OK, thats’s indeed a bold title, but this is a TL;DR post. See, this one was drafted a good while ago. The Duck Dodgers decided to prefigure with a few things that have been posted—like this and this—but then there were more revelations, so what we have is this one, about 900 words and way incomplete, and a 4,000 pound whopper coming up next week. So here’s the “Too Long; Didn’t Read” version for the lazy asses.

Update: Well, it didn’t take long for a commenter to misunderstand what we’re doing here, so let me preface some clarification. This is not an assertion of causality searching for a hypothesis. It’s clearly a set of reasonable, testable associations that give rise to a hypothesis that fortification or enrichment of foods with iron (and perhaps other vitamins and minerals) may have a host of unintended consequences and this should be studied specifically. The follow-on post will contain a lot more justification. For additional clarification I’ve added an additional image below as well.

It’s becoming more commonly known that iron overload can be a prominent feature of obesity and metabolic issues. Obesity and insulin resistance has been linked to an iron-enriched diet. Obese people have iron in the hypothalamus of their brains, their urine, their adipose tissue, and they do not absorb iron well and iron blood levels can be low in some cases. The body may very likely be using adipose intentionally to keep excess iron out of the blood so that pathogens and cancer cannot thrive (i.e. anemia of chronic disease). As those studies point out, adipocytes use hepcidin to regulate the iron status of the blood.

Surprisingly, what virtually all researchers miss is that the countries that fortify their food with iron (or rely heavily on imports of fortified food with iron) are the countries that tend to have the most obesity and metabolic issues—particularly as those countries consume more iron-rich meat.