Let’s say I had some rusty cookware. Or knives. Or something. (I don’t, but imagine I did.) And I used them in the preparation of food.
What is the danger, if any, from the consumption of rust?
you can buy vitamins with iron.
deteriorating cookware might also be metal plating and paint flecks.
mild rust on cast iron cookware isn’t harmful to people that i’ve seen.
I can’t see how you would ingest enough iron oxide to ever cause a problem. Certainly you clean the silverware between uses. If the utensils in question are chrome plated as with most, I would be concerned with any flakes of chrome plating that might come off in the food. This too would likely be harmless, but I could see the possibility of the metal flakes being so sharp and getting caught up in some organ of the digestive system. The body is very forgiving, but why take any chances. Utensils are very cheap. You could pick stuff up at the Salvation Army or garage sales of just by new at Wal-Mart. Better safe than sorry.
In the scenario you describe in the OP: NONE
Rust on cast iron can actually contribute to iron intake. Rust on various utensils is pretty irrelevant in terms of good or bad.
I sense that we have come here thinking bad things about rust? Is this the ol’ ‘rusty nail is gonna kill you’ syndrome? Because rusty nails cause deep punctures and sit outside in filth where the bacteria that causes all the trouble can flourish.
My thoughts also. You can get tetanus from a clean nail.
Rusty iron is no more toxic than non-rusty iron.
Iron will go right through you, unless you need more in your system, in which case your gut will take some up. It won’t hurt you at all. Unless, of course, you have hemochromatosis, but that’s another thread.
In the olden days (back to the Romans, I hear) rust was sometimes cultivated deliberately as a dietary supplement by putting iron nails in apples for a few days, then taking out the nails and eating the apples. A more current recommendation I have heard for if you want extra dietary iron is to simmer something acidic, like tomato sauce, in a cast iron pan.
LD50 for iron oxide in rats is on the order of 30 grams per kilogram.
That’s a lot of rust.
And the first thing a doctor will ask you in a case of vitamin overdose is whether they had iron in. The situation posed in the OP is unlikely to cause problems, but Iron can cause really nasty toxicity, and is difficult to get out of the body in treatment. It really isn’t a safe, non-toxic substance, and it’s particularly dangerous to children.
The iron used in supplements is iron (II), AKA ferrous salts; rust is iron (III) (ferric). Iron (II) is water soluble, and completely bioavailable, whereas iron (III) is insoluble, and mostly passes through the digestive system untouched. It takes about three grams of iron (II) to kill a toddler, as opposed to hundreds of grams of iron (III). Breathing iron oxide fumes, OTOH, is bad news, but that’s not an issue with cookware.
Yeah, I overreacted a bit there, the important thing is what the iron is already bound to (I get really paranoid about saying something is completely safe on the internet), but discounting the toxicity of iron because it is present in vitamins is a really bad idea :eek: