein, you risk paralysis and death with a 2+ year absence of the vitamin.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are other missing nutrients as well.
That's not quite right. B12 is mostly produced by bacteria on the surface of plants. We can't synthesize it an neither can the animals we eat. So if you eat products of animals that have been eating such plants (or these days, maybe supplements), there is a source, and especially in developed countries is often the easiest one.
It's an important vitamin, deficiency wise, and for humans there are 3 practical approaches: eat products from animals that consume B12 on plants, eat those plants, or fortify another food more directly.
The 2nd one sounds like an easy win, but is made harder by the fact that most processing (e.g. even vigorous washing ) will remove all the B12 as it is superficial and water soluble.
It's also worth noting we don't need much B12, and we don't need it every day, so managing this isn't very difficult.
You can get all the B12 you need and even more from this while still being balanced in macro and micro-nutrients. Also B12 deficiency will usually make you psychotic or very very tired and to die from it you have to be completely depleted, if you live in the modern world and eat products made with fortifried grains, like white bread, pasta or some breakfast cereals, you will probably never go below the threshold were you cause damage.
There's also multiple protein shakes or meal replacement shakes that sell for like 2 dollars that have enough B12 for the daily recommended intake which is far far more than what you actually need as it's based on the old 2000 calorie diet thing.
I'm not a vegetarian, but maybe we can avoid obviously-false statements like this. Please?
So the parent’s claim is an argument against unsupplemented veganism, and your counter of vegetarianism doesn’t address that. Massive difference between the two diets in terms of needing to supplement or not.
You can sort by any column, and see that the U.S., Brazil, and Japan have the highest number of Vegans, while Mexico and Poland purportedly lead by percentage, though those two are disputed.
The organisms that provide us vitamin B12 tend to host said bacteria and archaea within their GI.
Alternatively supplements are provided (as I mentioned). Nutritional yeast, dairy, and vitamin pills are some of the ways in which vegetarians survive. Apparently certain beans are high in B12 as well!
It's the same supplements but with extra steps.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11464234/
(Of course, this study is from Czech Republic where average beer consumption is something like 0.7l per capita)
I looked it up and it seems to be suggested that it does but I didn’t look long enough to find a study.
> "Yeast cannot produce B12, which is naturally produced only by some bacteria.[8] Some brands of nutritional yeast, though not all, are fortified with vitamin B12. When it is fortified, the vitamin B12 (commonly cyanocobalamin) is produced separately and then added to the yeast."
Furthermore, fortified all purpose flour is not the same as fortified nutritional yeast. In fact, what you are referring to is likely _enriched_ all purpose flour. This has vitamin B1, B2, B3, B9 and iron added to it. There is no addition of vitamin B12.