I wasn't aware that B12 is an amino acid, but this company which sells an energy drink called Fuze claims it is:
http://www.buydominica.com/vitamins/fuze.php

But I can't find any references which support this claim, so I am dubious.

@alamothe So when you cook the beans, you scoop the foam that bubbles up off the top, you soak the beans for a full day before you cook them (then poar off the water) and you cook them with a piece of seaweed called kombu and really you don't fart very much/at all.

Vitamin B12 is not an amino acid.

There are 21 amino acids that are found in humans and B12 (Cobalamin) is not included in that list.

Vitamin B12 contains cobalt, which is a metal. Amino acids contain are organic compounds, so they do not contain any metals.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/08/secret-abattoir-video-animal-abuse

now they appear to attempt to use electricity to stun animals instead of chemicals... i'll let the video speak for itself.

@scagga, is it not possible for organic compounds to contain metals? In fact, my understanding of chemistry isn't amazing, but Vitamin B12 is an organic compound as far as i can tell...

it looks like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/af/Cyanocobalamin-3 -sticks.png/280px-Cyanocobalamin-3 -sticks.png
the question of whether it is an amino acid i will leave to the technical pendants of chemistry. The fact is it is necessary for the health functioning of the human mammal.

@gramilaj, you seem like a healthy human mammal, how do you get your B12?

@ alamothe, you fail biology forever.
Also as to the B-12 thing, you can still get enough B-12 from Eggs and dairy. Cheese is a particularly good source.

Eggs and dairy... Have you seen the way cows and chickens are kept on dairy farms? It's worse than obscene.

I understand that. I'm not arguing for animal rights. I'm just arguing for good science.

But the title of the thread is arguing for animal rights...

@Mafia - if the reason to be vegetarian is to reduce suffering, or if it is to increase efficiency, in either case keeping animals for eggs and dairy will subject them to the pressures our supply/demand market system considers standard - they will continue to be mistreated and we will continue to rely on inefficient means of raising our food.

On the other hand, B12 can be produced by a bacterial process on industrial scales (which is where we get all our B12 supplements) so the whole arguement is moot.

Also, a question comes to mind. If vitamin B12 is in cows, but not plants, and cows only eat plants, then how did the Vitamin B12 end up in the cows?

Malialligator The cows guts are loaded with bacteria that produce the B12, as do all animals that are herbivorous. We get a large protion of are Vit K the same way from the bacteria in are gut.

Oh yeah. That would do it.
Thanks warsprite.

scagga B12 is organic because it's a carbon based compound like orathaic said in a earlyer post. This does not exclude metals being incorporated in them. Many organic compounds do contain metals, hemoglobin contains Fe (iron), chlorophyll contains Mg (magnesium), the list is huge. As to why B12 isn't a amino acid that's beyond my capability but, If look at an amino acid there size is 2 to maybe 12 carbon atoms with a few nitrogen atoms added plus some oxygen and hydrogen and occasional other element.

I can actually answer that one. Anything which is classified as an amino acid has a very very specific structure. There's a nitrogen atom, bonded to two hydrogen atoms and a carbon atom. This carbon atom is bonded to another hydrogen atom, a variable "R" chain and a carboxyl group. (In other words another carbon atom, double bonded to an oxygen atom and also bonded to an Oxygen atom which is bonded to a hydrogen atom.) Like this:

H H O -- H
\ | |
N -- C -- C = O
/ |
H R

The only thing that changes is what the R chain is made up of. The R chain can be made up of many different things, from something as simple as a single hydrogen atom as in glycine to a very complicated double ring structure as in tryptophan.

as i understand it your basic amino acids are used as the building block of proteins (and proteins form most of the bio-mechanisms of living organisms - not to be confused with the proteins we eat, these are the human specific ones we produe in our cells and code for with our DNA... though i believe fruit flies have about 50% of the human proteins coded for in their DNA... ) the whole procedure is massively interesting, but completely off topic.

with the right breeding i imagine humans could develop into very successful herbivores... and given that we know where to find a lot of bacteria (in the guts of other herbivores) it shouldn't be too hard to develop useful bacterial treatments to help us survive on a mostly vegetarian diet, infact i'd probably push for research into such a thing if i had the budget.

