By Karen Collins, MS, RD, CDN
American Institute for Cancer Research

Q: Am I likely to have problems getting all the iron I need as I move to eating meatless meals more often?

A: Not necessarily, if you make healthy food choices. Meat and fish, but especially red meat—beef, pork and lamb—provide heme iron.

That bowl of cereal you eat in the morning may provide you with 100 percent of the daily value of iron. The bowl of hot oatmeal that sticks to your ribs during a cold winter morning? That'll provide 60 percent of the daily value for iron.

You can't beat soybeans, lentils, all kinds of beans, and fortified cereal and oatmeal for healthy doses of iron, the mineral that helps transport oxygen throughout bodies, keeps our cells in shape, and enables us to stave off fatigue to get our jobs done and raise our families.

What's more, you can get healthy doses of iron also from meat, poultry, and fish, but many of us are trying to cut out meat and its saturated fat in our weight-loss or weight-management efforts. But that doesn't mean we must go without iron, especially pre-menopausal women who need substantially more iron than men because of pregnancy and menstruation.

Here is a chart of your best iron sources from non-meat foods. Visit Nubella's Recipe Database and Healthy Cooking Center for more than 6,000 recipes that include many of these items.

You can get your daily requirement of iron from either meat, poultry, fish or plant foods.

You can find almost two-thirds of the iron in your in your blood’s hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen throughout the body. Smaller amounts are found in myoglobin, a protein that helps supply oxygen to your muscles, and in enzymes that help with biochemical reactions.

There are two forms of dietary  iron: heme and nonheme. And both are important, especially to pre-menopausal women because of pregnancy and menstruation.

Heme iron comes from hemoblogin, and is found in foods from animals that originally contained hemoglobin, such as red meats, fish and poultry. You’ll get your highest concentrations of iron from these kinds of foods, which creates a predicament for people trying to lose weight by cutting out as much saturated fat in meat as possible.

Nonheme iron is contained in a wide variety of plant foods and added to iron-enriched and iron-fortified foods, such as breakfast cereals.

Here is a chart of the best sources of heme iron. Visit Nubella's Recipe Database and Healthy Cooking Center for more than 6,000 recipes using many of these foods.