“If you observe what happens in nature, you’ll see that the mouse eats the worm, the stoat eats the mouse, the fox eats the rabbit, and the wolf eats the lamb. We should eat a natural diet.” How many times have we heard that? If you don’t consume animal products, you probably couldn’t count them.
And it's true, the less processed the food is, the less distance it has traveled and the less added sugar it contains, the more nutrients it will provide to us, to our sons and daughters.
But animals don't produce their own food; they gather the plants, roots, and fruits they find in their environment, they hunt, or they scavenge. If there's one form of production further removed from the natural environment, it's meat production. Factory farms—where animals are systematically separated from their young, crammed together, fattened with low-quality, high-calorie feed, treated with antibiotics and hormones, and then slaughtered—are hardly the best example of "natural" food you can give your children. The millions of fish caught by fishing fleets or the fish farms that proliferate as marine animals are decimated are also not good examples of natural food.
Paradoxically, what seems unnatural is simply taking two vitamin B12 supplement pills a week. “I don’t think it’s right to make your children take pills their whole lives.” If you hit your son in public or force your daughter to kiss a stranger, surely no one will say anything. But if you feed your daughter a diet free of animal products, you’ve probably heard that same phrase. And it doesn’t matter if the diet is healthy and balanced. It doesn’t matter if it’s recommended by a nutritionist. It doesn’t matter if you’ve researched the topic and the other person doesn’t have a basic understanding of nutrition. If the person in front of you tends to give their opinion on what they don’t know, even if they haven’t been asked and they’ve heard that vegans take a vitamin supplement, they’ll say so.
It's not true that you can't live a life rich in vitamin B12 without consuming products that involve animal exploitation. Hominids have fed on carrion since our origins millions of years ago, while domestication only began a few millennia ago. It may sound absurd, but if the criterion for choosing food is to observe nature, eating carrion is more natural than domestication and a guaranteed source of vitamin B12 that doesn't involve exploitation.
For those who, like me, are not drawn to the first suggestion, I offer another one from Dr. Michael Greger (specializing in nutrition and health; founder ofwww.NutritionFacts.orgIn the documentary Food Choices, he explains why those who want to avoid pesticides should first adopt a strict vegetarian diet, and secondly, eat organically. But he then goes on to address the issue of vitamin B12.
He explains that all vitamins originate from plants, except for two: vitamin D, which our bodies create with the help of sunlight, and vitamin B12, which is produced by bacteria. If we drink river water, we will likely increase our vitamin B12 levels. But to prevent diseases like cholera, we chlorinate the water and kill all the bacteria, both good and bad. That's why he prefers to use supplements or foods fortified with vitamin B12 (some cookies, breakfast cereals, plant-based drinks, etc.).
Esta visión es la que comparten todas las veganas y veganos que he conocido hasta el momento. No nos guiamos por lo que es más natural, sino por lo que es más ético, mejor para nuestra salud o mejor para nuestro entorno.
But at this point we may cling to the idea that animal-derived vitamin B12 is still "more natural" than vitamin supplements from the pharmaceutical industry, even if we know the reality of industrial livestock farming and fishing.
Javier Ruiz, whom you may know from his viral 2015 letter titled “How Your Dog Changed My Life,” has recently published his first book, “How Animals Live and Die.” It includes the following excerpt from the articleDo carnivores need Vitamin B12 supplements?(Do carnivores need vitamin B12 supplements?) signed by Rooke (2013):
“However, cattle no longer graze on grass, and chickens don’t peck at the soil on factory farms. Moreover, even if they did, pesticides often kill the vitamin B12 produced by bacteria and insects in the soil. Heavy antibiotics eliminated the B12-producing bacteria found in the intestines of farm animals. Therefore, in order to maintain meat as a source of B12 despite these two factors, the meat industry adds this vitamin artificially to animal feed: 90% of the world’s B12 supplements are for livestock. Even if a person ate only organic, grass-fed meat, they might not be able to absorb the vitamin B12 bound to animal protein. Thus, it might be more effective to skip eating animals and get B12 directly from supplements.”