 I bet if you ask someone why fruits and vegetables were good for you, they couldn't really give you a straight answer, let alone explain it in depth. I'm going to go over the plant forms of vitamins versus the animal forms of vitamins and why we should be striving to achieve optimal nutrition through nutrient-dense animal foods as these vitamins are more available to the body in their animal form. Starting with vitamin B12, and vitamin B12 can only be obtained from animal foods in nature. The one logical thing I can't get past my head is B12 comes with fat and cholesterol in nature. It always does. It has to in the form of an animal food. And vegans will argue that you can supplement it and then that animals get B12 from the bacteria in the soil. But that's because those animals have drastically different digestive systems than humans do. If vegans had the digestive system of cows, I probably wouldn't be making this video. Just as cows convert the bacteria in the soil into B12 in their bodies, cows can also convert a lot of other nutrients that humans can't convert. Cows can convert vitamin K1 into K2 in their bodies to a much better extent than humans can, as well as the carotenoids and grass and toretinoic acid in the flesh of the animal and ALA in the grass into DHA in the body. These animals have drastically different digestive systems that can convert plant foods at much better rates because of their fermentative guts and the different bacteria strains they have in their stomachs. But I just can't get past in my head how contradictory that is and how illogical it is that vegans will say you need B12 but the only way to obtain B12 in nature is in the presence of fat and cholesterol and those are some scary words to some people. It is required for optimal health, everyone knows this and causes irreversible neurological damage when gone for a period of time with a deficiency. And I mean we see a lot of vegans with mental health problems, depression and this might be one of the things to attribute it to. And you'll notice in a lot of elderly people that do have mental problems their diet tends to be low in animal foods and that is not only in deficiency of B12 but some other vitamins as we'll see in the future. In regards to vegetarian deficiencies, and this is up to, this isn't a concrete percentage, it might have been like 40 to 62% of pregnant women were deficient in vitamin B12, up to 41% of adolescents, up to 86% of children and up to 90% of elderly people were deficient in vitamin B12, imagine how much worse vegans are. And a lot of people in the general population are even deficient in vitamin B12. Mother's milk can vary up to 3 times as much in vitamin B12, would you rather have your mother eating steak or have your mother on a vegan diet? These people tend to disregard the health of their child especially when pregnant or nursing for their dietary beliefs. Iron is similar in a sense that it's a deficiency that most vegans and even vegetarians develop after a period of time, but anemia is probably seen more than vitamin B12 deficiency and everything outside of B12 tends to get swept under the rug in the vegan community, they don't really talk about the importance of these vitamins. Meat is actually half heme iron, just an interesting fact and vegans will argue that heme iron is carcinogenic. I have a video I did a couple months ago on going over carcinogens in meat and the reason heme iron is attributed to carcinogenic activities is because it is now being consumed out of the context of vitamins it is normally present with. So I'll find that video and I'll put it in the description for you guys. Vitamin A improves absorption of iron. This ties in because since these people on plant-based diets are getting the planned form of vitamin A, they don't have as much of vitamin A to fight against the oxalates and the phytic acid, the anti-nutrients, the things that inhibit nutrient absorption that are contained in plant foods. These anti-nutrients can be countered by high vitamin A intake to some degree, but on a vegan diet, your vitamin A intake is inhibited as well. Vegetarians have similar intakes with more deficiencies. On paper, same exact amount of heme iron, same exact amount of non-heme iron, they still get deficiencies that's attributed directly to the anti-nutrients. These bind to minerals in the body and take them out. 40% of 75 vegan women were iron deficient. I believe that any vegan develops anemia over a period of time, if not incredibly low iron levels, inhibited by phytic acid and oxalates. So oxalates bind to calcium, iron and magnesium primarily and phytic acid binds to calcium and iron overlapping and then zinc, copper, phosphorus and manganese. I have a study linking each of these to the inhibition of these minerals, literally like 15 studies I'm going to link you guys, but I'm not going to go too much into anti-nutrients in this video because I do have a separate video speaking on other various anti-nutrients. It is important to note though that the reason a lot of the minerals in a vegan diet are not available is because of the incredibly high oxalate and phytic acid content, although the foods that contain these things are not necessarily bad themselves. When consumed without animal foods and in heavy, heavy amounts, that's where we see problems. So vegans will literally say, oh well phytic acid is good for you in a way, but they're anemic so go figure logic out the window. Vitamin K2 is something that doesn't really get talked about a lot. It's very, very important for bone metabolism and calcium regulation as well as blood flow. It thins the blood in a way. It's almost like a natural form of aspirin and vitamin K2 and vitamin D3 are deficiencies so prevalent in the population that's why the calcium RDA is so high. People think that, oh if you put more calcium in your diet your bones will be stronger, but no. Your body doesn't really need that