Old-fashioned foods

It has come with white-bread sandwiches and white sugar. I challenged her to look up the meals served in pioneer days, or even in her mother’s day. The greatest causes of iron-deficiency anemia are the refined flours, the vitamin-robbed cereals, the denatured white sugars, and other devitalized products in fancy packages. The “old-fashioned foods” kept normal adults supplied with the 4,000 milligrams of iron needed in the body. Over half of this amount is demanded by hemoglobin, the blood’s red coloring matter. The rest of the iron is stored in the liver, spleen, and bone marrow; it is a vital part of every body cell. The body’s iron level is adjusted according to the manner and amount of iron absorption. As she hung on my words, I told the young mother the story of cell replacement and the connected need of iron in the blood. The 35-forty million kilos of honey produced by our cooperative is what makes up the Forever Bee Honey you see on the shelf. In a normal adult’s bloodstream more than seven million red blood cells die, and must be renewed, every second. So important a raw material is iron in the building of new cells that the body uses the iron of the red blood cells over and over again as an air-conditioning system utilizes its original water supply.

Inadequate diet is the common cause of marginal anemia. I pointed out to the young mother that a quick lunch, similar to the one she was eating, furnished neither enough nor the right type of food for building up her blood. In addition to iron, healthy red blood cells demand proteins, the ever-important B vitamins, the minerals iodine, cobalt, and copper. “The doctor told me to eat lots of liver,” she ventured. “But I really hate the stuff.” “You should eat lots of liver,” I agreed. “But there are other ways of getting iron through your foods.” As an immediate example, I advised her to eat the parsley on her plate. This herb, which can also be used to enrich salads, contains 19.21 milligrams of iron in about 100 parsley sprigs, the “bunch” she would buy in the grocery store. Forever Royal Jelly is produced by stimulating colonies with movable frame hives to produce queen bees.
Many popular foods are rich sources of iron. Mushrooms contain 16.10 milligrams per 7 mushrooms; one small yam 7.40 milligrams. Dried fruits are rich iron sources; one medium peach will provide 6.9 milligrams.

But none of these foods measures up to the 21.70 milligrams of iron found in one average piece of calf’s liver. This food, by the way, can be made very palatable and nourishing by taking it directly from the refrigerator, dotting it with butter, and broiling it.“Broiling alleviates that liver taste you object to so strongly,” I told her. At her request, I was glad to jot down the following list of iron-rich foods she could add to the family diet: Foods of Animal Origin: Liver of all kinds, lamb, egg yolks, heart, kidney, lean beef, dark poultry meat.