This thread http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=358874 made me start wondering about my multivitamins. The brand I take (naturemade) has a mens formula with NO iron and a womens formula with lots of iron. I understand its important for women to get enough iron moreso then men but NO iron?
Why is iron bad for me as a man? If in fact it is at all?
Too much iron is bad, and there’s a very good chance you get as much as you need in your diet.
I don’t know that much about nutrition and required minerals and so on, but it might not be a question of ‘no iron’ as much as ‘no extra iron.’ I can easily believe that most regular diets, whether ‘healthy’ or not in the traditional sense, contain enough or more than enough iron for a grown man, and that supplementing it, (unless there is a good reason for it,) would do more harm than not.
On a slightly different tack, red meat (which is generally considered to be a ‘mannish’ food,) is rich in easily absorbed iron, right?? Maybe if you don’t eat much of that, then the assumptions the vitamin makers don’t apply to you and you should be taking something with some iron.
Hope this WAG helps.
IIRC the body tends to store iron, too much iron can be a bad thing. Women who have menses get rid of excess iron in their system each month with their cycle. (Though I’m sure there are some who still don’t get rid of enough.) Men do not. There are probably better cites out there than this one, but it explains what I’m saying.
Meant to add, generally men (and women) get enough iron via supplemented food as is, it’s not necessarily needed by the average person as part of their multi-vitamins. (There is less worry for women’s supplements because as I said, women get rid of at least some excess iron each month if they menstruate.) Some do need Iron supplements, but it’s not hard for a doctor to diagnose this. IANAD, but this is my layman’s understanding of why this is.
Our bodies do not have a mechanism for excreting excess iron. Levels are controlled entirely at the intake level. And has been said, a lot of extra iron in the blood can be very harmful - deadly if it goes on long enough. Hemochromatosis is the name for too much iron in the blood, and it’s usually a man’s disease, because women lose so much iron during menstruation. Iron is a very reactive element. It can take on a wide range of oxidative states, and can also form free radicals. So if you have more iron floating around than your body can handle, it’s like, well, a shotgun blast, with lots of little iron pellets zinging around damaging your cells. Usually, the first symptoms will show up when it’s too late for treatment - liver cancer or cirrhosis, for instance.
But anyway…women lose a lot of iron through bleeding. Men don’t. So women may need supplements, while they may be unhealthy for men.
Fantastic… Thanks for the info all. That makes sence now. 
Bah, if you’re a real man you bleed enough every month to excrete any extra iron you would consume! 
Just kidding.
Wouldn’t regular blood-letting or blood donations serve to reduce iron? Or would that be the treatment for Hemochromatosis?
In fact, that’s exactly how they treat it. Theraputic phlebotomy, they call it. The problem, historically, has been detecting it in the first place. As I mentioned earlier, usually by the time symptoms show up, irreversable damage has been done, and it’s really too late.
However, there is a genetic test that can be done to look for a set of mutations in the HFE gene that can cause one form of hemochromatosis, called hereditary hemochromatosis. This is one of the tests I run in a clinical genetics lab, which is why I know about all this. So let’s say you have a family history of hemochromatosis. You go get tested and find out you have the mutation. Knowing this, you can quite easily avoid any symptoms by eating a diet low in iron. Your doctor would probably keep an eye on your iron levels every year or so, but you should be fine.
If a patient shows up with already elevated iron levels, the doctors will take as much blood as they can for a few weeks until iron levels are down to something closer to normal (the patient will also be put on a low-iron diet).
I could go on about the molecular mechanisms of how the mutations lead to the disease, but I think I’ve already bored everyone. 
snore… wakes HUH? Yeah I said THANKS already… question answered smartguy! 
Can I just mention that haemochromatosis is a “man’s” disease because men usually become symptomatic while women do not usually show symptoms until they’re post-menopausal. Nonetheless, the excess iron can cause damage well before the patient shows symptoms of it.
Being a non-X-linked genetic disease the incidence is identical for both sexes, and anyone, male or female, with a family history of haemochromatosis should be tested for it, whether or not they have symptoms.
True. And nonsymptomatic women can pass on the mutation to their sons, so it doesn’t matter which side of your family has a history.
My ex had hemochromatosis, which he didn’t know he had. After his bout with hepatitis, he would eat tons of iron-rich foods (exactly what he wasn’t supposed to do). This disease is genetic (Kid Kalhoun was tested and looked OK, but I was told this can change with time). He ended up with liver cancer and died at the age of 45.
There’s definitely Men’s MultiVitamins that do contain Iron, though. I grabbed an inexpensive bottle that includes 100% daily allowance of iron. I hardly ever eat red meat over here, and the vegatables are pretty pathetic when it comes to nutrients. Dark green is not a food color here.
When my recent blood test suggested my iron level may be too low, I had to check the backs of several Once-A-Days before finding one with iron. But they’re certainly out there.
Actually, it does- it’s called 'bleeding". My WAG is that early Man very likely bled a lot more than modern Man- more accidents out hunting, or fights, or flint-knapping accidents, etc. Dudes can & should donate blood. If they won’t take your blood, I suggest letting a small wound bleed freely by running warm water over it- cleans it out and gets rid of a bit of excess blood.
I take it that postmenopausal women and hysterectomied women, etc., can lose the iron supplements just like men?
Wombless wonder here, totally avoided iron supplements once my hepatitis C was diagnosed, for the reason that Kalhoun said. Now the hep is cured but I figure I get more than enough iron from Luna Bars.
That calls to mind the amazing image from the X-Men 2 where Magneto pulls the extra iron right out of a prison guard’s veins.
Not much to add to the discussion. I’d just point out that becoming pregnant, making a placenta and making extra blood for a baby uses a LOT of extra iron for a long period of time. It’s not uncommon for women to be anemic during or after a pregnancy. Men have no similar process that uses huge amounts of iron. It’s not just menstruation.