You might have seen that some of the foods that you eat claim to be “fortified” with extra iron. What’s not always known is that this just means they add medical-grade iron filings directly into the food. You may also not know that it’s possible get this iron out of the food using a strong magnet.

What you’ll need

• Breakfast cereal. Check the labels to see the iron content. Find the one with the highest weight of iron per 100g that you can find. I used Tesco own-brand Rice Snaps.
• Resealable sandwich bags
• Strong neodymium magnet
• Metal screw (optional)
• A rolling pin
• A hand lens or digital microscope
• Water.

What to do

1. To extract the iron, first put the cereal into a large, resealable sandwich bag.

2. Then, use a rolling pin to smash the cereal into a fine powder.

3. When the cereal is a dust, transfer into a new bag. This is important as the bag you were originally using will now almost definitely be full of tiny holes 🙂

4. Fill this new bag with water until the cereal forms a messy, swimming, paste.

5. To extract the iron I used a very strong, small magnet. The one I used came from a set that I used to hang photos onto metal wires. To make it easier to handle I stuck mine to the end of a screw, but you could attach it to a piece of wood.

6. Fish around in the paste with the magnet for a few minutes. Make sure you trawl the whole bag.

7. Carefully clean the magnet in a bowl of clean water and gently pat dry.

8. The iron filings won’t be visible to the naked eye, but if you use a digital microscope (even a very cheap one) you should be able to see them. I used an Easi-Scope from TTS. If you don’t have a microscope try a hand lens.

9. The iron filings should be visible on the magnet. There’s wasn’t lots, but there was enough to be visible. You should just be able to see some along the edges of the magnet.

And that’s it. Proof that makers of breakfast cereal do indeed add extra iron into your food – and it’s possible to see it!

Video Guide : Extracting Iron

This video I helped make for Twig Education shows all the steps involved in extracting iron from cereal.

Why do we need iron in our food?

Iron is an important component of hemoglobin, the substance in red blood cells that carries oxygen from your lungs to transport it throughout your body. … If you don’t have enough iron, your body can’t make enough healthy oxygen-carrying red blood cells. A lack of red blood cells is called iron deficiency anemia.