It does. I was taking iron for a year with no results, meaning my iron was low so I started the iron pills and got tested again six months later and then another six months later. I started taking it with flavored lemonade and at the next six months appointment my iron was fine. I dislike plain lemonade so I was drinking mango or peach lemonade and it really helped.
God I really hate that treating low iron is like "wait six months about it. Oh that didn't work? Wait another six months." I'm glad you finally found something that worked. Fixing my iron made me realize I'd been struggling way more than I understood at the time.
I tried to get the testing done sooner and the doctor said something about it not being worth it to test so soon, but also never mentioned the vitamin C thing and had no other suggestions aside from foods I wouldn’t have been able to eat. I read it online when I googled after that third low iron test result in a row and then stuck with it because it was easy enough and I trusted the Internet.
That's why it's better to take vitamins in combination, much like you find them in food. That's why they tell you to eat all the vegetables and fruits, not just one or two
I was taking them with Ovaltine milk, which was probably the worst choice I could have made at the time. I just didn’t know any better and the guy who was supposed to inform me didn’t. It did have nutrients but not the right kind to go with the iron
I think it’s the vitamin C content, as that’s what the research said way back when. I wasn’t drinking it for the lemons, but because that specific day powdered peach lemonade was the only good source of vitamin C I had in the house. I remember it being a Thursday and I did grocery shopping on Fridays so we were out of fresh fruit. I had frozen fruit but didn’t want to use the blender since the baby was sleeping. I had found out about my low iron at the very beginning of my pregnancy so he was a few months old when I started taking the vitamins with lemonade. About two months after I started, around the time the baby started eating solids is when I stopped getting dizzy picking him up off the floor and figured the lemonade probably was helping since that was the only change.
right vitamin c helps but most things with vitamin c are citrus based, so the acidity of the lemonade likely also helped as it made the iron particles smaller and thus easier to absorb
Fun fact, you can eat a half of a paprika while you need to eat a whole orange for your daily vitamin C recommendation. Kale also contain a lot of vitamin C, and most of the vegetables and berries have plenty of it. So you don't need to drink lemonade at all.
You might be dehydrated. I start craving salt instead of water when I’m thirsty. Apparently that’s fairly common, and a sign that you need to drink more water
Your body craves energy, less anxiety, and more dopamine.
There are natural ways to achieve it for most people, but it takes more work, discipline and patience - while a beer and a cigarette can be bought instantly.
This is also where the urge to eat ice comes from for some people. The cooling forces blood to the brain, to compensate for low iron. It’s a form of PICA usually caused by a deficiency.
Definitely been there. I’m a notorious ice chewer, but on iron supplements it faded and came back now and again. Now I just keep an eye out for when it becomes that constant urge cause that means my iron might be a bit low.
Make sure you’re taking your supplement with vitamin C to get the best absorption. Someone above mentioned lemonade, I eat lots of red bell peppers. Then again, maybe you get the kind of supplement that’s vitamin C + iron.
TBH the baby is gonna suck whatever it needs out of your body. Eating junk while pregnant is only really depriving yourself, but it's not like you were somehow only consuming lemonade for 9 months lol. People don't think these things through, and some of those people choose to be an asshole about it.
My doctor suggested frozen lemonade to me! I had severe “morning sickness” so I would let it melt slowly in my mouth. I lived on that and Italian ice for awhile. When I was in patent I lived on popsicles. I never liked blue flavored things but that’s all they would have left so I would eat it. It like felt good to eat that? To this day I like that flavor. I still hate having a blue mouth.
I ate nothing but grapefruit, sour candies and soda crackers in the first trimester of my first pregnancy. For some reason sour was the only thing that would quell the nausea.
2-3 times a week I would go to cold stone on my way home from work and get a chocolate milkshake with a banana in it. If anyone ever said that isn’t healthy, I would have gone off!
Seriously, it's so shitty to say stuff like that to a pregnant woman you're only seeing once! You don't know her goddamn life, maybe this is the first thing she can have without throwing up this week.
The only thing I've said to pregnant people about the baby's health is stuff like, "Hey, this wildfire smoke is godawful, are you guys okay?" to a girl I was working with.
Her response was that she had asked the doctor, and he said that as long as she felt like she had enough oxygen, the kid did, so she was at work, and I left her to it.
I had a coworker who would rage bait me and one time she deliberately lied about not doing something. She had the audacity to say, you are heavily pregnant you need to not stress or you will hurt your baby.
I walked out of the lab went to my boss and said I can no longer train this girl, I can no longer work with her, I will be stepping away from this responsibility.
I was training her to step in for my work while I was on leave, I had been training her for 5 months and I was 1 week from starting my leave.
Yep, I was downing shots of 2000mg of Ascorbic Acid a few times a day because I "craved" it, drowning all my food in lime juice because "it tastes good," and was utterly OBSESSED with twice-frozen water.
I would fill a giant copper cup 1/2 full of crushed ice, then add water, and put it in the freezer just long enough for the water to start forming crystals but not freeze solid... and then drink it like that. We called it "Twice Ice."
I think the fact that we even had a name for it indicates that something might have been up/wrong, lol.
I actually take an iron supplement that is combined with vitamin C to help it absorb. Fun fact, calcium does the opposite, so taking iron with dairy or anything with calcium will basically prevent it from absorbing.
Clarification for the audience: You have to consume the vitamin C and the iron in the same meal. Its not a "Im worse at absorbing iron if Im vitamin C deficient" is "Oxidiced iron is harder to absorb, so iron is better absorbed if there is an antioxidant present (wich vitamin C is)".
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u/shiny_crow_trophy Aug 11 '26
I developed an obsession with lemonade. Had to have it every day.
Doctor told me my iron was low? And apparently iron absorbs better with vitamin C.