If your blood report flagged low vitamin D or low B12, you're in very good company. These are two of the most common deficiencies I see in reports from across India, and if you eat a largely vegetarian diet, there's a specific reason they show up together so often. It has very little to do with anything you're doing wrong.
Why these two, and why here
Vitamin D and B12 are unusual among nutrients because they aren't reliably available through a typical vegetarian plate — for very different reasons, but both worth understanding.
Vitamin D is made mostly in your skin, from sunlight, not from food — very few foods naturally contain meaningful amounts. In theory, India has no shortage of sun. In practice, most of us spend our sunlight hours indoors, under a roof or in a car, and when we are outside, we're often covered up or using sunscreen — for entirely good reasons like sun protection, but it means the skin isn't getting the direct exposure it needs to synthesise vitamin D. Higher melanin in skin also reduces how efficiently it's produced, which is part of why deficiency is so widespread across Indian populations specifically, regardless of diet.
B12 works differently — it's found almost exclusively in animal foods: meat, fish, eggs, and dairy. Plant foods don't contain meaningful, reliably absorbable B12. If your diet is vegetarian, and especially if it's low in dairy and eggs, your intake is often genuinely close to zero from food alone — this isn't a case of eating "not quite enough," it's often closer to eating none.
What this means for vitamin D
There's no realistic amount of food that will correct a significant vitamin D deficiency — food can help maintain levels once they're adequate, but it isn't a strong enough lever to fix a real shortfall on its own. A few minutes of sensible, unscreened sun exposure on your arms and legs, a few times a week, genuinely helps. Beyond that, correcting a real deficiency usually needs supplementation — and the dose, form, and duration of that is something for your doctor to decide based on your actual levels, not something to self-prescribe from a pharmacy shelf.
What this means for B12
If you eat dairy and eggs regularly, curd, milk, and paneer do contribute meaningful B12 — this is one of the genuine nutritional advantages of a lacto-vegetarian diet over a strict vegan one. If you're vegan, or your dairy intake is low, this is worth taking seriously rather than assuming your overall "healthy" diet covers it — B12 doesn't follow the same logic as most nutrients, where eating well generally means eating enough. You can eat an excellent, balanced vegetarian diet and still run low on B12, simply because it isn't reliably there to begin with.
As with vitamin D, correcting a real deficiency is usually a supplementation conversation with your doctor, not a food-only fix — B12 deficiency left unaddressed can affect nerve and blood health over time, so it's worth taking the report seriously rather than waiting to see.
What food can still do
Food's role here is to make sure you're not adding a second problem on top of the first — eating enough dairy, eggs, or fortified foods if you eat them, getting some regular daylight, and not assuming a general "healthy diet" automatically covers these two nutrients, because for many people it doesn't. It's also worth simply retesting after any intervention rather than guessing whether it's working.
If your report flagged either of these and you're not sure what to do about it, a free 15-minute discovery call is a good place to start working out what your specific numbers actually need.