Iron and First Foods
You’ll hear a lot about iron levels with a new baby, from pregnancy through your baby’s first few years.
Key points
Is there such a thing as too much breast feeding? Since very little iron is passed through breast milk, if a baby gets TOO full on yummy, fat, wonderful milk, they will not want to, or need to, eat anything else. Iron is one of those things (among others) we need real foods for. Most of these can be found in meat and leafy veggies.
Real foods come in on a perfectly timed schedule, around 4-6 months when iron natural levels from birth (and mom’s placenta) have started to run out.
Calcium actually blocks absorption of key nutrients and vitamins, (V-D, V-E for example), as do fried foods and poor quality oils (like most foods cooked with canola oil).
Foods that help absorb are high in V-C, like sweet peppers and fruit
On the flip side, too MUCH iron in infant formula can also harm your baby, including delayed development.
Infants around 1 year old need 11 milligrams of iron a day: a serving of liver has more than anything else by a LOT, and all you need every day. Plant based iron sources are harder to absorb, so you need even more to hit what is needed. Next, grass fed ground beef has 2mg per serving, followed by things like lentils, spinach, sweet potatoes.
Iron is necessary for healthy red blood cells to move oxygen throughout the body. Untreated low levels of healthy blood can cause low energy, but also cause physical and mental delays (walking and talking), and anemic (the official term) children tend to score lower on tests and be disruptive in the classroom. But also noted, babies given a formula with high levels of iron also lagged behind on coordination and memory tests.
Iron does a lot to do with physical growth: think muscle’s ability to use nutrients from blood, formation of nerve cells, and making hormones.
In reality, iron ties closely with breast feeding, and how much real foods the baby is getting. Because as long as the baby is drinking MOSTLY milk, they are not getting enough iron. So this discussion is tied intimately to the foods baby starts to eat, and when, and along with that, how long a mom decides to continue breast feeding.
As my baby reached 1 year old, I started to think more about “normal” ages when moms around the world breast feed. How long is normal? (vs popular)? What about around the world, and through time? The worldwide average age for breast feeding is about 4 years old (not exclusive, but still ongoing). In the US, most women start breastfeeding (85%+), but by 6 months, only about 60% women still do, then down to 35% by 1 year (not even exclusively, but breast feeding at all). The CDC recommends 6 months, and that seems to resonate in many people’s minds as the goal. My goal was 1-2 years, based on immunity recommendations, and even American Academy of Pediatrics recommending at LEAST 1 year.
As i was getting my breast feeding journey started, I was surprised to find how strongly some people’s opinions were on the topic, and how there was not much concensus, at least not at first glance, on this important first step in a baby’s life. I quickly learned many people think that breast feeding beyond 2 years as kind of strange, as being “more for the mom than the baby”. (So not true… but even if so, what would be wrong with that?! ha). And as much as it would be nice to be “free” from thinking about feeding or pumping to keep supply up, I actually was a bit sad about thinking about weening. My baby just loves it so much! And for me, there are no dishes to clean, and as long as I work from home, I am mostly around all day with my little guy, and no need to stop the chance for intimate moments, touch, and all that important nutrition (and expensive organic foods!) and antibody helpers. But I also totally understand moms who felt such a relief to be done of the burden of worrying about her milk supply and constant attachment. (Note: this story is not meant to make anyone feel guilty about feelings about choosing to breast feed or not, or how long, but finding out what our BODIES are expecting of us).
Okay, beyond social norms… let’s get back to the data.
