Benefits of including animal products in your diet for tackling B12 deficiency

By BCA Member, Simon Billings

This Nutrition and Hydration Week, BCA Member and Founder of the Academy of Chiropractic Nutrition, Simon Billings, discusses the benefits of including animal products in your diet for tackling B12 and other deficiencies, and how this can impact the chiropractic care patients receive.

Animals have been considered as an important source of nutrition for humans and have been prized and eaten for as long as humans could hunt. Let’s begin by exploring the overall benefits of including animal products in your diet.

Overall benefits of including animal products in your diet

Ruminants like cows are herbivores – they have four compartments in their stomachs and eat grass and other green foliage that humans cannot digest. They take the plant nutrients and turn the inactive vitamins found in plants into active forms to utilise for their own metabolism.

Minerals, amino acids and vitamins are all concentrated in tissues that are metabolically very active, like organs and muscles, which is why we get the benefits from eating animals – they have made the inactive nutrients in plants that we cannot digest, active, and concentrated them into a convenient nutrient dense package for us to eat.

In comparison, protein found in plants is tightly bound to sugars, which makes it far less bioavailable. So, while plants can be good sources of protein, you get far less of it by weight, compared to animal protein which is highly bioavailable.

When it comes to minerals, the same point applies. Iron found in meat (heme iron) is highly bioavailable while iron in plants (non-heme iron) is prone to being bound by the phytic acid and oxalates that are naturally found in the plant, making it unavailable for digestion.

And there is more – while the nutrients we’ve spoken about so far are inferior and lower in amount in most plants, there are some nutrients that are simply missing in plants.

B12 deficiency

B12 is made by bacteria in the digestive tracts of animals and is then absorbed into the blood stream to be passed to organs and muscles. There are no plant-based sources of B12 that are active in such way; there are forms of it found in things like spirulina, but these are inert biological isomers that may count on B12 blood tests and create false normals while antagonising the B12 receptor.

Most people on diets that do not include animal products are aware of this and therefore take B12 supplements. However, there is a common issue with those who have gut disorders such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), reflux and other named diseases, such as Crohn’s disease, as those patients cannot absorb the supplements and remain low on B12.

Sadly, while the NICE/NHS guidance is very clear about symptoms being the most important part of diagnosing B12 deficiency, and that deficiency should not be ruled out on blood tests alone (as there is no clear cut off point to determine it), symptoms are routinely ignored, leaving patients with normal, but low-end normal levels on B12 and overt symptoms of deficiency.

These patients will not respond to chiropractic care as favourably as patients that are not experiencing the issues mentioned above, because low B12 lowers their pain threshold, stops them from making new tissues and imbalances their brain chemistry. A simple sublingual or liposomal B12 supplement, however, will correct these issues and more.

Other nutrients only found in animals

As well as B12, people following diets that do not include animal products also frequently need additional supplementation with the below nutrients that are only found in animals:

• Creatine (for recycling ATP) – this may help with fatigue, depression and anxiety.
• Eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), usually found in fish but now also available from algae – theoretically, people can make EPA/DHA from alpha linolenic acid (ALA), but the conversion is limited by enzyme saturation and poor status of enzyme co-factors, making supplementation in many essential. This may help with pain, depression and anxiety.
• Carnitine acts as a shuttle moving fatty acids into the mitochondria to burn for It also helps to calm the nervous system down; this often helps with pain, fatigue, depression and anxiety.

 

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