Vitamin B12’s role in promoting heart health often gets overlooked, but it’s essential. Vitamin B12, B6, and folic acid work together to help reduce homocysteine, which is a protein that can build up in the blood and damage arterial walls. Thus playing a role in heart disease.
Vitamin B12 benefits your nervous system directly and helps to keep it in tip-top shape. When this vitamin is in short supply, you might develop annoying pins and needles in your extremities and/or numbness in your hands, legs, or feet.
Vitamin B12 helps to produce the fatty sheath that surrounds and protects your nerves. When you are deficient in it, your nerve cells cannot function properly.
Tingling and numbness might be one of the first signs of B12-related nerve damage, but if it continues unaddressed, it can alter the way that you move. This can sometimes affect your balance, making you more likely to fall over.
There are many signs that your tongue can reveal about your health, and a B12 deficiency is one of them. A mild deficiency can trigger tongue inflammation. This painful condition can affect how you speak and eat. Your tongue may be red and swollen or look smooth since the tiny bumps that contain your taste buds stretch out and disappear.
Another vital function vitamin B12 benefits is our vision, and a deficiency is typically related to nervous system damage that affects the optic nerve. The best defense is a good offense. Vitamin B12 can be found in animal foods such as meat, poultry, fish, and dairy products. If you don’t eat animal foods, you can get vitamin B12 from fortified foods or a supplement.
Some research has suggested that a vitamin B12 deficiency is linked to dementia and memory issues, but it’s not clear whether supplements might help. The potential link might be a result of high levels of homocysteine in the blood, but it’s too early to draw any firm conclusions.
Everyone knows that eating enough fiber and drinking enough water are vital to healthy bowel movements, but a vitamin B12 deficiency can also cause constipation, diarrhea, loss of appetite, and weight loss. The exact mechanism through which a B12 deficiency causes GI issues is still unknown.
People with a vitamin B12 deficiency often look pale or have slightly yellow skin. Glitches in your body’s red blood cell production affect the size and strength of these cells. They might be too big to travel through your body, resulting in pale skin. If they’re too fragile, they might break down and cause an excess of bilirubin, which results in an orange-yellow skin tone.
Source: rd
Images: depositphotos
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