The average person eats about 15 mg of iron each day. But only about 1 mg out of that 15 mg is actually absorbed by the body - the rest just passes out from your body into the sewerage system, and ends up at your local beach. Now if you re a man, you lose about 1 mg of iron per day, which just balances how much you absorb. But if you re a fertile woman, you lose about 1.1-2.2 mg per day. The extra iron is lost in the blood of each menstrual period - about 80 ml per month.
Some people don t get enough iron in their diet.
When a woman is pregnant, the growing baby will steal about 500 mg of iron from the mother, even if she already low on iron. More than half of the pregnant women who do not get any pre-natal care are iron deficient. There s just not enough iron in their breakfast cereal - they need meat and vegetables. You might eat lots of food with iron in it, but it s useless until you get the iron across the wall of the gut and into the blood stream. A food preservative, such as EDTA, will actually stick onto the iron while it s in your gut, so EDTA stops iron entering your blood stream.