Some great info for anybody considering helping the vegan movement by fermenting foods using the bacteria that produce b12. Surely this would be a better path than vegans having to support pharmacy companies testing on animals!! I just found this info on a forum online I felt the urge rising in me, somehow, to write another post about our all time favorite topic B12. A couple of months ago in my strolling the web for more knowledge around vegan nutrition, I stumbled upon a fascinating study by an equally fascinating professor Bärwald, or, to name correctly, Univ.-Prof. Dr. Ing. Günter Bärwald. baerwald-prof.de . He is an expert on fermentation technology. Infact, Professor Bärwald has his office about 15 bike-minutes from where I live in Berlin, though I havent had the chance to meet him in person, we engaged in email communication and he answered all my questions very patiently. You see, Professor Bärwald and his team in the 1940s were one of the first people to ferment Vitamin B12 with the help of bacteria. The interesting difference was to the standard way B12 is produced today, they fermented it in foods, that is, the foods they created contained active, good B12 simply because the process of fermentation that was used and the type of bacteria. In case youre wondering what the significance of this is, well, this makes him almost as important to veganism as late Donald Watson. It means, out there, forgotten, is a method to get vegan B12 in a food production method of fermentation, which eradicates one of the most dominating perceived weaknesses of the vegan diet: That it doesnt contain relevant amounts of bioactive B12. Yes it does, it *can*. _IF_ you ferment with the right method and use the right bacteria, namely Propionibacterium Freudenreichii and Pr. Shermanii. Most of us will have consumed foods that were fermented, like sauerkraut, beer, miso, soy-yogurt or a newer one, the Bionade beverage which unlike beer is fermented not with yeast but with bacteria as well. The fact that bioactive B12 can be fermented in a food, rather than as a supplement which follows a different route of production, is of huge importance, because it takes the taint off the vegan diet that it is not complete. Now the observant reader will now ask her or himself, well, where are these foods, and why, if such foods are possible, feasible, cheap, doable, out there buried in the desk of a friendly German professor, do I have to pop a pill for B12 and feel inferior about it? Well, because nobody cares. The standard way of producing supplemental B12 is so easy and cheap and well-implemented, only us crazy vegans would ever have the odd desire to consume some fermented soymilk with, careful, here is the word: natural B12 in which the B12 was fermented directly. Professor Bärwald has gone to exhibit his method at a time when our parents were Hippies but the food producers just shrugged and mentioned that synthetic B12 is abundant, why would anyone care for your method? The vegan market is small, and so there has been no demand for Professor Bärwalds idea, its demand and supply.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 15:45:04 +0000
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