iodine content of foods


I've now done a first go of evaluating the data at three sites:
1 Deakin University, Australia;
2 Finnish National Public Health Institute; and
3 Danish Institute for Food and Veterinary Research.

Deakin offers only average values, Fineli uses default values for
many foods individually, while DIFVR seems to have relied more on
individual analyses (and gives sources).

The data is all over the place e.g. shrimp is 88 ug/100g at Deakin,
210 at Fineli and 14 at DIFVR!

But the averages differ sharply too. In the order used by Deakin, and
using the foods in my database for the other two:

Deakin Fineli DIFVR
seafood 66 69 78
veg. 32 1.0 0.94
meat 26 4.1 1.7
egg 26 44 21
dairy 13 7.5 7.8
cereals 10 7.2 2.3
fruits 4 0.88 0.55

Obviously, you will wildly overestimate the iodine in a diet by using
Deakin (as I used to). However the data is so variable that it really
seems sensible to use averages for most foods.

Note that any food that is made with salt, cheese especially, will
vary greatly depending upon the salt used - cheeses cluster around
40-45, presumably those made using iodised salt, and around 7-8,
presumably non-iodised. The same will be true of other processed
products.

And, that's why the USDA won't even talk about iodine!
.

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