Bread and Iron

Too much of a good thing?

As almost everyone knows, iron is routinely added to "enriched" flour and bread because the element, needed to make hemoglobin, is stripped out in the grain-milling process. But disturbing news from Sweden suggests that too much iron may trigger a serious and often fatal hereditary illness. It is an iron storage disorder called hemochromatosis, and it causes its victims, mostly male, to absorb too much iron. Possible results: liver disease, diabetes, impotence, sterility, heart failure, even sudden death.

The disease has always been regarded as extremely rare. But doctors at Ostersund Hospital and in the Swedish district of Hede have just reported a surprising number of cases. After seeing ten cases in two years, Dr. K. Sigvard Olsson and colleagues screened 347 people, 96.4% of the total community between the ages of 30 to 39, for the disorder. No women, but four out of almost 200 men--"a remarkably high figure" of 2%--showed early signs of hemochromatosis.

Swedes get 42% of their dietary iron from fortified foods. The Swedish doctors are careful not to draw a causal link between the incidence of iron overload and Sweden's 30-year-old iron fortification program. But they warn that under such a program, people genetically predisposed to hemochromatosis are at risk.

Still, their findings may deal the final blow to a proposal, heatedly debated since 1970, to triple the present amount of iron added to U.S. flour and breads. Americans now receive about 25% of their dietary iron from such products. The proposal has been endorsed by nutrition experts as a preventive against iron deficiency, especially in women. But hematologists, led by William Crosby of the La Jolla, Calif., Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation, have steadily argued that on the basis of available information, an increase in iron is neither needed, effective nor safe.

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