Iron In Your Food

If you are feeling faint, are finding yourself frequently irritable and getting short out of breath a lot and are losing color on your normally pink cheeks, then you might be suffering from iron deficiency anemia. As the name suggests, you lack a very important nutrient - iron. Everybody needs iron. This mineral is important because it is what aids our able bodies to produce hemoglobin. The latter being the oxygen carrier in our red blood cells has the vital task of delivering oxygen from our should-be-healthy lungs to the rest of the parts of the human body. Low levels of iron means low levels of hemoglobin. And when our tissues are starved enough of oxygen then we get a dose of the terrible symptoms earlier mentioned.

Iron is critically important during the growth year periods namely infancy, childhood, adolescence particularly for menstruating women and pregnancy. It is on these stages when our body produces more blood tissues. The more tissues we get, the more our blood volume increases and it follows that we need more iron to transport and distribute oxygen to the new additions. Inadequacy and shortcoming of iron supply especially during the infant phase can cause grave consequences which might be life long. Iron deficiency anemia at earlier stages will have a major effect on the cognitive functions and could even lead to mental impairment. Tests have shown that children who were low with iron demonstrated low performances on aptitude tests and low learning curves as compared to those who had adequate intake of iron in their diets.