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Comment by james_pm | Hacker News Reader

Is this why blood has a metallic taste? It's literally metallic?

Yes, iron. You can clearly taste it. That's one of the things I noticed after using a plasmacutter to cut through sheet, the vaporized iron stays afloat long enough that if you take off your mask and get a whiff it smells like blood.

I was under the impression the iron in the blood was in the form of hemoglobin. Does hemoglobin itself have a metallic taste, or is the taste caused by something else in the blood?

Good question I do not know but I associate the two (blood, iron vapor) very closely. It may well be that the blood also contains some free iron but Iron is so toxic that I doubt that would be enough to taste directly so it may well that haemoglobin itself tastes metallic but it only has a handful of Iron atoms in it compared to a mountain of other stuff.

Yes.

Which of course leads to the inevitable sword-forging question.

Answer (possibly not suitable for some): <https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/78885>

I know we're not supposed to accuse anyone of trolling, but just admit it. :)

I'm pretty sure, yes.

I've never bought the official explanation for this. We have just four iron atoms per hemoglobin. But the roughly quarter-billion of these per red blood cell are in the red blood cells, which presumably haven't all suddenly lysed and dumped their hemoglobin.

I think we should test with blood plasma first. I'm thinking it is the various salts in the plasma we're tasting, not the iron bound up in hemoglobin which is itself trapped inside of red blood cells.

I was going to say, it's always been a more copper-y taste to me and that's what I usually read in descriptions of the taste.

I'd describe it more like an umami-rich sauce.

Which it is...

If you are a vampire.

Did some more reading, can't find much conclusive, you might be right, this reddit post is probably one of the better discussions

https://www.reddit.com/r/biology/comments/cqes9/why_does_blo...

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