Is my diet deficient in vitamin B12?

With the increased popularity of plant-based foods it is essential for vegetarians, vegans and others to maintain an adequate intake of nutrients such as vitamin B12 which is otherwise found predominantly in animal products. Vegans often consume macroalgae and fermented vegetables to improve their vitamin B12 status, even though these foodstuffs are not potent sources of vitamin B12.  Identifying and getting a better understanding of novel potential sources of vitamin B12 is an important area of research and requires reliable and robust methodology to accurately determine vitamin B12 in complex matrices.

Two recent papers have demonstrated the use of the R-Biopharm Rhône EASI-EXTRACT® VITAMIN B12 immunoaffinity column for vitamin B12 analysis in different situations. Wolkers et al., in an article in LWT – Food Science and Technology have studied how to maximise vitamin B12 concentrations during fermentation of lupin beans. The aim was production of ‘tempeh’ which is a tofu-type product made from lupin seeds rather than soya. It was demonstrated that a high vitamin B12 content (up to 20 µg/100 g fresh lupin tempeh) could be produced which could provide a significant  vitamin contribution to the diet.  In another paper by Acosta et al., published in Journal of Food Composition and Analysis the source of vitamin B12 has been studied in the Lemnaceae family of plants in particular duckweeds. It was found that two strains of duckweed-associated bacteria produced vitamin B12 at varied levels from 0.5 and 10 µg/100 g of dry matter.  Targeted inoculation of duckweed with certain bacterial strains, reliably provided vitamin B12 at stable levels of up to 8 µg/100 g dry plant matter. Chickweed is already being consumed from Wolffia a genus of aquatic plants being the smallest of duckweeds and is marketed commercially as a new delicacy from Southeast Asia. It has very small, green leaves and has a pleasant salad taste with a crispy “caviar” texture.  Consuming 150 g of fresh duckweed per person (corresponding to 10–15 g of dry material) is possible, for instance in a Wolffia spicy salad or Wolffia smoothie which could contribute about a third of the recommended intake for vitamin B12.

The common feature of both these publications has been the need to have an accurate and reliable measure of vitamin B12 at low levels to be able to draw meaningful conclusions.  Although sophisticated LC-MS/MS was employed for separation and detection, as in many other cases of trace analysis of foods immunoaffinity column clean-up played a crucial part in the analysis employing R-Biopharm Rhône EASI-EXTRACT® VITAMIN B12 immunoaffinity columns.