Iron & B12 for Vegetarians

Vegetarians run low on iron more often than most people, and teenagers and anyone who menstruates more often still. Plant iron absorbs far less efficiently than the iron in meat, but that's only half the story: what else is on the plate can swing how much you absorb by a factor of two or three.

The single biggest lever is vitamin C in the same meal. Lemon, tomato, bell pepper, citrus, berries, broccoli. Every recipe here is built that way on purpose, which is why there's a whole lemon in the soup and orange in the smoothie. They aren't for flavour, they're doing real work.

A few things quietly block iron, and they're easy to fix: tea and coffee (the tannins are strong inhibitors, so keep them an hour away from an iron-heavy meal), a big glass of milk alongside dinner (save dairy for between meals), and the phytates in grains and beans (soaking, sprouting and fermenting cut them, which is why tempeh and well-soaked beans are better).

B12 is a different problem, and worth being straight about: there is no reliable plant source. Not spinach, not spirulina, not fermented food. Dairy and fortified foods (fortified nutritional yeast, fortified plant milk, fortified cereal) help, and the nooch sauce here is aimed squarely at that. But food alone rarely corrects a deficiency that's already there. If your bloodwork is already low, a supplement and a retest with your clinic is the honest answer, not a recipe.

Every recipe shows its real per-serving numbers, calculated from official government food data.