Illustration of a bowl of pumpkin seeds, a dish of cashews, a bowl of chickpeas and a few zinc tablets on a wooden board.

Do vegans get enough zinc? Less than meat eaters, but the 50 mg bottle is too much

Gregory Knox
November 3, 2026
12 mins

Usually less than meat eaters, because phytates in legumes and whole grains bind zinc and meat is high in the absorbable kind; a 2013 meta-analysis calls vegetarians’ intake and status low. Our pick, if you supplement, is MegaFood’s vegan 22.5 mg tablet. A 50 mg pill alone tops the 40 mg adult upper limit.

A 50 mg zinc pill is the dose the US upper limit was built on. In the study the Institute of Medicine panel used, 18 healthy women aged 25 to 40 took 50 mg of zinc a day as zinc gluconate for 10 weeks, and an enzyme that tracks copper status fell. The panel added an estimated 10 mg from food, set 60 mg a day as the lowest level with an adverse effect, and divided it by an uncertainty factor of 1.5 to reach 40 mg for adults, a limit that counts zinc from food and supplements together. NOW sells a vegan zinc picolinate at exactly 50 mg, and its product page cautions that it “is not intended for long term use”. Now set it beside the difference in diets. In a 2013 meta-analysis of 26 studies, vegetarians ate on average 0.88 mg less zinc a day than non-vegetarians; the abstract says the impact on intake and status was greater in vegans but gives no separate figure. For vegetarians with low intakes or blood zinc at the lower end of the reference range, the same authors listed low-dose supplementation and zinc-fortified foods among the strategies worth considering. That is why dose comes before price on this page. Zinc is one gap among several, and our guide to the supplements vegans actually need covers the others.

Nine zinc supplements compared

We read each maker’s own US product page and, where the page shows one, the Supplement Facts panel, in October 2026. Prices are the makers’ store prices on the day and will change; per-tablet figures are our arithmetic.

Product	Zinc per daily serving	Vegan, per the maker or label	Price on the maker’s page
MegaFood Zinc Bisglycinate	22.5 mg, 1 tablet	Yes, vegan badge	$17.99 for 60
Solgar Zinc Picolinate 22 mg	22 mg, 1 tablet	Yes, labeled vegan	None listed
Complement Essential	8 mg, in 3 capsules with other nutrients	Yes, no animal-derived ingredients	$49 for 30 servings
Garden of Life Vitamin Code Raw Zinc	30 mg, with 60 mg vitamin C	Yes, Certified Vegan logo	$12.79 for 60
NOW Zinc Picolinate 50 mg	50 mg, 1 capsule	Yes, labeled vegan	$5.99 for 30
Thorne Zinc Picolinate 15 mg	15 or 30 mg, 1 or 2 capsules	Not vegan-verified; lists leucine	$15 for 60
Nature Made Zinc 30 mg	30 mg, 1 tablet	No claim; stearates unsourced	$5.79 for 100
NOW Zinc Glycinate Softgels	30 mg, 1 softgel	No: bovine gelatin, beeswax	$17.99 for 120
Nature Made Zinc Gummies 30 mg	30 mg, 2 gummies	No: gelatin	$18.49 for 60 gummies

MegaFood Zinc Bisglycinate

Our pick for a standalone zinc tablet. One tablet a day gives 22.5 mg of zinc as fermented zinc bisglycinate, and the page marks it vegan, kosher, gluten-free and Non-GMO Project Verified. It costs $17.99 for 60 tablets or $27.99 for 120, about 30 and 23 cents a tablet. Among the vegan-labeled standalone bottles here, only Solgar’s 22 mg comes close. Take one and 17.5 mg of the 40 mg limit is left for food (our arithmetic); the sample day in the needs section below comes to about 10.5 mg.

The label also lists a 44 mg “Food Blend” of organic spinach, brown rice, parsley leaf, carrot, broccoli and beetroot. That is 0.044 g of food blend, brown rice included, so count the zinc and don’t count it as a vegetable serving. Don’t buy it if you want every inactive ingredient traced on the label: the panel lists stearic acid with no source, and the vegan badge names no certifier.