The reality of breast feeding is that it is more important than just nutrition. A book called Touch actually demonstrates breast feeding is more about sensation of TOUCH, especially in the beginning of a baby’s life, even over nourishment. A baby can actually go its first few days without any food at all, while mom’s milk supply comes in, and both partners figure out the feeding dance. That is obviously not an optimal scenario, but is interesting to note the biological NEEDS of a baby, in the beginning, are more tied to establishing CLOSENESS, a bond, a physical need to be together, being more important than nutritional needs. Don’t believe it? Look at the experiments about monkeys. The poor baby monkeys would rather cuddle with an empty bottle covered in soft blanket than a wire monkey full of milk, all the way to starvation. The need for touch and cuddling is more important than we can ever believe, no matter how “woo” we consider touchy-feely things to be over the supposed "hard science” of nutritional research. And that popular understanding of nutrition and working out is obsolete. We see food and energy as only with the “calorie in/calorie out” model, but we are essentially looking at the wrong units (sorry, engineering nerd here). The calorie is essentially the UPS truck, but we are interested in what is in those packages more than just a pretty brown box showing up. We can trick our bodies into THINKING we have nutrients coming in the exact same way. With this model, we THINK we can eat whatever we want, “in moderation”, then can work it off. But, using a diet of M&M’s as an extreme case, bad food will not keep anyone alive for very long, already debunking the myth of calorie hypothesis. Someone even did a study of monkeys and cats, and within the first generation of a diet of potato chips, illness sets in, and reproduction essentially stops. Yes, quality of food matters, not just quantity.
So aside from breast milk, we have to start thinking about adding outside foods into our baby’s body in the first 4 months of so of life. Milk is still THE most important thing, and nobody seems to argue that - whether it be from mom (best), formula (getting quite good), and lastly, from animals (suggested ONLY after 1 year old… making you wonder why we drink it at all… more on that later).
At 4 months, babies are meant to just start licking the spoon, so to speak. We are getting them used to flavors, and textures (more slowly), and by a year, they should be familiar with most things they are going to be eating. If you notice, baby’s natural instincts are to put anything and EVERYTHING into their mouths, during a very specific age, when their gut is trying to develop the most diverse set of gut bugs possible. Then by about age 3, that picky toddler age sets in. As a baby can start to walk (age 1), they can also start to pick up their own foods, mostly guided by an adult (since babies are still pretty helpless at this age). By about age 3, when babies CAN start wandering around and living more independently, they also develop serious food aversions and tastes. This makes sense too: with so many plants and things to eat in the wild, our body wants us to stick to the ones we know, the ones our mommies and daddies and loving community around us has showed us for the last few years. Anything else is yucky, or really, dangerous. This all leads us back to introducing as many foods as possible before the pickiness sets in. And showing these foods not just once, but many times, so their little bodies can get used to them.
Food allergies: some studies show religious ritual using peanut butter in infants in Israel lead to some of the lowest levels of peanut allergies in the world. Strong case for early introduction.
Back to the main topic… iron.
After around 6 months, babies reserves of iron from being in mom’s belly start to disappear, and that baby needs to start getting iron on their own. This all comes down to the fact that iron does not cross through blood (and milk is a byproduct of blood). While in mom’s belly, your baby gets all the nutrition and iron from their mom via the placenta (that temporary ORGAN that magically appears and disappears with each pregnancy).
As long as the baby gets enough placenta blood (waiting at least 5 min to cut the umbilical cord after birth), your baby should get enough iron to last about 6 months, eating only breast milk. This does cross over nicely into the 4m+ recommendation to start introducing foods slowly to avoid food allergies like nuts, etc. This transition continues to about 75% of calories coming in from outside breast milk by year 1, and mostly, if not all, calories from elsewhere by age 2.
Now looking at things biologically, I like to try to figure out the best times to start weaning, etc based on what our evolutionary biology expects from us. Working backwards, Most toddlers are getting enough iron around 2 years old, ramping up quickly after about 1 year. This seems to mean most babies slowly decrease the breast milk,
The other tell tale sign is average age of lactose intolerance starting around 2-4 years old. There are some genes, mostly Swedish in origin, that low levels of V-D apparently were supplemented by ability to digest lactose more easily. Most adults today, 60%, are lactose intolerant, and many do not even realize it. Some are much more obviously effected than others, while some have symptoms that show up in the subtle ways of chronic inflammation, different in every person. This can include acne, joint pain, low energy, and all kinds of weird stuff we chalk off as daily expectations. I ate cereal every day with 2% milk through basically 30 years old. Finally, at 35, I realized with CERTAINTY that dairy was causing my horrible acne.
Also, calcium in milk apparently blocks absorption of V-D (which is actually a hormone, not a vitamin as the name once proposed). So all this is to lead us to believe we were not really meant to be drinking milk, (esp not in large amounts of factory animal milks and cheeses), as our society wants us to believe, after the age of about 2-4 years old (set up for profit and helping out an obsolete farming incentive structure).
