STORY BY: KONADU BENEDICTA
A Dietician at the Meridian hospital, Forzia Abdul Rahman, has reiterated that black tea and coffee prevent the absorption of iron, which causes iron deficiency in humans.
With this, she said, ” there are certain things we call inhibitors that prevent or interfere with the absorption of iron. So our tea, the black tea and the coffee, I’m not going to mention brands. We all know what they are, but when you take those things, they interfere in the absorption of iron. Exactly and then we also have the drinks, so the sugar-sweetened beverages interfere with the absorption of iron.”
She revealed that it is not appropriate to drink milk after taking dark green leafy vegetables.
“So milk is a rich source of iron and calcium, ok. But because of the calcium in the milk, if you are going to take any of the dark green leaf vegetables for the non-heme iron food. You don’t have to consume milk at the same time. You need to allow some intervals. Allow about a 4-hour interval between eating the dark green leafy vegetables and taking your milk. By then, the iron would have digested and the body would have adsorb it and then you can take your milk then after.”
Forzia Abdul Rahman, however, mentioned some foods that we can get iron from.
“So basically, from the food that we eat, we get iron from it. Iron can be gotten from both plant sources and animal sources of food. So when you look at the table here, we have different varieties of items displayed. So our dark green leaf vegetable, we have our lettuce, ‘ayoyo’ that’s what we call jute leaf, ‘ademe’, ‘kontomire’, so those ones are the heme iron. Then we have the non-heme iron, which is fish, the egg, the chicken, the red meat, so be it beef, our shrimp, our oysters, our milk, they all give us iron,” she stated on GTV’s breakfast show on Wednesday, August 31.