much calcium. Your body needs vitamin K2 and vitamin D3 to absorb the calcium into the bones and vitamin K2 can be obtained from a fermented food called natto, but it is an unnatural food and it is in the form of MK7 which still needs to be converted to MK4. So to be clear there's different forms of K2 that need to be converted into MK4 and in regards to the plant versus animal form vitamin K1 gets converted into vitamin K2 at fairly low rates and that happens in the gut. It happens with the gut bacteria, vitamin K1 converts into vitamin K3 and then that produces vitamin K2. It's a fairly complicated process but most people are deficient. They actually recommend mother's supplement vitamin K because a lot of babies are deficient now and I will link that study in the description. It needs fat to be absorbed and fat can only really be obtained in nature in all parts of the world from animal foods. So to convert vitamin K1 to K2 your body needs fat and fat can only have been obtained from animal foods in all parts of the world. The absorption rate of spinach, vitamin K1 and spinach was 7.3% whereas spinach with butter was 24.3% and it's important to note that butter itself has vitamin K2 so I think this statistic is smudged a bit and we can't really use it as an accurate metric. Spinach had about 11% availability versus a tablet form of vitamin K1 so the whole form of food, definitely low availability for the vitamin K1 should definitely either be supplementing vitamin K2 or consuming a lot of fermented foods. I mean natto is the only plant version, egg yolks and liver have a ton of vitamin K2, cheese is known for having an incredible amount of K2. I have a bunch of other videos touching on this. I'll post them below. Vitamin A and I love talking about vitamin A because I think it's the most important vitamin that will come up in the future that people will realize we needed to be consuming in much larger amounts. Not only that, beta carotene carotenoids are the form of vitamin A in plant foods but they are allowed to label beta carotene as vitamin A whereas true vitamin A is in the form of retinoic acid in animal foods. The conversion rates are around 12 to 1 for fruit and 28 to 1 for green leafy vegetables. I'll put a bunch of other foods here but the interesting one is spirulina. It's a man-made protein based food and that's why the conversion rate is much lower, 4.1 to 1 of beta carotene to vitamin A. Golden rice tube, the starch structure of golden rice allows it to be absorbed a lot better but when people were fed 6 milligrams of carotene in oil, the absorption rate was 3.8 to 1, 126 milligrams, 55 to 1. So 3.8 to 1 sounds pretty good but 55 to 1. What this tells us is that either the body cannot convert carotenoids in a large amount in an efficient way and that's definitely true. What it also tells us is we need fat to absorb and convert carotene to vitamin A and this means we need animal foods because as I said animal foods are the only source of fat in all parts of the world in all regions. There are two common non-synonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms with genetic variability that result in a 70% decrease in absorption. This pretty much says that a certain percentage of the population cannot convert carotene to vitamin A. That literally says while x% of the population needs to get vitamin A or carotenoic acid from animal foods and that could also be a reason that a lot of people go on the vegan diet and they don't do so well after just a matter of a few months where other people last a bit longer. DHA, DHA the importance I think everyone kind of agrees, cognitive function, development of babies, cardiovascular health, DHA being a long chain fatty acid as well as EPA, abundant in brain, eye, heart, tissue as well as breast milk, EPA being important in heart health, ALA a short chain fatty acid with low conversion rates being the plant form of the fatty acid. It's also worth noting that ALA is contained in animal foods as well as plant foods so it's not like you're not getting ALA by eating animal foods. The main thing I wanted to focus on here was that the conversion rates of ALA to DHA are negligible and I would even argue you cannot raise blood levels of DHA on most vegan diets. That one tablespoon, two tablespoon of flax seeds and you're shaking the morning to get your omega-3s is the biggest BS there is in nutrition, at least right now I think. In the context of a high saturated fat diet, the conversion rates more really looking at DHA here is 3.8%. If the diet is high in omega-6, it's going to cut the bioavailability by 50%. So from 3.8% to 1.9% and no one follows a high saturated fat vegan diet so we have to say okay maybe it's high omega-6 fat but vegans don't follow high fat diets. So this is best case scenario, this is not like theorizing. You would need 1 cup of flax seed to get the equivalent amount of DHA to just over 1 bite of mackerel. No one needs 1 cup of flax seed, no one does. One tablespoon of flax is about 1% of a serving of fish, 1% if it's getting converted in the body. The International Society for the Study of Fatty S's and Lipids recommends 500 milligrams of DHA and EPA every day. A vegan isn't even getting 10% of that at best. Vegans aren't even close to hitting the RDA with these, let alone optimal health. Levels in breast milk of DHA can vary from .05 to .75% and consuming fish twice a week doubled the DHA in breast milk of women so it's safe to say there's a minimum amount of DHA that needs to be in breast milk for the mother to be nourishing the child in an optimal amount. I'm assuming that somewhere between .3 and .4% DHA although the more the better I guess as I said earlier. You want your mother eating fish or you want your mother eating legumes, come on. What's going to nourish the child? Protein is something that I didn't really want to touch on too much because we know there are a lot of vegan bodybuilders and