Family Forum / Parenting / Parenting / January 2006

Have you tried increasing her iron through her diet?

Mary Ann

Polyvisol can be put in a drink, you know.   The problem with the
vitamins with iron that look like candy is that kids want to take to
much and they can lead to iron poisoning.

There is a Flintstones vitamin called Flintstones complete that has
iron in it.

--
Dorothy

There is no sound, no cry in all the world
that can be heard unless someone listens ..

The Outer Limits

Raisins are a decent  source of iron.  My 22 month old loves the
little boxes of "candy"  ;-)

Nan

We use Nature's Plus Animal Parade multi vit and mineral. They're
chewable and come in 3 or 4 flavors bottled individually or in a mixed
flavors bottle. They are vegetarian (as are we) and hypo-allergenic, and
made from whole food concentrates. They are about $11-12 for a bottle of
90. (They also make a separate calcium, which we also use.) I started
ds1 on them around age 2.The dose for a 4+ year old is two chewables, so
for age 2-4 I gave 1 chewable. The bottle lists the RDA values for both
age 2 and age 4; the serving size is indicated to be 2 chewables, which
puts the values for age 2 very high, so giving one chewable brings the
values into a more reasonable range. So the iron value for age 2 with
one chewable would be 2.5mg, or 25% RDA. I figure that's a good
baseline, and then the rest in our case still comes from breastmilk and
diet.

I would recommend getting a couple of cast iron pans and cooking some of
your child's food in those each day. I have one in which I can put a
steamer basket and steam veggies in it, warm soups in it, and a skillet
in which I cook scrambled eggs, stir fry, etc. (Not sure if you eat
eggs, but you get the idea.)

Don't forget to push the dark green leafies, beans, whole grains. Really
try to keep your veggie diet varied and the child should be fine.

I'd be careful with the dried fruits. Although higher in iron, they can
be dangerous for teeth. I thought I was doing my kid a favor, exposing
him to all variety of fruits through these organic fruit leathers. He
used to eat one every day, until he had to have three fillings and an
abcessed tooth had to be pulled. If you do give things like raisins, be
sure to floss (my downfall at the time) and brush and generally try to
get the teeth rinsed with water right after eating them.

-Karen, veggie mom to two veggie kids Henry 5.5 and William 1.5-

If you aren't already doing it, get some decent cast iron (uncoated cast
iron) cookware, and cook in it regularly.  It may not be enough to
eliminate the need for iron supplements, but it goes a very long way.  
(I had one brother who was mildy anemic as a toddler, and for him it WAS
enough -- Mom just made sure to cook at least one meal a day in cast
iron.)

I'm not a professional, so take what I say with a grain of salt.  It is
my understanding that when a person is deficient in iron, it's not that
they're not getting enough iron; it's that their body is having trouble
or not absorbing the iron that it gets.  Figuring out the absorption
part *seems* to me to be the goal rather than simply adding iron.  I
might be full of you know what in what I'm saying, but this is what
comes to mind when hearing your dilemma.

I'm not a professional, so take what I say with a grain of salt.  It is
my understanding that when a person is deficient in iron, it's not that
they're not getting enough iron; it's that their body is having trouble
or not absorbing the iron that it gets.  Figuring out the absorption
part *seems* to me to be the goal rather than simply adding iron.  I
might be full of you know what in what I'm saying, but this is what
comes to mind when hearing your dilemma.

Oh and by the way...as a veggie, my iron level has always been way
above average.  Even when I was vegan.

I'm not a professional, so take what I say with a grain of salt.  It is
my understanding that when a person is deficient in iron, it's not that
they're not getting enough iron; it's that their body is having trouble
or not absorbing the iron that it gets.  Figuring out the absorption
part *seems* to me to be the goal rather than simply adding iron.  I
might be full of you know what in what I'm saying, but this is what
comes to mind when hearing your dilemma.

Oh and by the way...as a veggie, my iron level has always been way
above average.  Even when I was vegan.

She's probably old enough to take a chewable multivitamin. My kids do much
better on those than they ever did on the drinkable solutions. I buy
Schiff's Children's Chewable vitamins with minerals (it's in a red and white
bottle). It was one of the few I could find where I didn't have to break a
tablet in half for my 2 year old. Each tablet has 9 mg of iron, which is
listed as 90% of the %daily value for kids under the age of 4 (kids over 4
are supposed to take two a day).  Some drugstores have them, but I usually
have more luck at natural/health food stores.

DD has also registered low in iron. The other things I've done is increase
her intake of cereals which are higher in iron like Cheerios and Kix,
increase her intake of veggies high in iron (this takes some disguising
efforts sometimes), cook in iron skillets, and make sure to give her the
vitamin apart from eating/drinking dairy (calcium can affect iron intake).

Good luck.

Blackstrap molasses and unrefined sugar are good sources of iron.
I buy plain unsweetened yogurt and sweeten with unrefined sugar
(and fruit).

-kim