I have been watching videos about health and nutrition and learning so much that I did not know before. Sadly, after a few weeks I forget almost every detail, retaining only that I need more of this or less of that.
Tonight I watched a video about Iron. It was interesting. I am sure you have all seen them put Total in a blender and then pull out iron shavings with a magnet. What I did not know is that iron shavings are the most common way to enrich our food with iron. He showed us that he pulled what looked like a quarter of a teaspoon of iron shavings out of one of those little individual flavored packets of oatmeal. He said that there are iron shavings in baby cereal.
They refer to these iron shavings as food grade iron.
We cannot metabolize metallic iron. Our bodies can only use iron that comes from plants. Iron shavings are not only adding nothing to our nutrition, they are destructive to the digestive system and cause damage which is leaky gut syndrome. I want to pull things out of my cabinet put them in the blender with water and run my magnet around to see if I can pull out iron shavings. If I do, I will add what products gave me what result.
And the other thing I learned is that even when they do not use actual iron shavings to enrich our food they are using metallic iron. Plant derived iron is more expensive.
And the saddest thing is that we don’t even need that much iron. The speaker said that almost everyone has too much iron in their bodies and the level that most people think of as normal is actually too much because it is based on what is average instead of what is ideal. Labcorp lists normal iron as 30 – 400 ng/ml. The actual healthy range is from 15 to 25 ng/ml.  (Do you remember your levels, Ramona?)
Too much iron is destructive to other nutrients because it is an oxygen hog and robs them of the oxygen they need. (Actually, I think I got that last bit from a video I watched earlier about minerals in general.)
The speaker said to stop using anything packaged because almost everything that comes in a box is enriched with unusable iron, usually in the form of shavings. He said that even if it doesn’t say it is enriched with iron, if it has the word enriched or fortified, it has iron.
Think leaky gut.