FEELING TIRED EVEN AFTER A SOLID NIGHT’S SLEEP? Turns out one in two women is iron-deficient

Hands up if you’re feeling tired even after a solid night’s sleep? Join the club! It could be an iron deficiency: a recent study shows that about one in two women are deficient in iron.

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Iron deficiency is the most common and widespread nutritional disorder.

tiredness. When the number of red blood cells drops below a certain level, it’s called iron deficiency anaemia, though you can have anaemia without having an iron deficiency.

Two knock-on effects of a lack of oxygen are lowered immunity (so you get sick more often) and a lowered ability to concentrate. The lack of iron – and oxygen – also affects your body’s ability to regulate its temperature.

Iron also helps our muscles to store and use oxygen, and forms part of enzymes that help to digest food, among other functions.

Pregnant women have a heightened need for iron, and a severe deficiency could mean a preterm or a smallerthan-normal baby. These too-tiny tots are sadly at greater risk of health problems or death before they’ve even reached a year.

SO WHERE DO YOU GET IT?

Oysters! And chocolate! Yes, really.

The US Institute of Medicine says the recommended dietary allowance (RDA) for iron ranges from 18mg for women aged 19 to 50, to 8mg for men. Just think: there’s a thousand of those millis in just one gram! Once women are over 51, the amount they need drops to the same level as that for men. (It’s down to iron loss in menstruation, obv.) The thing is, even though your body needs only traces of iron, you need to eat far more than a few milligrams of the food it’s in to get enough.

For a food to qualify as a great source of a nutrient, the US Department of Agriculture (who’ve done extensive research into all this) reckons it should give you about 20% of that nutrient’s RDA. And according to their nutrient database, oysters and chocolate tick that box better than most other foods, with just 85g of each giving 44% and 39% of your daily value. An important proviso on the quality of choc: it should be dark and contain 45–69% cocoa solids.

A couple of other foods deserve special mention. It wasn’t for nothing that your mum tried to feed you beef liver as a child: at 28% of what you need in a day, 85g of pan-fried liver is right near the top of the list. And a rather surprisingly great source is white beans, which, along with those oysters, top the ranking. (With beans, things aren’t quite that simple, though.) Close contenders for the ‘great source’ label are half a cup each of lentils and spinach. And after that, kidney beans, sardines (bones in), chickpeas, tomatoes, beef, potato and cashew nuts are reasonably good sources. There’s a cautionary note for vegetarians from the National Institutes of Health: your recommended daily allowance is 1.8 times higher than for meat-eaters. How so? They explain that heme iron from meat is more bioavailable than non-heme iron from plant-based foods, and meat, poultry, and seafood increase the absorption of non-heme iron. Bioavailability, as you probably know, is the degree to which what you eat is actually absorbed by your body. The problem