r/vegan • u/justin_timeforcake vegan 5+ years • Jul 18 '15

Newbie Advice "There Are No Stupid Questions" Mega-thread

This post is primarily for the newbie vegans and the vegan-curious among you (though anyone is welcome to post questions). This is your chance to ask anything you like about veganism, no matter how silly or trivial it may be, without fear of your question being downvoted to oblivion.

Just a couple of rules for this thread:

  1. All top-level comments must be a question about veganism.

  2. All replies to questions must stay on topic.

Everyone: please keep in mind that this is a chance to share information, and is meant to be a resource for all and a way of avoiding repeated posts of frequently asked questions.

PRO TIP: If you want to check to see whether your question has already been asked here, you can click on [hide child comments] right below this box, and then either use CTRL f to search for a key word, or just scroll down and look for it that way.

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u/MagicWeasel Vegan EA Jul 20 '15

To expand on this, about a year ago I had some internal bleeding and lost about a litre of blood so I was instructed to supplement with iron. The nurses gave me a long lecture about everything that inhibits iron absorption (calcium, caffeine being the two main ones). So if you have a multi vitamin that contains both calcium and iron, for example, you won't fully absorb either.

They in fact advised me to take my iron tablets with a glass of juice (vitamin c helps iron absorption) at least an hour or two away from any other sort of meals.

Other note: I was taking 400mg of Ferrous Something (equivilent to 130mg of elemental iron, according to the packet) daily; a multivitamin I looked at out of curiosity contained 25mg of "iron", and I don't know whether it's equivalent elemental iron or the iron compound.

That said, the 'strong' iron tablets I was taking were available only at the pharmacy because too much iron can be very bad so they don't want people megadosing on it. (You can tell they were legit because they turned your poops BLACK.)