
And a cereal option is iron-fortified cereals as well as iron-fortified breads. But if you’ve bean there, done that, you could be getting enough iron from white beans, lentils, kidney beans, and peas. Lean meat, seafood, and poultry are among the best sources. If you are a bit rusty on what types of foods have lots of iron, remember that it can tougher to meet recommended daily intake levels of iron if you don’t eat, well, meat. For adult women, ages 19 through 50 years, this recommended daily intake jumps up to 18 mg of iron, compared to 8 mg for men in the same age range.

The recommended daily intake of iron is the same (8 mg) for both girls and boys when they are nine to 13 years of age. Among those who had not yet begun to menstruate, 27.1% had iron deficiency when using the 25-μg/L ferritin level threshold.īlood through menstruation is a major reason why girls who are 14 to 18 years of age are recommended to have at daily intake of iron of at least 15 mg compared to 11 mg for boys of the same age, as indicated by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Dietary Supplements.

This percentage dropped to 17% when a lower, more stringent 15 μg/L ferritin cutoff was used for iron deficiency and rose to 77.5% with a 50 μg/L cutoff. A much larger percentage (38.6%) of the teens girls and young women studied had iron deficiency when the threshold for iron deficiency was having blood ferritin levels of less than 25 μg/L.
