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How much iron is too much?
Noticed that DV for Iron for an adult male is only 8mg. According to my food diary entries for today I consumed over 15 mg of iron or 190% DV. Should I be worried about consuming too much iron. This is probably my daily intake of iron every day. I had a heart attack in 2009 and I've read that too much iron can be bad for people with heart disease.
Since my average intake of dietary iron is around 16 mg per day and the only supplements I take is a multivitamin with no iron and the UL of iron for an adult male is about 45 mg, I'm not going to worry about it. Thanks
Interesting. So basically just get iron from normal foods, don't take supplements and let the body take care of itself. I think such research is stemming from the new idea of pumping supplements into the body. However, it's researchers who cause this problem. They analyse a tiny portion of a population and claim that many people are too low in vitamin x,y and z. People read this, panic and pack their bodies with supplements. Why don't they easy? just remove them all off the shelf and make it so only a DR can prescribe them. Then we will stop the overdosing. Eating healthy foods is sufficient unless you have a physical problem, and then a DR should be monitoring you. We are warmed to stay out of the sun because of cancer, and then we are told we are all too low in vitamin D. We can't win if we listen to the researchers.
I haven't heard of iron being bad for heart disease, what I do know is that it's important for haemoglobin which carries your oxygen. With low iron, your oxygen levels in the blood would drop. If you don't take supplements, I think your body will basically just absorb what it needs from foods. To prove this (if you so desire), take iron supplements and after a day or two, you will see your stools change to a greenish colour due to your body not absorbing more than it requires.
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"However, too much iron can build up in our bodies resulting in a condition called iron overload and contribute to the development of a number of diseases. In fact, the medical world began to pay closer attention to the correlation of high iron ferritin levels and high heart attack rates that were published in a 1992 Finnish study."
"Iron overload creates an aggregate, or extra amount of, red blood cells which creates deposits of a sticky fibrinous material that attaches itself to the inside of internal organs and structures. These deposits can lead to diseases like:
Liver cirrhosis or cancer
Diabetes
Heart attack/heart failure
Neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer, Parkinson, or Huntington’s disease
Osteoporosis
Low thyroid (hypothyroidism)
"Here are a few of the warning symptoms of iron overload:
Chronic fatigue
Joint pain
Abdominal pain (from liver involvement)
Diabetes (from pancreas involvement)
Elevated iron levels (serum iron, ferritin)
Irregular heart rhythms"
"Men: Men below the age of 80 need about 8 mg of iron as well – same as postmenopausal women. This amount can well be met by eating a healthy diet and watching iron levels of fortified foods. Recommendation: Be sure your multivitamin/mineral supplement does not contain iron. Over age 80, dietary intake may be lower than what it was in younger years and a man may need extra iron at this time. However, this should be confirmed by lab tests (RBCs) first and assessed by a physician who can make the appropriate iron recommendations at that time."