this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Let's stick with the iron in your hemoglobin for some more weirdness. The body knows iron is hard to uptake, so when you bleed a lot under your skin and get a bruise, the body re-uptakes everything it can. Those color changes as the bruise goes away is part of the synthesis of compounds to get the good stuff back into the body, and send the rest away as waste.
In the other direction, coronaviruses can denature the iron from your hemoglobin. So some covid patients end up with terrible oxygen levels because the virus is dumping iron product in the blood, no longer able to take in oxygen. I am a paramedic and didn't believe this second one either, but on researching it explained to me why these patients were having so much trouble breathing on low concentration oxygen... the oxygen was there, but the transport system had lost the ability to carry it.
I had to take iron supplements in the past because my periods were so bad that I would lose my vision and pass out from loss of blood.
I don't have iron issues so I haven't completely fact checked this, but I have read in various places that using cast iron skillets to cook with does add more iron to your foods to help supplement.
There are also iron "fish", or fish shaped blocks of iron, that can be used while cooking which do the same thing!
Before using cast iron daily, when I donated blood my iron levels were regularly at the lowest allowable limit or sometimes too low to donate. Once I started cooking with cast iron, I started getting comments about how great my iron levels are every time I donate.
That is super interesting information and kind of makes sense with the seasoning involved.
But I recently learned you can get different enamel types that you don't have to season.
I would think an enameled skillet would not provide any extra iron; the glass that the enamel is made of forms a barrier between the iron and everything else. That's nice because you don't have to worry about it rusting any more, but it also means no iron in your food.
Yeah, its like a trade off. I'm uneasy about having to season a pan for some reason. I'm pretty sure I have OCD and if I can't clean a dish the way I clean my other dishes it bugs me to some extent.
Ah gotcha, I can understand how that might be a thing; cat iron is definitely something you treat differently than other dishes. There's a whole fascinating level of nerdery to proper seasoning, but it's definitely special cookware that doesn't fit the usual patterns.
yeah, for some reason it gets to me that there is something left on the pan on purpose. My brain just wants me to scrub it all off.
What about if you think off it like Teflon on a nonstick pan?
I use a ceramic pan mostly and try to stay away from nonstick and teflon because that can scratch over time and get into food.
I also have an issue with rinsing out dishes. I'm worried there is still going to be soap so I just rinse things over and over.
Yeah, I stay away from the nonstick stuff as well, for the same reason. Just thought that thinking of seasoning as a nonstick coating target than as something to be cleaned off might be helpful, though I totally get it if not.
You'll just develop a new ocd about how sexy you can make your cast iron look. They're the only dishes related thing I enjoy cleaning up.
lmao that's definitely not how OCD works.