Solgar Zinc Picolinate 22 mg

Solgar’s tablet gives 22 mg of zinc as zinc picolinate, one a day at mealtime, and the page labels it vegan, non-GMO, gluten-free, dairy-free and kosher. Its panel lists vegetable stearic acid and vegetable magnesium stearate, along with cellulose and dicalcium phosphate, so the stearate question that trips up other labels is answered in the list itself.

The page lists a 100-tablet bottle and gives no price, only links to stores and online retailers. Buy it over MegaFood if seeing the stearate source on the label matters more to you than knowing the price before you go looking.

Complement Essential

This is a vegan multi-nutrient capsule, not a zinc product, and it is here for its dose. Three capsules a day give 8 mg of zinc alongside B12, vitamin D3, vitamin K2, iodine, magnesium, selenium and algal DHA and EPA. Complement says the formula contains no animal-derived ingredients and no gelatin or dairy. 8 mg is the women’s RDA and 3 mg under the men’s.

For the zinc alone it is poor value: $49 for 30 servings is about $1.63 a day, against about 30 cents for the MegaFood tablet. It makes sense only if you were going to buy B12 and iodine anyway, in which case the zinc comes along at the lowest dose on this list.

Garden of Life Vitamin Code Raw Zinc

30 mg of zinc and 60 mg of vitamin C per serving, in a base of 23 powdered organically grown fruits and vegetables with live probiotics and enzymes. The page shows the Certified Vegan logo and explains it as no animal ingredients or by-products and no chemical products tested on animals. It is also Non-GMO Project Verified and NSF gluten-free certified. Garden of Life charges $12.79 for 60 capsules, 21 cents a serving by its own figure.

The catch is the dose. 30 mg leaves 10 mg of the 40 mg limit for everything you eat (our arithmetic). NIH puts a cup of cooked oats at 2.3 mg and an ounce of roasted pumpkin seeds at 2.2 mg, so a seed-heavy breakfast eats a fair part of that margin. Skip it if you already take a multivitamin with zinc in it.

NOW Zinc Picolinate 50 mg

Vegan by NOW’s own badge, in a hypromellose capsule with rice flour and stearic acid NOW marks as vegetable-sourced. The problem with the bottle is the dose, 50 mg of zinc from 271 mg of zinc picolinate, 455% of the Daily Value, which is 10 mg over the adult upper limit before you eat anything. NIH says doses of 50 mg or more over a period of weeks can inhibit copper absorption, reduce immune function and lower HDL cholesterol. NOW’s caution says the product is for adults only and not intended for long term use. The bottle costs $5.99 for 30 capsules. As a daily top-up, it is the wrong bottle.

Thorne Zinc Picolinate 15 mg

The lowest standalone dose of the nine, at 15 mg a capsule (30 mg if you take two, as Thorne allows). $15 for 60 capsules. On paper this is the bottle a vegan with a small gap would want.

Thorne runs its own “Vegan” verified classification, and this product doesn’t carry it. Its Thorne Verified badges include gluten-free and dairy-free but not vegan, and its other ingredients start with leucine. Thorne’s vegan page names amino acids derived from keratin, leucine among them, as one of its categories of non-vegan products, and says leucine can also appear in “Other Ingredients,” which “would make the product not vegan”. The same page adds that a product missing from the vegan-verified list is not necessarily non-vegan. By Thorne’s own guidance, that leucine makes this bottle not vegan until Thorne says otherwise, so we would leave it on the shelf.

Nature Made Zinc 30 mg

One tablet gives 30 mg of zinc as zinc gluconate, and the label says USP has tested and verified the product. At $5.79 for 100 tablets it is about 6 cents a tablet, the lowest per-tablet price of those we found. The product page even says vegetarians and vegans may have inadequate zinc intake.

It makes no vegan claim, though, and the label lists stearic acid and magnesium stearate without saying what they are made from. Solgar prints “vegetable” in front of the same two words. Ask Nature Made before you buy, and treat it as not vegan until it answers.

NOW Zinc Glycinate Softgels

Same maker as the 50 mg picolinate above, opposite verdict. The softgel shell is bovine gelatin, and beeswax is listed right after it. Each softgel gives 30 mg of zinc from 150 mg of Albion zinc bisglycinate, 120 for $17.99. Not vegan.

