Best foods for iron rich

Iron is the mineral your body uses to build hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from your lungs to every tissue. Fall short and energy, focus, and exercise capacity all tend to suffer. On this page we rank the 260 foods in our database that qualify as iron rich, ordered by our Nutrient Density Score, a 1 to 100 measure of how much nutrition a food delivers per calorie rather than per gram.

That per-calorie lens explains why fresh herbs dominate the top of the list. Parsley, fresh earns a perfect 100 with 6.2 mg of iron per 100 grams, while thyme, fresh supplies 17.4 mg for almost no calories. Dried spices concentrate the mineral even further: dried basil lists 89.8 mg and dried coriander leaf 42.5 mg per 100 grams.

Read the serving size

Those numbers reward density, not realism. You sprinkle a gram of dried basil, not a 100 gram plate, so the iron per actual serving is modest. Plant foods also supply non-heme iron, which the body absorbs less efficiently than the heme iron in meat, though pairing them with vitamin C helps. Fresh spearmint and other leafy greens are useful contributors, not standalone fixes. Individual iron needs vary, so treat this as a reference rather than medical advice.