Every month or so, someone reads my recommendations for vegans, checks out some vegan multivitamins, and then writes me asking about the high levels (many times the RDA) of some individual vitamins in many of the vegan multivitamins.

While I’m not aware that taking B vitamins and vitamin C in the amounts found in typical vegan multis poses any sort of health problem, I thought it might interest readers to hear what supplements I take.

For vitamin B12 and calcium, I drink about 1 to 1.5 glasses of fortified soymilk each day. In the past, I have taken a Trader Joe’s 500 mg calcium / 250 mg magnesium/ 7.5 zinc supplement on days I didn’t drink enough soymilk; but lately I’ve been taking it every day. I also take a 1,000 mcg B12 supplement about once a week.

For vitamin D, I try to sit out in the sun for 20 minutes each day (10 minutes facing the sun, 10 minutes facing away). I save any reading that I can do away from the computer for this time each day. I normally get a lot of sun on the weekends. During the dead of winter, I have a vitamin D lamp that I sit in front of for about 10 minutes a day. Vitamin D2 supplements should be fine – I don’t think every vegan needs to run out and get a vitamin D lamp for the winter. I tend to suffer from (self-diagnosed) seasonal affective disorder, so I like the lamp. Until a year ago, I was living in Sacramento where there was plenty of sun throughout the year, but now that I live in Oakland, which can be a lot more cloudy, I have found that I need more light during the winter.

For iodine, I take a 225 mcg supplement every few days. I pop one when I realize that I haven’t in awhile.

For omega-3s, I am a bit of an anomaly, and do not strictly adhere to my own recommendations. Around 2002, I had my prothrombin time tested just to see where it was. Prothrombin time is a measure of how fast your blood clots. Being a vegan, I wanted to make sure I was getting enough omega-3 and that my blood wasn’t clotting too fast. Well, it turned out that it was actually clotting too slowly (but not by much). I had been taking 1 tsp of flaxseed per day for some time (a couple years). I’m not sure if that was related, but I decided to stop supplementing as omega-3s slow blood-clotting time. I have had my prothrombin time tested a few times since then and it is always just a tiny bit slower than normal. So for omega-3s, I will take a DHA tablet once in awhile, but by no means on a daily basis as I recommend for other vegans. I do eat canola oil regularly, which has omega-3s, but not nearly as much as flaxseed oil.

I drink about 4 oz of carrot juice a day to make sure I’m getting beta-carotene.

And that’s it. I hope I haven’t raised more questions than I’ve answered!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 5:00 pm and is filed under B12, Beta-carotene, Bones, Calcium, Omega-3s, Supplements, Vitamin A, Zinc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.