I know that you can’t eat stuff made of iron, but I don’t know WHY you can’t just eat iron stuff. I know iron supplements exist how is that different?
In: Biology
It’s all just iron. The iron in the food is the same as the iron in the ground. You just get very, very small amounts of it in your food. Some people buy these little solid iron thingies (usually shaped like a fish) to put in their pots and pans while they cook to enrich their food with iron. You need iron and a deficiency of it can cause you to become lightheaded, among other things, but iron takes a long time to be processed by the body so you should only take supplements if recommended by a doctor. So technically, taking iron supplements on a whim can sort of be as bad as just eating iron
It’s the same, but the iron in food is just VERY small amounts compared to just a hunk of iron
Like the daily recommended amount of iron for an adult is 18mg, which is about 0.0002 cubic inches in volume
There isn’t a difference. It’s the same kind of iron. It’s also the same iron in blood and that’s used to make steel. I’m fact, cooking with iron objects in the pot is a recommended treatment for people with iron deficiency because some of the iron breaks off in the food and is eaten.
Iron supplements are usually in a salt form that is more easily dissolved and absorbed into the body. Iron fortification in food is quite literally just iron that’s ground extremely fine and put in minute amounts in food. The reason why you can’t just eat a solid chunk of iron is that your teeth will break once you chomp down on it, and if you manage to swallow down iron shavings, they will shred the soft tissues of your mouth, throat, and stomach as you try to eat it
You can eat metal iron, the stomach acid is strong enough to dissolve some of it into useable form. But overdosing on iron is also possible -the daily requirement for iron is about a spec of dust, so don’t start taking ball bearings instead of iron pills.
You absolutely can just eat iron. Cast iron pans and a little tool called the Lucky Iron Fish that you put in your soup while its stewing can be used to try to increase someones intake by leaching iron into the water.
That said, there are different forms of iron, and its form matters a lot in terms of us actually getting it into our bodies.
It comes in three forms. Pure iron, Ferrous iron, and Ferric iron. Ferric iron is not soluble, it’s the stuff that makes rust bright red. You can only absorb Ferrous iron, so it’s best to have a supplement that has ferrous iron, not ferric. That said, you do have an enzyme in your gut that can change ferric to ferrous, so it’s not like you won’t get *any* iron if you decide to chow down on some rust.
Pure iron would turn into ferrous iron in your acidic gut. The issue is you only need a few thousandths of a gram of iron per day, so if you ate a spoonful of iron filings, you’d be in trouble.
The reason irons so great for us is that it’s really reactive. That reactiveness is exactly why you don’t want a whole load of it floating around – it’ll react with *you* and start messing all the chemicals that make you up*.* Iron’s also so vital to us that we never evolved a way to get rid of it other than by bleeding. That means if you ate a whole bunch of pure iron, you will get very sick and without a doctor, there’s nothing you can do about it.
You can just eat iron,, it just has to be ground up and in the proper amounts. Take a bag of iron fortified cereal and run a magnet over it.. you’ll see iron filings all throughout it.
Just run a magnet around in some dry cereal with iron in the ingredients and then tell me you aren’t eating iron….
It’s the same atoms, but in different chemical compounds.
A regular chunk of iron is crystals of pure iron and iron oxide; very stable, not water-soluble, so your body can’t break away individual atoms efficiently to use them.
Iron in food and supplements is torn away from the crystal in a “mobile” form, typically salts (attached to an acid) or part of a protein (in use by another organism). Salts are often water-soluble, proteins are digestible, so your body has no issue extracting and using this form of iron.
>but I don’t know WHY you can’t just eat iron stuff
[Yes you can](https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/how-to-extract-iron-from-cereal).
Latest Answers