people can get protein from plant-based sources. It is important to note though that these plant-based sources of protein, none of them are natural. We could look at the bioavailability of foods like milk 91, soy 59 and plant-based foods don't really look too good in regards to their protein bioavailability but when we look at powders and concentrates, various plant-based like soy protein powder is actually pretty close to whey protein powder so I don't really want to argue anything with the protein despite just saying that they're not actually natural foods. They would never have existed especially the protein powders but vegans have laboratories in their backyards so go figure. I didn't put fat here because I would just be arguing well plant fats can be high in omega-6 and the main argument against plant-based fats is that all these vitamins I'm talking about today are contained in the fat of animals. Plant fats do not have the vitamins you need to build your body, coconut, avocado, macadamia nut, although their fatty acid profiles might look great especially you know when compared to certain meat products they might be like oh this is pretty similar they do not contain the fat side of the vitamins that animal foods do, particularly high quality pastured animal foods. There are two forms of vitamin D, vitamin D2 and D3, D2 is the form that plants use and D3 is what humans use and metabolize from the sun as well as various animal foods contain vitamin D3. Fatty fish, egg yolks, cod liver oil are mainly known because chickens tend to be out in the sun, pasture chickens and fish, wild caught fish do contain vitamin D3 especially cod liver oil, the liver of the fish. Freshly killed animals that were on summer grass do actually have vitamin D3 in them. The problem is a lot of cows aren't really on pasture in the summer when they're slaughtered you know the animal has to have decent vitamin D3 stores in the body in order for its meat to actually have vitamin D3 in it so although animal foods might not be our sole source of vitamin D3 they were definitely used in various climates and regions where the sun exposure wasn't as high for parts of the year. Carnicine and taurine are two things that are only contained in animal foods. Carnicine being an antioxidant, abundant in muscle and brain tissue associated with athletic performance but it can be formed in the body so but again like the conversion rate of you know you're doing all these other things what's the conversion rate of carnicine you know we really need a lot more research on this stuff. Carnicine amino acid it's abundant in all tissues it's associated with longer life spans reduces cardiovascular risk and it is currently being used to treat epileptic seizures as well as liver disease so I mean I'm sure I could touch on just those two in a video itself but I just kind of wanted to get these points across and explain to you guys the bioavailability of all of these foods and how kind of contradictory you know people literally think a vegan diet is nutrient-dense that's very far from the truth. The problem here is they will say oh you could supplement B12 you could supplement iron and iron is actually bad for you we don't need that much you can eat natto for K2 anti-nutrients are good for you oh you don't really need that much vitamin A that's enough that we converted from carotene DHA take an algae oil supplement protein oh you could take soy protein powder take hemp protein powder fats some healthy fats and avocados are good for you vitamin D3 get it from the sun you know these aren't needed they will literally make an argument against every single vitamin mineral does not matter they have an argument for it and I just it's just I don't know where does it end I guess one thing I didn't touch on was crystal Kasumi Chris was vegan and had very low vitamin D3 levels despite supplementing vitamin D3 she stopped supplementing vitamin D3 she went on a carnivore diet her vitamin D3 levels I think they tripled over the course of a few months so guys just because you're getting something on paper does not mean it's being absorbed in the body or digested in the body I think these paper value warriors vegans writing down on paper oh I'm hitting my RDAs all I'm doing this all I'm doing that RDAs are just not being deficient nothing to do with optimal health I can't even convince carnivores that vitamin A is important in large amounts that DHA is important in large amounts how am I supposed to convince vegans that they need to obtain these from animal foods I feel like I am completely screwed you know I really do so hopefully and there's probably a there are probably a lot of other things I could have touched on in this video but these are just the main points because these are vitamins that I personally believe are attributed to my overall health I mean B12 comes inherently an iron is more about deficiencies as vegans but vitamin K2 vitamin D3 vitamin A DHA those main things are what I attribute to being an optimal health those main fat soluble vitamins I will post the video on vitamin A explaining why nutrients are important how retinoic acid vitamin A is the precursor to every cell being created in the body I don't have a video on vitamin D3 titled the Greek God I do have a video debunking heme iron I will try to link everything for you guys in the description if you guys would like to support me please just share the video definitely check out the stuff below in the description if you guys would like to reach out to me for some makeup tips use the contact form on my website or shoot me an email I will be doing a video on anti nutrients next week and hopefully I will do a video comparing the nutrient profile of various foods just so you guys actually have an idea of where to get these vitamins from those two were on the books for next week let me know if you guys would like to see anything else in regards to the educational stuff