Do vegetarians suffer from deficiency of certain nutrients?
Though plant foods are loaded with most essential nutrients, vegetarians do need to take some extra precaution to make sure that their diet includes a variety of plant foods. Lack of such variety may result in deficiency of vitamin B12, Iron, Calcium and Zinc. Vegetarians can easily fix these possible deficiencies by including certain functional foods and taking certain inexpensive supplements. In any case however, these potential deficiencies do not justify consumption of meat, fish and eggs simply because of the following reasons: • It is not difficult to include a variety of plant foods in diet to avoid certain potential deficiencies. • The potential deficiencies can be fixed easily through supplements. Meat consumption at current levels can not be justified only to avoid some deficiencies since such consumption adds tremendous long term complications on human health and results in large scale violence against innocent animals. Even if it is proved that certain nutrients are found o
