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Comment by pwinnski | Hacker News Reader

I've read this before, and yet weirdly, there're literally hundreds of millions of people on this planet[0] who've never eaten meat once in their lives, and somehow they're not all paralyzed and dead before the age of two.

I'm not a vegetarian, but maybe we can avoid obviously-false statements like this. Please?

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country

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Meat and eggs. So you need eggs. It’s also present in dairy.

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.

Oh, you didn't click through, maybe. Or missed that the linked page included millions of vegans, too, in the same chart.

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.

Strict vegans are the only ones that typically have the B12 issue. Most vegetarians still eat a lot of dairy and eggs so still get B12 in their diet. Also a lot of foods are 'fortified' by government regulation to avoid common nutritional deficiencies that would arise with their standard diets, so it's hard to take certain things at face value.

Yes sorry. You are right I wasn't very clear and also I didn't realize that B12 actually comes from bacteria and archaea.

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!

Beans are often a staple for vegetarian and vegan diets, so that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the follow-up!

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