Iron: who at your table needs the most

A household with a teenage girl and someone who's pregnant doesn't have one iron problem this week. It has two, and they don't move together. Add a toddler and there's a third, smaller than the other two and easy to miss entirely. Iron isn't a single household figure to hit. It belongs to each person at the table, and it changes as they grow.

Why the number isn't the same for everyone

Every person in your household gets their own daily targets from the USDA dietary reference intakes for their age and sex. Iron is one of the micronutrients that usually go missing, so it's worth seeing the whole shape of it at once:

• children 4 to 8: 10 mg a day
• ages 9 to 13, boys and girls alike: 8 mg
• boys 14 to 18: 11 mg; girls 14 to 18: 15 mg
• men 19 to 50: 8 mg; women 19 to 50: 18 mg
• 51 and over: 8 mg, women and men both

That isn't a curve. It steps up at 14 for girls, steps up again at 19 for women, and steps back down at 51, where the reference tables treat the years after menopause as their own band. A boy and a girl of the same age, at the same table, eating off the same list, are standing on different steps of it.

Teen girls and pregnancy are the big jumps

Two rows jump much further than the rest, and they're the two a shared grocery list is most likely to flatten.

The first is the teenage one. A girl of 14 to 18 needs 15 mg a day. Her father needs 8 mg. If the week gets planned around what the adults eat, she's the person it comes up short for — and she's rarely the person doing the planning.

The second is pregnancy, where the target goes to 27 mg, then settles at 9 mg while nursing.

Two kinds of iron, and why pairing matters

Iron doesn't arrive in one form. The NIH Office of Dietary Supplements iron fact sheet describes two kinds: heme iron, which comes from meat, and non-heme iron, which is the kind in legumes, seeds and dark leafy greens. They take different routes into you, and the non-heme kind goes further when something rich in vitamin C is on the plate beside it.

Mirabelly tracks total iron against each person's target, which is how the reference intakes are written. So the pairing is a good kitchen habit rather than something the list is doing for you.

Where to find it in the store

Iron arrives from two quite different directions: red and organ meats on one side, legumes and dark leafy greens on the other. The foods highest in iron ranks the whole catalog, and it's worth reading with one thing in mind. The top rows are fortified breakfast cereals — added iron, not the grain — so the whole-food picks come from further down.

Beans, lentils, seeds and organ meats aren't glamorous, but they're the honest answer once the fortified cereals are set aside. Further down is where the pantry starts: dried cannellini beans, dried kidney beans, pumpkin seeds, tahini, wheat germ and sun-dried tomatoes. Chicken livers sit in the same stretch, if your house eats them. Brown lentils aren't on that ranking at all, but they belong in the same bowl as the beans. Each of those pages carries its own amount, so this post doesn't restate one.

What Mirabelly does with all this

A table of numbers isn't much use on its own. What Mirabelly does with it is the whole point: every person you add to your household gets their own targets, pregnancy and nursing are handled as stages of their own, and nobody gets averaged into a single household figure. Then it builds one shared weekly grocery list that covers all of those targets at once, and tells you by name if it couldn't reach one. How it works walks through the rest of what happens between your household and your week.