Iron in dried apricots?

[jessmarimba]

I've been looking for ways to improve my iron intake. A few websites (including webmd and the American Red Cross) have listed dried apricots as a good source of non-heme iron. So I bought a bag at the grocery store and I've been munching on them (yummy!) but I looked at the back and it lists iron at 0%. ?? Did the brand I get somehow remove the iron in the processing? Or is the serving size on the brand too small to register the iron? Or is there really no iron in dried apricots?

(And along those lines...why only dried? Because you'd have to eat way too many regular ones to get a reasonable amount of iron? So did they maybe use the iron content of an undried apricot on the brand I bought to estimate the content for the dried ones?)

Thanks!

[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]

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.

[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...

[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.

[Owlie]

What about cooking in big batches on weekends? Crockpot beef stew, or a week's worth of taco/burrito meat...

[jessmarimba]

I'll probably crockpot again when it gets cooler.

The other problem is that without a microwave, it takes longer to reheat leftovers than the salad/pasta options. And I don't really want a microwave. I was just looking for less obvious sources of iron.

[OakLeaf]

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

Huh?

[Owlie]

Huh?

They seem to have only used three samples for most of them. I should turn off the science-speak sometimes...

[OakLeaf]

I would've figured it out if I'd bothered to click through. Yikes. Three (or fewer) 100-g samples to publish these figures that people rely on??? I guess that gives you an idea how seriously they take nutrition.



And a lot of the nutritional values they give are based on zero data points, estimated from "another form of the same food, or similar food." Including the figures for dehydrated apricots, except for vitamin C and the B-complex which are likely to be further degraded by the extra processing. Which still doesn't explain the variation in iron between dehydrated apricots and the other forms.


It's worth noting that for dried apricots, they had three data points, a mean iron content per 100 g of 2.66 g and a standard deviation of 0.624.