Another reason to think about how much breast milk to feed an infant is in the amount of time formula companies recommend formula over animal milk, which tends to be about 1 year old. While nobody is willing to tell moms they should do something, and few people are willing to fund helpful things like that, you can rest assured that for-profit companies funded as many studies as possible to find ANY incentive for their products, and you can use that data to understand what it was saying about needs of breast milk, which is virtually ALWAYS better than formula. But politically, nobody wants to make a mom feel bad if she stops breast feeding for ANY reason, especially if she had really wanted to be breast feeding.
The numbers
Okay, so how much iron should a baby be getting by age?
As you get older, the needs of iron stay basically the same, especially for adult males, sticking around 10 mg/day. Iron needs increase dramatically for women when fertile, from 15 mg/day as teenagers to 27 mg/day when pregnant, back down to 9 mg/day when breast feeding. Iron really starts to seem like a key nutrient for birth.
The best sources of iron are…
TYPES OF IRON & HOW TO AID IRON ABSORPTION
There are two types of naturally occurring iron found in our diet:
Haem iron – found in animal food (e.g red meat, poultry & seafood) is absorbed well by the body.
Non-heam iron – found in plant foods (e.g beans, lentil, fortified cereals and leafy green vegetables ) is less well absorbed.
Although many vegetarian foods are a good source of iron, our bodies don’t absorb it so well, and may just need more attention to adding in the right amount.
Some foods can help your body absorb iron from iron-rich foods; others can hinder it. To absorb the most iron from the foods you eat:
Combine iron-rich food with fruit and vegetables high in vitamin C. (Vitamin C aids absorption)
Where possible include both animal and plant sources of iron in the same meal. (Animal protein boosts iron absorption from plant sources.)
Cook your plant foods to improve the amount of available iron (e.g the body absorbs six per cent of the iron from raw broccoli, compared to 30 per cent from cooked broccoli.)
Limit dairy during or directly after having a source of iron. (Calcium inhibits absorption of iron)
Don’t allow your child to drink more than 24 ounces (710 millilitres) of milk a day. (If young children fill up on milk, then they often don’t eat many other iron-rich foods. Milk also decreases the absorption of iron)
Tips
Try incorporating spinach into a variety of dishes, including soups, sauces. It will wilt and may be more acceptable. You can even blend it into sauces.
Roasting vegetables, in my opinion, is a kid-friendly way of cooking vegetables. Try serving roasted broccoli or kale chips.
To boost absorption, try serving them with fruits and vegetables that are rich in vitamin C. E.g Sprinkle kale chips on top of chilli made with a tomato based sauce, blend spinach into a tomato-based pasta sauce.
Recipes
MAIN MEALS
Turkey Meatballs in a Tomato Sauce
Why it is good -Iron from the turkey and vitamin C from the tomato sauce.
Why it is good -Iron from the beef and some vitamin C from the Capsicum (bell pepper.)
Why it is good -Includes both animal (chicken) and plant (chickpeas) sources of iron and cooked in a tomato sauce (Vit C)
Why it is good – Includes both animal (beef) and plant (beans) sources of iron and cooked in a tomato sauce (Vit C)
Sweet Potato & Chickpea Curry (V)
Why it is good – Chickpea and sweet potato are sources of iron. Sweet potato is also a source of Vitamin C which is good for iron absorption.
Lentil & Sweet Potato Shepherds Pie (V)
Why it is good – Lentils are a source of iron and sweet potato is a source of iron and Vitamin C.
LUNCH
Why it is good – Salmon is a source of iron
Why it is good – Iron from the tuna
Why it is good – Lentils, egg and sweet potato are sources of iron. Sweet potato is a source of vitamin C
Why it is good – Sweet Potato is a source of iron and Vitamin C.
Why it is good – Quinoa is a source of iron and the tomato and pineapple aids absorption.
Why it is good – Iron from chickpea flour
SNACK IDEAS
Why it is good – Iron from the dried apricot and cashew nuts. Serve with some fruits high in vitamin C to aid absorption.
Why it is good – Both dates and peanut butter are sources of iron. Serve with some fruits high in vitamin C to aid absorption.
Why it is good – Iron from chickpeas, chia seeds, oats and dates. Vit C from blueberries & raspberries.
