eli5: Why do we need iron as a nutrient? I understand iron as a metal. Why do we need to consume it?
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More generally, we have enzymes that speed up chemical transformations, like converting sugar energy to energy used for muscles. These enzymes are proteins, but they sometimes have non-protein components called cofactors. The non-protein components of enzymes often contain iron (also sometimes copper and other metals) because these metals are better than proteins in some chemical transformations such as transferring electrons.
Many people mentioned iron being involved in the oxygen-carrying activity of hemoglobin, which is a good example. A similar iron-containing structure is part of many other proteins, including proteins involved in extracting energy from food, and proteins carrying out photosynthesis. Iron is part of many other, very different, enzymes as well. For example, there are iron-sulfur structures in many enzymes that are unrelated to the iron-containing structure in hemoglobin.
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