The redneck strike again.

[Confused Ape]

I've been looking into the mystery of Vitamin B12 and am learning some interesting things. Our closest relatives are gorillas and chimpanzees and we shared a common ancestor with them not so long ago in the evolutionary time scale.

When Humans and Chimps Split

Kumar’s team used a recently developed method in genetic sequencing to make the most comprehensive comparison to date of genes from humans, chimps, macaque monkeys and rats. They examined the number of mutations in the DNA sequence of each species to estimate its rate of evolutionary change.

The results were released today in the online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The work does not exclude a broader time frame but makes it very unlikely.

"We can conclude that humans and chimpanzees probably last shared a common ancestor between five and seven million years ago," said research team member Blair Hedges, an astrobiologist at Penn State.

We're closely related to gorillas as well. Our cousins' diets are mostly plant foods but they aren't vegetarians for a very good reason and it's something that we humans have in common with them. It's possible to get round this today, however, with B12 supplements. Where Do Gorillas Get Their Vitamin B12?

Except for vitamin D and vitamin B12, plants provide all the essential nutrients that people need. Plants contain minerals, such as calcium and iron, which they have absorbed from the soil. Plants contain all of the other vitamins and essential amino acids, which they have made for their own purposes. Plants are also the original source of the essential fatty acids. However, plants don’t make vitamin B12, and neither do animals. All of the vitamin B12 in nature comes from bacteria.

Some plant-eaters get their supply of vitamin B12 from the bacteria in their own digestive system, as long as they are eating something that contains the element cobalt. (Vitamin B12 contains cobalt). Cattle and sheep are particularly good at getting vitamin B12 from their own gut bacteria. They have a lot of bacterial fermentation going on in their stomachs, so the vitamin B12 is made before the food passes through the part of the intestine where the vitamin B12 gets absorbed. Such animals are called “foregut fermenters.”

Other species, including rabbits and gorillas and human beings, are “hindgut fermenters.” Their gut bacteria make vitamin B12, but only after the food has passed through the part of the intestine where the vitamin B12 can get absorbed. Rabbits solve this problem by eating some of their own droppings. Wild mountain gorillas sometimes do the same thing, usually during periods of bad weather. Captive gorillas do it a lot more often, possibly because they are bored.

On the other hand, gorillas and human beings can eat foods that already contain ready-made vitamin B12. For gorillas, that means tasty, tasty termites, which get vitamin B12 from their own gut bacteria.

Chimpanzees sometimes hunt for meat but they also eat termites. The page I've linked to has two videos - one showing a gorilla collecting termites from a trree and the other showing chimps fishing for termites with sticks.

I then found a very interesting bit of research that's been going on in India - RGCB scientists unravelling the Vitamin B12 mystery

Increasing Vitamin B12 deficiency among the population has been baffling science for a while now. This vitamin, most essential for maintaining a healthy body and mind, is not synthesised by plants. For the same reason, vegetarians generally tend to be deficient.

However, our vegetarian grandmothers and grandfathers never suffered this deficiency.

“To explain this conundrum, we conjectured that they could have got it from the food they ate, especially the vegetables,” said R Ajaykumar, who along with T R Kannan, E V Soniya and M Radhakrishna Pillai had conducted the study.

Just like plants, even animals are unable to synthesise vitamin B12. But certain bacteria can do this job - bacteria that reside in the gut of ruminants such as cow, goat and sheep. But how did the vegetarians in the older generation get access to this?, was the million dollar question.

The scientists, on a hunch, decided to test the cow dung for the presence of the vitamin and it turned out to be positive. New experiments were designed and dung samples were collected from cows reared with different food habits - one group predominantly fed on fresh grass, one on dried hay and the last group on synthetic commercial feed.

Maximum amount of the vitamin was found in cows fed on green grass while in others it was less by about 75 percent.

