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Comment by dbcooper | Hacker News Reader

This is also a problem with iron salt supplements.

As someone with Crohn's disease, I am interested in developing superior alternatives.

Cooking with cast iron, especially not being afraid to do longer-cooked mildly acidic foods like a braise or a lasagna, gives a pretty bio-available boost to your iron. It's mostly FE (II), but it doesn't have much time to oxidize before it's appropriately metabolized.

You can also try cooking soup with uncoated (without zinc) iron nails, or use something like https://luckyironfish.com/

presumably the zinc will dissolve in the acidic food even more easily than the iron, and i think your body can tolerate higher intake levels

Do you know if iron supplementation increase the risk of harmful gut infection in susceptible people, for instance those with diverticulosis? I've recently started supplementing iron myself (i'm mostly vegetarian and have had low iron levels on blood tests before) and have noticed some unpleasant intestinal changes, which could be related. I do have diverticula but not crohn's.

I can't answer your question, but I can say you really need to talk to a medical professional or nutritionist who knows your circumstances and not get the answer from the Internet.

It's well and good to generalize and I do that myself[1], but if you know you have some atypical condition please just talk to a pro who really understands your situation.

[1] For example I mentioned in another comment not too long ago that under normal circumstances dietary cholesterol isn't a big deal and it's not. But there are people with certain conditions for whom it is a very big deal.

Like many people, I have to figure stuff out for myself because the US medical industry is borderline useless. I've talked to plenty of primary care docs, gastroenterologists. They have no clue, they don't care. They just shrug off your questions and see you out the door after the allotted 6 minutes of office visit time for which I pay $75 a pop. All they want to do is procedures like colonoscopies, which I've had and which have showed nothing of note.

That really sucks, I'm sorry to hear that. I guess I've been lucky and have just had really good caregivers so far. In the circumstances you describe though it sounds like you need to do your best to read and evaluate the source material and make the best decisions you can. I wish you the best.

One thing that's worked out for me is nerding out with my doctors though. If they can't then I find a new one. So far for me this has just been with respect to lifting weights and the various consequences thereof, but I imagine the principle generalizes. I'm getting to the age where my body is going to start climbing the s-curve of decay so I hope I'm right. And I do have reason to hope.

Someone very important to me has a rare genetic disorder. It took over a decade, but that person found a doctor who actually cared and nerded out over it and followed the research. Those caregivers are out there, so don't give up looking for them. If you happen to be fortunate enough to live in California your odds of finding such a person within driving distance are quite good.

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