Cast Iron Pot Cooking - Health Benefits???

Question

My niece cooks with a cast iron pot. She claims that it gets iron into your system. Is this true or is she just a crack pot???

Answer 1

Never heard of any health benefits of cast iron cooking. Graduated culinary school, including nutrition... nope never heard of it.

Answer 2

Yep there are benefits.

Most non-stick pots that are shiny and black have Teflon, which have been scientifically proven to increase the risk of cancer. It's just a bad chemical, and everytime you cook with it, some of it gets scraped off into your food. This is bad! Eventually, you know how the inside bottoms of pots lose their non-stick coating and you see all the scraped areas? Well, all the coating that is missing was more than likely eaten into your food in tiny tiny pieces.

Cast iron is a great alternative, and my family has bought a whole set for home cooking. Iron is natural, and it can be found in vitamins... your body needs it for blood and the like. There is nothing cancer-causing about cast iron pots. You can scratch them up all you want, and if you eat some microscopic pieces, that's fine, your body needs it!

Answer 3

There's a theory--and it's really just that--that some of the iron from cast iron pots and pans will leach into the food. This could explain how some pioneer women managed to stay reasonably healthy without a more obvious source of iron in their diets.

Answer 4

It Is True that you can get small amounts of iron from cooking with a cast iron pan. You will get more iron from multi-vitamins or iron rich foods like spinach, etc. The folks who told you that you will Not get iron from cooking with an iron pan are mistaken.

Answer 5

You can make a really good stew in a cast iron pot. You just need a can of stew (or a recipe for homemade) and a biscuit recipe (one that works with stews-they are usually cooked right on top of the stew). Unless your pot comes pre-seasoned it might take a while for it to break in enough that you can use it for all types of recipes.

Answer 6

I can't answer about the 'iron' into your system, but, the slow cooking is a factor. Slow cooking doesn't kill as much of the nutrients as does faster methods.
Take crock pots for example.......Notice the differences

Answer 7

Lol shes a crack pot, I think it is actually worse to cook with it because it soaks everything in and is way harder to clean, it also gets really hot really fast and its hard not to burn in it. Iron the metal and Iron the vitamin are diff things, maybe she thinks since it has Iron in the name that it adds Iron to the food, who knows!

Answer 8

Why not just eat some rust directly then?

Answer 9

It is true.