Nature Made Zinc Gummies 30 mg

Not vegan. Gelatin sits in the other ingredients right after the water. Two mixed berry gummies give 30 mg of zinc as zinc citrate and 3 g of added sugar, and a bottle of 60 gummies, 30 servings, costs $18.49. Its product page also notes that vegetarians and vegans may run low on zinc because they eat few animal products, which is a brave thing to print above a gelatin gummy.

How much zinc do vegans need?

The RDA, as NIH lists it, is 11 mg a day for men and 8 mg for women aged 19 and over, 11 mg in pregnancy and 12 mg while breastfeeding. It is not adjusted for diet. The 2001 Institute of Medicine report behind them says the requirement “may be as much as 50 percent greater for vegetarians” and particularly for strict vegetarians whose staples are grains and legumes and whose dietary phytate to zinc molar ratio exceeds 15 to 1. It did not turn that into a separate number, writing that there were not sufficient data to set requirements on the basis of other food components. If that upper bound were applied to the RDA, it would give 16.5 mg for men and 12 mg for women (our arithmetic); the IOM did not set those figures.

EFSA, which advises on Europe’s reference values, did put numbers on phytate. Its population reference intakes for adults rise with phytate intake from 300 to 1,200 mg a day, from 9.4 to 16.3 mg of zinc for men and from 7.5 to 12.7 mg for women. Our 50% figures land close to EFSA’s highest-phytate values (our arithmetic). NIH’s current fact sheet gives no vegan figure at all. It says that the zinc absorbed from food ranges from 5% to more than 50% depending on the phytate in the diet, and that vegetarians and vegans might benefit from soaking beans, grains and seeds in water for several hours before cooking them, from canned and pre-cooked foods, from fermented foods and from zinc supplements.

Food gets you part of the way, and it is easy to count. NIH’s table gives a cup of cooked oats 2.3 mg, an ounce of roasted pumpkin seeds 2.2 mg, half a cup of boiled lentils 1.3 mg, a slice of whole wheat bread 0.6 mg, half a cup of cooked brown rice 0.7 mg and an ounce of dry-roasted peanuts 0.8 mg. A day of oats, pumpkin seeds, a full cup of lentils, two slices of bread, a cup of brown rice and the peanuts comes to about 10.5 mg (our arithmetic). That is just under the men’s RDA and below the 16.5 mg that the IOM’s upper bound would give. A serving of breakfast cereal fortified to 25% of the Daily Value adds 2.8 mg.

If you are pregnant, breastfeeding, buying for a child or take medication, set the product and the dose with your doctor or a registered dietitian rather than from this page.

How to read a zinc label

The number on the Supplement Facts panel is elemental zinc, not the weight of the whole compound. That is why NOW can list 271 mg of zinc picolinate and 50 mg of zinc on the same line. Compare bottles on the zinc figure and ignore the bigger number in brackets.

Pick on dose before form. NIH says absorption from zinc citrate and zinc gluconate supplements is similar, at about 61% in young adults, and about 50% from zinc oxide. Nothing we read for this article compares picolinate or bisglycinate with those, so we chose on dose and vegan status and left the form alone.

Vegan status hides in four places on a zinc label. Check the softgel shell: NOW’s is bovine gelatin. Gummies can contain gelatin, as Nature Made’s do. Thorne notes that while many companies use vegetable-based stearates, some use animal-based ones, so look for a stated vegetable source, as on Solgar’s and NOW’s labels. And leucine in the other ingredients is the one Thorne itself flags.

Then add it up. The 40 mg limit covers zinc from food and supplements combined, and it does not apply to people taking zinc as a medical treatment. A multivitamin with zinc and a zinc tablet on top count together.

One more thing goes wrong in the cupboard rather than on the label. NIH says supplements with 25 mg or more of elemental iron, taken at the same time as zinc, can reduce zinc absorption, while the iron in fortified foods does not significantly interfere. NIH’s caution is about taking the two at the same time. If you take an iron tablet too, see our guide to iron for vegans for whether you need that tablet at all.

Sources

Gregory Knox

Gregory has been vegan since 2012 and came to it as a sceptic. He believed a balanced diet needed meat and dairy, so he read the studies and the books until he was sure it didn't. He still reads them, and turns what he finds into plain answers on food, ingredients, supplements and health questions. He also runs the technical side of Vegan Pots. Not a doctor, just very thorough.