According to MSNBC, a recent study found that taking iron supplements does not have as significant benefit for pregnant women who don’t already have iron-poor blood. The study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that anemic pregnant women boosted their iron levels by taking supplements but the women who had higher levels to begin with did not see any extra boost.
Iron is essential to making hemoglobin, the component of red blood cells that carries oxygen throughout the body. A pregnant woman’s iron needs rise as her body produces greater volumes of blood for her and the fetus. A professor of human nutrition at Cornell University said that the gut senses when the body needs iron, and through gut responses the body absorbs iron better.
According to the World Health Organization, fewer than one in five pregnant women in the U.S. were anemic in 2005. In other countries, those statistics may be as high as up to 57 percent of pregnant anemic women.
A team of researchers from U.S. and Belgium recruited 1,270 pregnant women. About 550 of them were anemic at the beginning of the trial. Half the women took supplements with 60 milligrams of iron and 400 micrograms of folic acid. The other half took 30 milligrams of iron and 400 micrograms of folic acid. Both groups took vitamins including zinc, Vitamin A and C.
The research group found that women who were anemic at the beginning of the study caught up to those women who were not anemic, their levels of iron in the blood ended up the same at around 11 grams per deciliter.
