Mercola - Natural Health Products & Articles

There’s a common misconception that adhering to a strict vegan or vegetarian diet can make you a whole lot healthier than other people.

The truth is, you’ll actually miss out on important nutrients that you can get only from animal sources of food.

Vitamin B12 is one of these nutrients. Vitamin B12 is one of the eight B complex vitamins and is naturally present in foods that come from animals, including meat, fish, eggs, milk and milk products.

Known as the “energy vitamin,” vitamin B12 is necessary for many vital bodily functions including production of energy, immune system support, and the formation of red blood cells, natural health expert Joseph Mercola explains.

In India, where most people follow a vegetarian lifestyle, about 80 percent of adults are vitamin B12-deficient.

About 1 in 4 adult Americans have been found to be deficient in this important vitamin and almost half of the entire U.S. population has suboptimal blood levels.

As you grow older, you increase the likelihood of becoming vitamin B12-deficient because of two reasons: not getting enough of it from your diet and losing the ability to absorb it.

Though vitamin B12 is a water soluble nutrient, it is difficult to assimilate through the stomach because of its complicated chemical structure and because it contains the element cobalt.

Your digestive system breaks down as you age and you lose the ability to secrete hydrochloric acid, which releases vitamin B12 from your food. Using antacids or anti-ulcer drugs also lowers your stomach acid levels and decreases your ability to assimilate vitamin B12.

You can be eating foods rich in vitamin B12 but it’s likely that that still won’t be enough to provide you with optimal levels of vitamin B12.

Multivitamins containing vitamin B12 won’t do the trick either. If you check the labels, you’ll see that most of them contain between 100-200 micrograms of vitamin B12. But Dr. Mercola explains that if you actually took 500 micrograms of vitamin B12, you'd absorb only about 1.8 micrograms – that’s an absorption rate of only one third of one percent!

Also, the late Victor Herbert, a renowned vitamin B12 expert, said that many multivitamin products today contain dangerous B12 analogs. Analogs are created when crystalline vitamin B12 interacts with other nutrients in multivitamin products, such as vitamin C, iron and copper. This interaction increases your need for vitamin B12.

If you want to ensure that you’re getting optimal levels of this important nutrient, Mercola recommends the Vitamin B-12 Energy Booster Spray, which uses a patented NanoMist® delivery system to provide you with an exact dosage of 1200 micrograms with every spray. You use the spray six times (two sprays, three times per day) to get the optimum level of vitamin B12 that you need.

The Vitamin B-12 Energy Booster Spray works better than any capsule, gelcap, liguid or tablet out in the market. It helps you feel energized the entire day and is definitely healthier than taking multiple cups of coffee to get a caffeine rush.

Advanced nutrition can come from something as simple as a spray (with a little help from nanotechnology). Spray on energy with Dr. Mercola’s Vitamin B-12 Energy Booster Spray now!