Wouldn’t it be nice to curl up with a blanket, get into your coziest sweatpants, watch your favorite shows and eat comfort foods like a warm bowl of soup while you’re losing blood at about 80ml over the next 2-7 days during your menstruation. Some women can lose more blood than that in a week and it could take your body several weeks to replenish what you lost. By the time it’s replenished, you’re losing blood again during your next menstruation period. This makes me tired thinking about being a woman doesn’t it?
That blood loss and lack of movement because of our cramping uterus often leaves our bodies colder than usual. Blood flow warms you up. So this is why a warm bowl of soup is SOOOOOOOO comforting during ‘shark week’. If warm soup is comforting, why not get the maximum benefit from soup and eat the MOST beneficial soup for women. That is Clam Chowder.
Why is Clam Chowder the most beneficial soup during menstruation?
We know that warm soup is comforting to eat when we don’t feel well, but do we know how much iron we need to feel even better? When we lose blood during our periods, we are also losing that iron that transports oxygen to our organs and muscles. Oxygen is essential to living so iron is very important. If our iron levels are low, we feel tired, sluggish, out of breath, and often you’ll end up with a headache. Oh not another headache!
To understand how much our menstrual cycles deplete our iron levels, let’s compare how much iron adult men need vs adult women. According to the NIH, Adult men need 8mg per day of dietary Iron and adult women need 18mg per day. That’s more than twice as much. Even with monthly blood loss, those numbers were surprising as men tend to have more muscle tone and larger than women. The numbers don’t lie, it takes a lot to prepare for children, care for children, and also have children.
Now that you know you NEED quite a bit of dietary iron, clams rank one of the top iron rich foods in nutrition education. The number 1 food happens to be liver, but that doesn’t sound appetizing in a soup. Just 1/4 cup of baby clams contains 10.8mg of iron. 3 oz of chicken only contain 0.6mg of iron to put these baby clams into perspective. So you can compare your most popular chicken noodle soup with a measly 0.6mg of iron to clam chowder soup at an impressive 10.8mg of iron. Remember, you need about 18mg per day! On a normal day! Clam chowder sounding better now?
Clam Chowder Recipe
The most nutritious clam chowder soup is one you make yourself from scratch. Processed foods contain unhealthy preservatives and rarely organic ingredients. This five star New England Clam Chowder recipe from happily unprocessed is a delicious and nutritious choice to prepare for your menstrual cycle.
Some other ways you can eat baby clams is to mix them with macaroni and cheese, make a cheesy clam dip or add them to stuffed mushrooms. In other words, they go really well with creamy stuff and cheese!
I’ve noticed the secret is out about the iron nutritional benefit of baby clams and have been sold out quite a bit in my local grocery stores. I stock up with Amazon with these canned clams. The iron content is not the only benefit of clams, it is a great source of lean protein and many vitamins and minerals. Give our favorite clam chowder soup a try and let us know how you start to feel during your menstruation. Wishing the women out there a well and nutritious journey.
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The New Health Cycle 