Lena,
You’ll get some amount of iron in just about everything you eat, so you don’t need to fill the entire RDA through those foods. Once you’re off the high-dose iron supplement, you could take a multivitamin or small iron supplement to help meet the RDA. Adding a few servings of high-iron foods and vitamin C at 2-3 meals per day and meeting the RDA through a small iron supplement can improve iron status in many women.

I have been diagnosed with anemia recently and am now taking the high dose ferritin supplement. But I’m trying to see how I can maintain my iron level after I’m done with my supplement, so that I wouldn’t have to supplement it forever 🙂

Thank you so much for this article and I would really appreciate your help with this question

Max,

No, you don’t need to take into account absorption rates when determining if you’re meeting the DRI. The DRI is based on the average dietary intake needs of a population rather than on a population’s net absorption needs. But, the DRIs for iron might not exactly apply to vegans because it’s harder to absorb plant iron than the heme iron in meat (which is, on average, about half the iron in meat). Our article on Iron explains this more thoroughly.

Nikita,
I couldn’t find the article by Kajanachumpol, but the study by Shaw was of Buddhists in China and the study by Bhatti was of Jains in India. While these populations’ health is important, the research we present on VeganHealth, assessing the nutrition implications a vegan diet, generally focuses on vegan populations living in developed countries because we have a better idea of what their food access is like. Our recommendations would be the same for vegans in China and India, but with the hope that vegans in those countries have access to the foods or supplements we recommend or adequate alternatives.

“A few studies even reported a higher prevalence for ID and iron-deficiency anaemia (IDA) in vegetarians, especially in females ( Bhatti et al., 2007;Kajanachumpol et al., 2011;Shaw et al., 1995)”

Jack and colleagues, could you please comment on that?

Eo.,
You should ask your doctor whether to seek psychological treatment for apathy, but given the other symptoms of iron deficiency, it wouldn’t surprise me if apathy can stem from iron deficiency. Good luck—I hope you feel better soon.
Jack

Thanks for your reply!
They state it as a symptom here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5427299/ (but without referencing any sources)
and here (paywall) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27644916
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23351097 link to fulltext doesn’t work.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16108396 no link to fulltext
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17066209 no link to fulltext

None of these (from what I could read) seem to point to any mechanism or discovery that apathy is a symptom of anemia. There probably is something somewhere possibly an old research paper, but I can’t seem to find it.

Currently anemic & struggling to concentrate with the fatigue, weakness, dizziness, headaches, chest pains & shortness of breath (so my research may not be so great…) Experiencing some rather large amount of apathy so I was wondering if the apathy will resolve itself or if I should be going for a psychological approach instead, that is why I was looking for the source below the article, to read more about it. It could be good to also state in the article roughly how long it takes to recover from anemia even though it varies per individual (& how bad the anemia is & the treatment method) there must be an average?

Eo.,
I got it from one of the sources I was using when I wrote the article—I don’t know which one. Taylor Wolfram, who helps with the site, tried to find it in response to your previous comment and she said she couldn’t, so I told her to remove it from the article when she gets a chance. She’s probably planning on responding to you, but since I started responding, I figured I’d answer you about this also.

Given the other symptoms of iron deficiency, I’d be surprised if apathy isn’t also a symptom, but if Taylor couldn’t verify it, and neither can you, perhaps the source I got the info from was wrong. Or perhaps apathy is hard to measure so clinicians are unlikely to report it as much as other symptoms that are more easily detected. I’m sure there was a source that said that—I wouldn’t have made it up.

Thanks Jack,I was wondering for part 1 where you got the symptom of apathy as a result of low iron.
https://staging.veganhealth.org/iron-part-1/#symptoms-iron-deficiency
I tried to look at the sources listed below the article (but there were some pay walls) & also found very little online about it (mainly blogs) .
Thanks!