Consuming Enough Foods With Vitamin B6 - Meeting Your Bare Minimum Needs Is the Best You Can Do

Vitamin B6 is useful in fighting a variety of health conditions. It plays a role in preventing heart disease, in stopping age-related mental decline and memory loss, and in supporting recovery from ADHD, liver disease, diabetes, allergies, and women's reproductive issues.

You can avoid vitamin B6 deficiency symptoms if you get as little as 2 milligrams a day. But getting even those 2 milligrams can require some planning, especially if you are vegetarian or vegan.

What foods contain vitamin B6? Here are the vitamin B6 contents of some common foods:

• 1/2 cup of Kellogg's All-Bran, 3.6 mg
• 1 cup of General Mills Total Cereal, 2.0 mg (both cereals have added B6)
• 6 oz (168 g) of broiled whitefish, 1.0 mg
• Medium baked potato with skin, 0.6 mg
• 1 medium banana (5 oz/140 g), 0.5 mg
• 3 oz (84 grams, or one piece) fried chicken, 0.4 mg
• 1 cup (150 grams) cooked broccoli, 0.3 mg
• 1 cup (190 grams) boiled collard greens, 0.2 mg
• 1 cup (150 grams) raw carrots, 0.15 mg
• 1 cup (240 ml) of pink grapefruit juice, 0.10 mg
• 2/3 cup (100 g) of fresh blueberries, 0.05 mg

You can find values for these and hundreds of other foods at the USDA website. But it should be very quickly obvious that one has to eat a lot of fresh food to get the minimum daily vitamin B6 needed to avoid deficiency diseases, and the hundreds of milligrams of B6 per day needed to support recovery from various health conditions (learn more about vitamin B6 dosage) is simply impossible with B6 supplements.

Just how much food would you have to eat, for instance, to get enough B6 to support recovery from cirrhosis of the liver? Getting 50 milligrams of B6 a day from natural sources of vitamin B6 would require eating:

• 18 cups of Kelloggs' All-Bran, or
• 25 cups of General Mill's Total, or
• 18 pounds (8 kilos) of broiled whitefish, or
• 83 baked potatoes with skin, or
• 100 bananas (no peels, however), or
• 250 pieces of fried chicken, or
• 88 pounds (40 kilos) of cooked broccoli, or
• 110 pounds (50 kilos) of boiled collard greens, or
• 32 gallons (30 liters) of pink grapefruit juice, or
• 667 cups (100 kilos) of fresh blueberries.

And some conditions require 10 times more B6 than that. The simple fact is that supplements give you the dosage you need to correct severe nutritional imbalances. Then in a few weeks, after any deficiency is corrected, it's possible to pursue a much lower daily dosage of vitamin B6 by eating vitamin B6 foods.

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