Which foods are highest in iron?

1 cup of Sesame seeds, whole, dried gives 21 mg of iron. That is 116% of the Daily Value, and it is the highest of the 1000 foods on this site that has not been fortified.

This ranking is per typical portion rather than per 100 g. Lists built per 100 g end up full of dried herbs and fortified bars, which is technically correct and practically useless, because nobody sits down to 100 g of thyme. Items marked fortified rank where they do because nutrients were added during manufacture, not because the food itself is rich in them.

How to read this list

Read the portion column before the milligrams. A cup of whole sesame seeds tops the table, and a cup of sesame seeds is not something anyone eats in a sitting. A tablespoon or two is, and that is a fifteenth of the number you see.

The more useful point is that the list mixes two kinds of iron that behave differently in your body. Iron from meat and liver is absorbed far better than iron from seeds, beans and fortified grains. Absorption runs at roughly 14 to 18 per cent on a mixed diet with meat, seafood and vitamin C, and at 5 to 12 per cent on a vegetarian one.

Myth. Heme iron is absorbed better and that turns out to matter less than it sounds. Anaemic infants given heme iron recovered no faster than infants given plain ferrous sulfate at the same dose. Haemoglobin and ferritin, the two things that were supposed to separate them, ended up the same. Five secondary blood markers did favour heme iron, which is why the argument has not died.

The meat factor, the idea that meat on the plate drags plant iron in alongside it, ran into the same wall. Fifty-two women with low ferritin ate beef or plant-based meat for eight weeks. Both groups improved. Neither improved more than the other. Both were also taking a supplement, so what was tested is whether meat adds anything on top of one, and over eight weeks it added nothing that showed up in a blood test.

One change worth making

Put a source of vitamin C next to the plant-based iron, which means tomatoes with the lentils or fruit with the fortified cereal. Keep the tea and coffee for an hour later, because they work in the other direction.

Unsettled. How much that buys you is less settled than the advice sounds. Across trials that added vitamin C rich fruit to meals, ferritin rose by about 9 micrograms per litre and haemoglobin by about 1.3 g/L, both modest and both consistent. The measurement that did not move was absorption itself, which is the whole reason the advice exists. Eat the fruit. Expect a nudge rather than a fix.

The iron that comes out of the pan

Cooking in cast iron does put iron into food. What eleven studies of it show is how far that is from a change in anybody's blood. Iron pots moved haemoglobin or iron measures in four of eight trials, and a plain iron ingot dropped into the pan managed one of three.

Unsettled. The scatter is mostly about the kitchen rather than the metal. Daily use of a pot ran as low as 27 per cent in those trials, against 90 per cent and better for an ingot people only had to drop in, and the reviewers put the spread down to who was cooking and how often. Eight of the eleven never recorded whether malaria was about and nine never recorded worms, which are two of the commonest reasons for the anaemia they were treating.

Myth. The iron fish, the cooking ingot that travelled the world as a cheap answer to anaemia, was finally put in a trial. Three hundred and forty anaemic Cambodian women used the fish, took iron tablets or did neither, for a year. Haemoglobin finished at 115 g/L in all three groups. Only 9 per cent of those women were short of iron to begin with and inherited haemoglobin disorders were common, and the trialists now advise against the fish wherever that pair of conditions holds.

That is the general lesson of this page in one object. More iron in the food is a different thing from more iron in the person.

Bread decides a lot of it. In one national survey, bread and cereals were the largest source of the phytate that holds iron back, and median phytate intake rose from 535 to 658 milligrams a day across seven years. Most of that population came out in the low iron availability band. The same bowl of lentils gives up different amounts of iron depending on what the country eats around it.

Two footnotes for reading any iron table, including this one. Plant foods and iron-fortified foods carry only the non-heme form, so a high number there delivers less than the same number beside meat, seafood or poultry. And spinach is the classic example of a food that looks strong by content and performs poorly in practice, because the oxalate in it holds the iron back.

Written from the evidence cards and the data on this page, then checked back against the sources. Bioma Learn has no human medical reviewer at this time and we say so rather than invent one. Information, not medical advice. How we verify.

Full ranking →

Full guide: Iron: why the number on the label is not the number your body gets

Data: USDA FoodData Central. % Daily Value against the FDA DV of 18 mg. Checked 2026-09-15.