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
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.
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