The answer then is that excess iron in your diet is unsafe however you get it, but that cast iron pans, while within safe levels themselves, can act as a contributory factor to excess iron, with any of its associated health dangers. When you consider statistics that claim a helping of pasta and red sauce cooked in a non-cast iron pan adds around 0.69 mg of iron to your body, and the same helping, cooked in a cast iron pan, adds around 5.7 mg of iron to your body, the amounts we’re talking about are not trivial. So, does the use of a cast iron pan contribute to harmful iron excess in the body? Not necessarily – but possibly. More than that and we can be absorbed too much. Women between the age of 19-50 need 14.8 mg per day. Men and postmenopausal women need roughly 8.7 mg of iron per day to stay healthy. And part of the point that makes iron an issue is that once it’s been absorbed into our system, it doesn’t go anywhere, it just sits there, accumulating, behind the scenes. It is true that excess iron in the body has been linked to a range of conditions, including Alzheimers, heart disease and colorectal cancer. So excess iron – which can include iron oxidized from cast iron pans – can affect different people differently. There’s also a more extreme risk of dangerous iron overload in people with hereditary hemochromatosis. Men, frequent red meat eaters, and postmenopausal women, for instance. There are many groups for whom too much iron in their system is a very real danger. There are people who have a strong iron deficiency, and among those most likely to need more iron in their diets are vegans (on the basis of their avoidance of the likes of iron-rich red meat), and menstruating women (on the basis of a loss of iron-rich blood).īut iron is a nutritional element in very delicate quantities. Because the answer is “It depends who eats it.” So the question is whether iron is dangerous when consumed. Where it goes is obvious – it goes into food, and from food into our bodies. The thing that has caused concern about cast iron pans and health is that with continual use, cast iron pans can lose some of their iron content. Cast iron pans are for the most part made of … well, cast iron.
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