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Dietary and prophylactic iron supplements

Helpful or harmful?

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Abstract

Mild hypoferremia represents an aspect of the ability of the body to withhold iron from pathogenic bacteria, fungi, and protozoa, and from neoplastic cells. However, our iron-withholding defense system can be thwarted by practices that enhance iron overload such as indiscriminate iron fortification of foods, medically prescribed iron supplements, alcohol ingestion, and cigarette smoking. Elevated standards for normal levels of iron can be misleading and even dangerous for individuals faced with medical insults such as chronic infection, neoplasia, cardiomyopathy, and arthritis. We are becoming increasingly aware that the wide-spread hypoferremia in human populations is a physiological response to insult rather than a pathological cause of insult, and that attempts to correct the condition by simply raising iron levels may not only be misguided but may actually impair host defense.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Anthropology Program, Old Dominion University, 23529, Norfolk, VA

    Susan Kent

  2. Indiana University, USA

    Eugene D. Weinberg

  3. University of Toronto, Canada

    Patricia Stuart-Macadam

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Susan Kent received her Ph.D. from Washington State University in 1980. She does fieldwork on living peoples, focusing on patterns of diet, disease, demography, mobility, and household composition in order to develop a data base relevant to the interpretation of the archaeological record. For the past three summers she has worked with the Basarwa of Botswana. She is the editor ofMethod and Theory for Acticity Area Research, published in 1987, andFarmers as Hunters: The Implications of Sedentism, soon to be published by Cambridge University Press.

Dr. Weinberg received his Ph.D. degree at the University of Chicago in 1950 and has been a faculty member at Indiana University since that time. He became a full professor in 1961 and, since then, has had a joint appointment in the Biology Department and in the Medical Sciences Program, where he is head of the microbiology section. Dr. Weinberg retired last year from the USPHS Commissioned Corps Reserve where he held the rank of Scientist Director. He has been a Travelling Lecturer for both the American Society for Microbiology and the Australian Society of Microbiology. Dr. Weinberg has published over 125 full-length papers that mainly are concerned with interactions of microbial and host cell physiology in determining the outcome of infectious disease episodes. Two of these papers have been officially designated as Benchmark Papers in Microbiology.

Patricia Stuart-Macadam received her Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1982. Her interests focus on paleopathology in prehistoric and historic Europe and Africa. Recent research has been on porotic hyperostosis in skulls from a Romano-British cemetary from the 4th century AD.

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Kent, S., Weinberg, E.D. & Stuart-Macadam, P. Dietary and prophylactic iron supplements. Human Nature 1, 53–79 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02692146

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