I have, very regretfully, stopped using cast iron. Being a man, in a country where I can't easily donate blood, iron load is something that I want to be careful of.
It is possible to cook with cast iron in a way that won't leech too much iron into food, just as it is possible to cook with nonstick in a way that won't leech Dupont chemicals. But I'd much rather just use foolproof stainless or ceramic cookware that doesn't have these issues.
What? Unless you have haemochromatosis this is really tinfoilery over the iron levels acquired through natural ingestion, especially the thought of leach levels from a pan. You get more iron from meat or a bowl of cereal than you could ever get from a pan without it being flat out dissolved in the process over the course of a handful of cooks.
Is the iron that leaches from pan even bio-available? Aren't supplements very specific compounds? I can admit that it might be toxic, but that toxicity is not due to something like over production of haemoglobin...
A pan is about 1 kg (a good cast iron one could be much heavier). That's enough for 200,000 bowls of cereal.
Even if you reckon the pan is degraded enough to be obviously useless after losing 5% of its weight, that would require you to use it every day for 30 years, not "a handful of cooks".
Is this comment an implicit endorsement of giving blood as a health benefit because it allows to slough off heavy metals or something? what…? News to me.
I don't understand the issue with cast iron pots after reading that either.
My understanding is that to get iron overload, your body would need to absorb excess iron and store it. This happens with haemochromatosis over a long time (30+ years), but it can also happen if you consume way too much iron by, for example, taking too many iron supplements when you don't need them. In normal circumstances and with a standard diet, the body will regulate it's iron intake so that too much doesn't get stored and so there's no iron oberload.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but this leaves me a little confused about what the commenter meant. If you have a normal diet and don't have haemochromatosis or some other confounding factor, I don't see how enough iron could be leached from a cast iron pot to cause iron overload.
If you cook acidic things like tomatoes, apparently it can leech a significant amount of iron - apparently in some cases exceeding what you'd get from food.
Yeah, the main problem for men isn't full blown iron overload but rather subclinical iron excess which mostly comes from dietary heme iron since it bypasses the body's iron intake regulator compared to non-heme iron.
It makes no sense to fixate on elemental iron residue from your cast iron pan, especially if you're still getting heme iron infusions from red meat.
Anyone who doesn't lose blood somehow - for modern humans that usually means either menstruation or blood donation - should be careful of sources of excess iron in their diet. It's one reason why multivitamin supplements are often labelled as "for men" or "for women". The women's one will have iron.
My other half works for the NHS blood/transfusion department and was able to trace my blood (after I gave her the number on the blood pack) and confirm that I was negative for various diseases including syphilis.
Also, you get a free iron/anaemia test before donating.
Too much of anything is bad. A quart of table salt would kill you. A bucket of water force-fed into you could kill you.
Hemoglobin in blood contains a lot of iron; it's used to bind oxygen. Too much iron intake apparently can result in its overproduction, and too much is no good. Donating blood rids you of excess iron, while also benefiting other people.
I suppose you should first check if your levels of iron are indeed excessive.
