I’ve been reading up on nutrition relating to women who are vegetarians and the need for Iron. Basically, for women who are vegetarians (and doing resistance training), getting enough iron is important.
You can take an iron pill, cook foods in an iron pot like a wok, and also, avocado and natto has a lot of iron. However, taking an iron pill needs to be done on an empty stomach, and it’s a similar recommendation for drinking caffeine, because having caffeine with food reduces absorption of iron. So what is the timing for having food, caffeine, and iron supplements?
This seems to be the necessary schedule:
1. Breakfast w/ non-caffeinated drink (ex: ginger tea)
2. After 1 hour - have caffeinated drink (ex: milk tea, matcha)
3. Snacks … lunch …
4. Have iron pill either 2 hours after lunch or 2 hours after dinner
In my mind, I was starting to think of matcha as like, a miracle drink that has it all, after googling ‘matcha nutrition’. It seemed to have everything. So then I got the idea to search, ‘what nutrients does matcha *not* have?’ And it tends to not have vitamin D and Iron. My partner pointed out that vegetarians tend to lack certain things that can easily be found in red meats, like iron, and how this could be especially a problem for women. So I looked that up, and found that the more troubling thing is that if one drinks caffeinated drinks with a meal, or near a meal, it actually decreases iron absorption.
So, gonna try out this schedule. I stopped drinking coffee a while ago, though I’ll sometimes have like, half a cup in the afternoon to go with a pastry or something. Some desserts just seem to *have* to go with coffee.
