What Most Plant-Based People Get Wrong About Their Diet (and what to do about it)
BY FOUNDER LISA G-T.
LAST UPDATED August 2, 2026
Most people who eat vegan, vegetarian or plant-based are eating better than almost everyone around them.
More vegetables, more fiber, more whole food, less junk.
And they're still short on nutrients they've never thought about.
(If you eat mostly plant-based, this applies to you too.)
You Took Care of B12. That's the Problem.
B12 is the one everybody knows about. It's the first thing people say when they find out you don't eat meat, and it's the first thing you fixed.
And the moment you handled B12, you stopped looking.
There's also a second problem hiding inside the first. Most multivitamins contain around 7 mcg of B12. Vegans and vegetarians generally need closer to 150 mcg a day.
Your body absorbs only a small fraction of any oral dose, so a plant-based formula has to start much higher to leave you with enough.
So the tiredness you've been blaming on bad sleep may not be about sleep at all.
The Ones Nobody Warned You About
Iron, omega-3 and iodine never come up in the conversation about plant-based eating. They should.
Iron: you're eating plenty, but plant iron absorbs far less efficiently than iron from meat. It carries oxygen to every cell you have. Run low and it's the afternoon crash.
Omega-3: lax, chia and walnuts give you ALA, and your body converts very little of it into EPA and DHA. DHA is structural in your brain, EPA is what your heart and inflammatory response run on. Low levels show up as brain fog.
Iodine: it reaches most people through dairy and seafood, so take both off the plate and there's usually nothing left. It runs your thyroid, which sets your metabolism and your energy baseline
Your Multivitamin Was Built for Someone Who Eats Meat
So you take a multi. Except almost every multi on the shelf was formulated for an omnivore diet.
They're loaded with vitamins A and C, which are abundant in the foods you already eat more of than anyone, and thin on what you actually need.
Look at your own bottle. Most have no omega-3, no iodine, a token dose of B12, and iron in a form that's hard to absorb.
It isn't that the multi is bad. It was built to fill someone else's gaps, not yours. Which means you can take a multivitamin every single day for years and still feel exactly like this.
Meet the Multi Built for the Way You Eat
Every multivitamin on the shelf is trying to serve everyone at once.
wholier's Multi for Plant-Based People was formulated for one diet: yours.
It's eight essential nutrients, chosen because a vegan or vegetarian diet leaves them short. B12, omega-3 DHA + EPA, iron, D3, iodine, zinc, selenium and K2. Nothing in it that you're already getting plenty of from food.
It's also everything you'd otherwise be buying separately. The B12, the algal omega-3, the iron and the D3 come in two capsules a day instead of four bottles on your counter.
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What You'll Actually Notice
Nutrient gaps don't announce themselves. They show up as the low-grade stuff you've written off as normal.
The afternoon energy dip. Brain fog you blame on sleep. Getting sick more than you feel like you should.
wholier's Multi supports steady all-day energy, mental clarity, and healthy immune function by covering the nutrients most closely tied to them: B12 for energy, DHA and EPA for focus, iron for oxygen delivery, zinc and selenium for immunity.
Formulated by Nutritionists, From the Actual Research
We didn't start with a standard multivitamin and make it vegan.
We worked with medical and nutrition experts and went through hundreds of clinical studies on vegan and vegetarian populations to find what this way of eating genuinely leaves short.
Then we built the formula around those eight nutrients and nothing else. No padding with vitamins you're already getting more of than everyone you know.
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The Dosages + Forms Are Actually Right
A nutrient being on the label doesn't mean there's enough of it in there.
wholier's Multi has 150 mcg of B12, not the 7 mcg most multis stop at.
The omega-3 is algae-based DHA and EPA, the forms your body actually uses, not ALA you have to convert. The iron is in a bioavailable form. The D3 is vegan, not the weaker D2 most plant-based formulas fall back on.
Third-Party Tested + Refills That Cut the Waste
Every batch is third-party tested for heavy metals, contaminants, purity and label accuracy, and made in the USA to GMP standards.
Your first order comes in a forever glass bottle, and every refill after that arrives in a compostable pack.
That's up to 60% less packaging waste than shipping a new bottle every month.
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Get 30% off wholier's Multi for Plant-Based People
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