AMA #58: Iron: its role in health, testing methods, and strategies for preventing and managing iron deficiency

6.5% of all enzymes in the human body are iron-dependent.

If you forget everything else about iron's importance, just remember this: You're not going to be able to move oxygen around your body without it. And when it comes to your mitochondria and other very important places in the body where cellular respiration takes place, some of the most important enzymes depend on iron.

Take-home message number one of this podcast is if your doctors are not checking your ferritin levels, please ask that they do. It's not enough to just know what your iron level is. You have to know what that ferritin level is as well.

We consume about 10-20 milligrams of iron per day. Our absorption of that is roughly 10%. So we're going to absorb somewhere between 1 and 2 milligrams of iron per day. The rest of it will be lost. It's going to come right out our GI system.

So, basically 2% of the human genome encodes for iron related-proteins. That's a staggering amount of our human genome.