Estimation of dietary iron bioavailability from food iron intake and iron status.

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This study explores dietary iron levels in men and women and the bioavailability of iron in each gender. The study has 873 participants. There were 495 men and 378 women. All the women who participated were pre-menopausal, not pregnant and not currently breast feeding. The study was done for seven days; this is an appropriate amount of time for an individual’s nutritional status to be evaluated.
The goal of this study was for the authors to predict the prevalence of iron intake and find a specific amount of iron intake that can help to maintain an appropriate iron balance for optimal health. Some iron intake data was used from another study performed by the National Diet and Nutrition Survey. This data collection involved an interview with each person participating and it also had each person who was participating undergo blood and urine tests for a series of seven days (this being a minimum amount for the collection).
They analyzed the data they received through an MEIA kit. The mean iron levels were 13.5mg for women and 9.8 mg for men. They had hypothesized that women would have a 13% absorption rate and men would have a 14% absorption rate, concluding that iron would be more readily absorbed by men. They found that 31% of women had depleted iron stores and the men’s results were too low to get accurate numbers. The research had concluded that women had higher iron levels, higher serum ferritin levels and therefore were able to absorb iron better than men and had more stores available than men. Unfortunately, the authors do not know which gender had a higher percentage of depleted stores due to the lack of data for the males. BG.

Dainty, J. R., Berry, R., Lynch, S. R., Harvey, L. J., & Fairweather-Tait, S. J. (2014). Estimation of dietary iron bioavailability from food iron intake and iron status. Plos One, 9(10), e111824. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0111824  

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