The next perplexing question was how the green grass could have so much of vitamin B12, especially since the grass cannot synthesise it. Would it have been contaminated with vitamin B12-rich cow dung or would it have absorbed the vitamin from the soil already contaminated with dung?

The scientific team at RGCB grew ‘cheera’ plants in tissue culture and found that the plants grown in glass beakers could absorb the vitamin B12 from the growth medium provided. They also found that the vitamin was found accumulated in portions of the plants that are consumed.

“So we assume that this is what happens in the soil too, under natural conditions. After our field studies, we will come to a final answer,” said Ajayakumar.

Long ago, in our villages, plants were generally fertilised with cow dung. The natural contamination of soil with the dung from grazing cows or by human application of the same as manure would have given the plants enough Vitamin B12.

If the plants had enough Vitamin B12, so would the vegetarians.

Getting Vitamin B12 from plants was only possible because humans had invented farming and animal domestication. There's something else required, though - Cobalt Cobalt (Vitamin B12) Deficiency

Many pastures in the United Kingdom are deficient in cobalt, leading to a deficiency in ruminants. The only known biological role for cobalt is as a constituent of vitamin B12, which has two major coenzyme functions in the body. Methylcobalamin promotes methionine synthesis. Methionine supply ultimately influences DNA synthesis (Kennedy et al., 1995). Deoxyadenosylcobalamin performs a key role in the energy metabolism of ruminants by facilitating the metabolism of propionate, which is an important precursor of glucose in ruminants (Kennedy et al., 1991). Changes in lipid (Stangl et al., 1999) and amino acid metabolism (Stangl et al., 1998) during cobalt deficiency have also been reported.

Ruminants rely entirely on their rumen microbes to incorporate cobalt into vitamin B12. The vitamin B12 status of the animals is therefore not entirely dependent on the level of cobalt in the soil and diet (Paterson et al., 1989; Reid and Horvath, 1980). The efficiency with which cobalt is incorporated into vitamin B12 by the rumen microbes, the efficiency of absorption and the metabolic demands of the coenzyme-dependent functions are also important factors (Suttle, 1992). Dietary levels of cobalt below 0.05 mg/kg DM are regarded as inadequate. Soil values of cobalt below 0.3 mg (5.1 m mol)/kg soil, are regarded as 'deficient'.

In other countries, such as Japan, human excrement was used as fertiliser.

However, historically, pit toilets were more common, as they were easier to build and allowed the reuse of the feces as fertilizer[14]—very important in a country where Buddhism and its associated mostly vegetarian, pescetarian lifestyle acted to reduce dependence on livestock for food. The waste products of rich people were sold at higher prices because their diet was better.[11]

Selling human waste products as fertilizers became much less common after World War II, both for sanitary reasons and because of the proliferation of chemical fertilizers, and less than 1% is now used for night soil fertilization.[15][16]

Is untreated human sewage as good as cow poo? Foods Sources High In Vitamin B12

Another interesting scientific fact is that the bacteria that are located in the intestines of humans manufacture and secrete large amounts of Vitamin B12. Unfortunately, this occurs low in the intestinal tract, past the point where the vitamin could be absorbed. This information was found because of studies of certain SW Asian countries where meat is rarely consumed and yet lacked widespread Vitamin B12 deficiencies as would be expected. The research found that crops that were improperly cleaned, actually contained enough Vitamin B12 from human feces to prevent deficiencies from occurring

Slough sewage plant turns human excrement into high-quality fertiliser

Just a few yards from the choked M4 motorway, beyond the massive settling tanks and a steaming, 500-tonne mountain of black sewage sludge at Slough treatment works, a modern alchemy is taking place that could potentially keep the world in food for a few more years.

The plant is taking the tiny quantities of phosphorus contained in the poo of the Berkshire town's 140,000 people and turning it into high-quality fertiliser fit to grow organic garden vegetables.

No Vitamin B12, though, so these organic vegetables won't have any.