This is how to get enough vitamin B2, or
riboflavin, from food.
Hi. I'm Dr. Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com. And this is
Chris Masterjohn Lite, where the name of the game is
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And today we're going to talk about
getting enough riboflavin from food.
The RDA is set so that adult women need
1.1 milligrams per day and adult men need
1.3 milligrams per day.
Alex Leaf and I did a long podcast
together where in our analysis we
decided that people are better off
getting 2 to 5 milligrams of riboflavin
per day. And you could think of that as
you want 2 milligrams per day if you
don't have a lot of factors that
increase your riboflavin requirement. So
for example, if you are sedentary, if you
are on a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet,
if you are not exposed to a lot of light,
you're not going outdoors a lot, you're
not using tanning beds, and so on. Then
under these conditions, and you're not
trying to lose weight, under these
conditions your riboflavin
requirement might be closer to
2 milligrams per day. On the other hand, if
you are eating a high-fat diet, if you're
dieting a lot, if you're exercising a lot,
if you are going out and tanning a lot,
all these things are going to conspire to
raise your riboflavin requirement.
And that might put you up towards 5 milligrams per day.
So if we're trying to shoot
for 2 to 5 milligrams per day, how are we going to
do that? Well, the number one source of
riboflavin is liver. In fact, a serving of
liver will give you, you guessed
it, 2 to 5 milligrams of riboflavin. So if you
were to eat a serving of liver a day, you
would get all the riboflavin that you
need. Unfortunately you really shouldn't
eat liver every day, or at least not if
you're going to eat 3 or 4 ounces of it.
You certainly could eat, you could
certainly eat one ounce of liver per day.
But if we're talking about 3 to 4 ounces
of liver in a serving, we really
want to limit that to two servings a
week because there are other things in
the liver like vitamin A and copper
where we'd get too much. But certainly one
or two servings of liver per week will
do wonders for your riboflavin status.
In the next tier, we could say kidney, heart, and almonds
have 1 to 2 milligrams of riboflavin.
So even these servings, if you're getting
2 of these servings per day, you're hitting
your riboflavin requirement just in
those foods, and you can see the value
here of eating liver once or twice
a week and then diversifying your organ
meats with kidney and heart. In tier 3 we
have red meat, cheese, eggs, salmon,
mushrooms, seaweed, sesame, wheat
germ, and wheat bran. These all give
0.4 to 0.5 milligrams of riboflavin. You can see
here that you really need to get 3
servings per day of these just to hit
over the RDA, and if you want to hit our
recommendation for 2 to 5 milligrams,
then you really need to eat more than
3 servings from that third tier, or you
need to eat 2 or 3 servings from that
tier and add some of the organ meats.
In the fourth tier is other meats besides
the ones that I just listed besides red meat,
and salmon, and milk also falls in
tier 4. These are providing between 0.2
and 0.4 milligrams per day. So you're
going to need a higher volume of those
tier 4 meats and you're going to need a higher
volume of milk to you meet your
riboflavin requirement. Whole grains, nuts
seeds, and vegetables, including beans
and other starches, tend to have between
0.1 and 0.3 milligrams of riboflavin per
serving. These really are only relevant
if you're eating them in very high
quantities. One of the things that you'll
notice is that it's relatively hard to
eat a vegan or vegetarian diet and get a
high dose of riboflavin. And that's why
you'll see that biochemical evidence of
riboflavin deficiency is about three
times more common in vegans and
vegetarians. If you are vegan or
vegetarian, then you really need to avoid
refined foods because if you're relying
on whole grains, nuts, seeds, and
vegetables, then yeah, you can work in
some mushrooms, you can work in some
seaweed, some sesame, some wheat
germ, and bran to give your riboflavin an extra
boost, but you just don't have meat, you don't
have milk, you don't have salmon, you
don't have eggs, you don't have cheese,
you don't have organ meats, you don't
have liver, you do have almonds, right? But
your food selection is limited from
those top tiers, and that means that if
you're putting oils into your
diet, and you're putting sugar into your
diet, as a vegetarian, then you're really
crowding out that little tiny bit
of riboflavin that you need from all of
the lower quality whole foods, and it
becomes very dangerous to start putting
in junk. With that said, for anyone
including omnivores, the more sugar and
the more fat that you put into your diet,
the more you're crowding out good
sources of riboflavin, and most omnivores
are also not eating from those top tiers,
especially the liver, the kidney, and the heart.
Many people think that nutritional
yeast is a good source of riboflavin.
That's only true if it's fortified.
Naturally occurring riboflavin is very
low in nutritional yeast. One important
point to make is that enriched white
flour does contain riboflavin because
it's added. I believe it's better to get
your vitamins from natural whole foods;
however, you can see that if you are
health-conscious, you could move away
from refined flour, and you could move
towards, say, a high-fat diet. If you're
doing that and you're not including
organ meats and the other top tier foods,
you are probably decreasing your
riboflavin status as you make that
health-conscious series of decisions.
Just as a vegetarian is going to need to
plan their diet more carefully since
they have fewer top-tier riboflavin-rich
foods available to them, so someone who's
eating a high-fat diet
is going to need to be more careful
about planning their diet because the
fat is occupying space in their diet
where they can't put those top-tier
foods. For the person who just eats a lot
of red meat, eggs, cheese, and salmon,
they may not have to worry so much, but for
someone who's eating high-fat, it may be
especially important to kick up some of
those organ meats. For someone who's
vegetarian or vegan, they really need to be
careful about clearing out all of the sugar and oils
and junk to be able to extract whatever
riboflavin they can from the
low-riboflavin foods in high volume. But at
the end of the day, you're just going to
have more riboflavin if you eat liver.
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