Iron in dried apricots?

[Owlie]

USDA says dried apricots have 2.66mg iron per 100g. The serving size is probably too small for them to list the iron.

(And yes, it's dried only because you'd have to eat rather a lot of fresh ones to get the same amount of iron.)

[OakLeaf]

Calorie for calorie though, the nutrition charts still say consistently that dried fruit has somewhat more iron than fresh.

I don't know why, because the nutrition analyses ignore any "subtleties" like what can be absorbed by the body and what can't. Obviously the charts depend on the fiction that food is fungible, so maybe it's something as simple as different varieties being used for drying vs. fresh consumption, or fruit being picked at different states of maturity for each.

[Owlie]

The iron values also differ between dried and dehydrated apricots, so maybe it is a varietal (and therefore soil differences) thing...

[TsPoet]

Dehydrated fruit also has more calories, due to the loss of water. Are you sure it isn't just that the iron has been "concentrated" by the loss of water?

[OakLeaf]

If you compare calorie for calorie dried vs. fresh vs. dehydrated, there's obviously something else going on besides taking out the water weight, but I have a feeling it's one of the things I guessed at.

Raw apricots have .008 mg Fe/kcal; sulfured dried apricots .011; sulfured dehydrated apricots .019. That's a lot of variation.

Anybody have any idea how big a sample size the USDA uses to come up with those values?

IAE, obviously food is NOT fungible, so there's no guarantee the apricots each of us eats have the same amount of iron as the ones the USDA sampled. Guidelines only ... not rigid values for counting ...

[Owlie]

If you compare calorie for calorie dried vs. fresh vs. dehydrated, there's obviously something else going on besides taking out the water weight, but I have a feeling it's one of the things I guessed at.

Raw apricots have .008 mg Fe/kcal; sulfured dried apricots .011; sulfured dehydrated apricots .019. That's a lot of variation.

Anybody have any idea how big a sample size the USDA uses to come up with those values?

IAE, obviously food is NOT fungible, so there's no guarantee the apricots each of us eats have the same amount of iron as the ones the USDA sampled. Guidelines only ... not rigid values for counting ...

Most of them seem to have three data points...

[OakLeaf]

Most of them seem to have three data points...

Huh?

[Owlie]

Dehydrated fruit also has more calories, due to the loss of water. Are you sure it isn't just that the iron has been "concentrated" by the loss of water?

Are we now talking calories per gram, or calories per serving.
The numbers I've been looking at are per 100g.

[westtexas]

Aside from dried fruits... what about cooking with cast iron? It leeches iron into your foods when you use it. Whether this is a source of iron the body can use or not, I do not know - but I have heard it can be helpful for those with low iron.

Personally I love cooking with cast iron because the clean up is so much easier - and by that I mean... no clean up.

I could be totally wrong though.

[jessmarimba]

Aside from dried fruits... what about cooking with cast iron? It leeches iron into your foods when you use it. Whether this is a source of iron the body can use or not, I do not know - but I have heard it can be helpful for those with low iron.

Personally I love cooking with cast iron because the clean up is so much easier - and by that I mean... no clean up.

I could be totally wrong though.

I've heard that too but I don't know that I cook enough for it to be worth it. Which is also part of the problem...meat generally needs to be cooked to be eaten, and I'm just too lazy/tired to do more than make a salad or a quick pasta meal for dinner. PB&J or soup for lunch, and yogurt & fruit for breakfast. I figured the apricots (and munching on pumpkin seeds) are a small change to start.