Damn it. For some reason the forum will not print the spaces I put in between there to make that diagram work. That sucks. It was actually kinda cool. = (

You can see a similar diagram to the one I attempted, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AminoAcidball.svg

@Mafia - your chemistry is stronger than mine, so may i ask, is my 'basic understanding' flawed in any fundamental way? (ignoring my speculative 'could develop' bit which i know is fiction)

orathaic in theory it might work converting humans but, you would need to to give us a larger gut. Even chimps have a larger bowel than we do. A good example of what we might look like is the gorilla which are very much a herbivore. That big pot belly you often see on them isn't fat(unlike me). Than you have to deal with all that extra gas. :-P

as i understand it (and i'm not completely illiterate) kangaroos are able to break down methane in their guts via some some bacterial process - cows are not able to do this. (which is why eating kangaroo meat is so much more environmentally friendly...)

i asusme this will help with the gas (to some degree)

anyway, i was asking about the amino-acid -> protein bit of chemistry... i think i understand most of it on at least a theoretical level...

Umm, mostly you're correct. You are right that when we eat protein our digestive system breaks it down into it's constituent amino acids and then builds up the proteins we need again. The only thing is, I'm not sure exactly how many proteins really are human specific. It's a very small number of proteins that humans have that other animals or even plants do not. Which leads to a situation that can seem slightly silly at times. You eat a food and end up ingesting all kinds of whole proteins you can use. Then your body breaks it down into it's constituent amino acids, and then builds that exact same protein from scratch, because your body needs it.

but then we're not able to build amino acids from scratch, right? so we need certain 'essential' amino acids in our diet.

Separately it is good to consume ones which are easily broken down if we had to do that.

Vitamins and essential oils on the other hand are complex (organic) molecules which we don't use to build proteins, i assume some of these are not broken down and built back up...

I never heard that kangaroos do that. I wasn't trying implying you were illiterate, just carrying the ideal through.

em, yes, well i read a short article on trying to introduce bacteria from kangaroo guts into cows.... in the hopes of reducing their methane emissions...

Warsprite is in a sense correct however. The gorilla pot belly is the result of a lot of intestines, used to eat a lot of plants and the length of the digestive tract is correlated to the diet which the animal evolved to eat. Shorter = meat, longer = plants. That being said, dogs, for instance have shorter intestines than humans do, but are still not necessarily strict carnivores. To quote wikipedia. "Dogs can adapt to a wide-ranging diet, and are not dependent on meat-specific protein nor a very high level of protein in order to fulfill their basic dietary requirements. Dogs will healthily digest a variety of foods, including vegetables and grains, and can consume a large proportion of these in their diet." (I should make it clear however that this is not the same for cats, cats are obligate carnivores, their diet really does need to be virtually all made of meat.)

The point is that the long intestines really are for digesting really really rough material like leaves, stems, twigs, bark, etc. Humans don't need to digest those parts. When we rely on vegetable matter, we eat things which are considerably less rough. We eat the fruit and the seeds and flowers (broccoli, cauliflower) and roots. And even when we do eat leaves, it's only those of specific plants which are relatively easy to digest, (lettuce, cabbage). If you went up to an oak tree and tried eating oak leaves, they'd come out the other end mostly unchanged, that's why gorillas have long long intestines, because they do eat leaves. Humans however are better at choosing our vegetable matter, and therefore even a human on an all plant diet doesn't need a longer digestive tract, because he or she knows what part of the plant to eat.

Actually there are only 8 amino acids that humans cannot synthesize. These are the essential amino acids, and must be consumed in the diet. An individual plant source is "complete" but may only have trace amounts of a certain amino acid. That said, varying the plants you eat is sufficient to make sure you get all the protein you need. Adding dairy and/or eggs to the diet is enough to ensure amino acids out the wazoo. (This all applies to adults, growing children are a more complex matter.)

And actually fats, and oils are broken down by the body into their constituent parts as well, but the difference is that they're made up of much fewer pieces and it's less important which kinds of fat your body has, for the purposes of the body, any fat will do.

And the sweet thing about being human is that you're not tied down by your digestive tract. Sure, beans can be hard to fully digest and make you fart and don't easily give up all their protein. You can soak your rice or beans (and break down their phytic acids, I believe then cook them just like this pre-digestion that we're talking about using bacterial implants to accomplish. I mean, that would be sweet, but just cover your beans in water for a day and you're doing basically the same thing.

bacterial implants? i'm pretty sure the bacteria in your gut compromises multiple species at present, i'm sure they all 'want' to survive and need to break down material to survive (and replicate) i don't know how many different bacteria there are, but i'm sure i've heard large numbers quoted... adding or altering that bacterial balance would be a cool skill, but i'm not sure if it counts as an implant...

Still, i do like the 'preparation' or pre-digestion method of providing us with a healthy diet, some might call it cooking...