Hi I’m Dr. Kiki Sanford and today on food science were going to play with our cereal.
Breakfast cereal is a stable of many American household from sugar bombs to super nutritious it comes in all shapes and flavors. However, so that people can make educated choices about their diet and that of their children cereals must state how much of certain required vitamins and minerals they contain. One common cereal claims to deliver 100% of all the iron you need for and entire day in a single serving, nice. But iron is found in nails and is a component in steel what is it doing in your breakfast cereal.
Iron in addition to helping make skyscrapers possible is actually something we need to eat in our food. Now you can play with magnets and nails and you can even play with the magnet and iron supplements. But have you ever tried playing with a magnet in your breakfast cereal it’s takes a little practice but it’s fairly easy to move around cereal instead of nails. Watch. How much iron do you really need everyday. The US RDA is between 10 and 18mg depending on age and sex.
Women are recommended to get 15mg per day and up to 30mg if they’re pregnant or breast feeding. Men are recommended to get 10mg each day. Iron is essential to the proper functioning of your cells and various enzymes. It also makes up a large part of the oxygen carrying molecules in our blood “Hemoglobin”. Hemoglobin is a metallic protein with four globular protein subunits enclosing four heme groups. The heme groups each contain one iron atom embedded within a ring like molecule called “Porforen”. The iron is the active oxygen binding portion of hemoglobin, four iron atoms means that each molecule of hemoglobin can bind four oxygen’s.
Obviously it’s important, so if you don’t get enough iron in your diet it can lead to trouble. Iron deficiency can lead to weakness, fatigue, anemia, irritability, and dirt eating. So back to the cereal, did you know that it’s actually possible to see the iron in you’re cereal well it is. And I’m going to show you how, first you take your breakfasts cereal and stick it on a blender, a cup or two that will work pretty well, add water just to cover the flakes. Put the lid back on and mix it up really well, you don’t want any thick flakes remaining.
That looks pretty good, take the slurry and put it into a bowl, there’s the cereal then take your magnet and just stir the slurry for about a minute or so, I’ll be back in a minute. Iron is lost during the processing of most foods so in some cases like flour, food manufacturers have taken to enriching their products with elemental iron. Elemental iron is not absorbed by the body as easily as iron found naturally in foods. You’re likely to eat foods other than cereal that contain iron, so the question is can you get to much? Well the answer is both yes and no the body has no way to excrete extra iron. But it’s absorption is very tightly regulated, so if you can manage to get your body to absorb it you can wind up with too much iron in your blood and tissues, which can lead to iron toxicity. Ingestion of 60mg per kilogram of body weight is lethal but considering that most people don’t even make the RDA of 18mg per day death from iron poisoning for the average person is unlikely.
So now you’re going to want to rinse your magnet lightly in water, make sure you get all of the cereal off of it. Can you see the iron on the magnet all the black stuff that you see are the iron filling from you’re cereal, but remember it’s not just food.
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