No animal products: what is missing, and where to find it

Vegan or nearly: the five questions, and what the app does with them.

A plate without animal products is your bacteria's best friend — and it leaves five questions that plants do not settle on their own. The app keeps them in the Molecules space, in the family “What plants don't provide”; here is the essential.

Vitamin B12. No plant makes it. Spirulina, chlorella and nori contain inactive analogues, which moreover distort a blood test. A supplement, no discussion: it is the one point plant-based nutrition does not argue about. Declare it in Settings → My supplements, and the app stops asking you for it.

Long-chain omega-3 (EPA, DHA). The body makes them from the ALA in flax, chia and walnuts — poorly, a few percent. Cultivated microalgae are the only direct plant source, as a supplement.

Iodine. Almost absent from land plants. Seaweeds are the only serious sources — and kombu holds so much that daily use would be an excess. Iodised salt does the rest.

Iron, zinc, calcium. They are on the plate, but held back by phytates and oxalates (see “The flip side”). Three gestures are worth more than quantity: vitamin C in the same meal, tea and coffee kept apart, and legumes soaked, sprouted or sourdough-fermented. For calcium, kale and broccoli give more than spinach, whose oxalates block almost all of it.

Protein. Rice and lentils, semolina and chickpeas, corn and beans: the lysine / methionine complementarity does not need to be computed within the day — it is enough that both families come back within the week. The Molecules space tracks lysine, methionine and tryptophan separately. Commercial veggie steaks and cheeses are neutral entries: they count neither as a plant nor as a category.

Declaring your diet (Settings → My diet) changes no figure: it only changes what the app tells you — a “not covered” line becomes, for a pescatarian, “covered by your fish”.