This is why managing your iron status
with dietary restriction should only be
a last resort.
Hi. I'm Dr. Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com.
And this is Chris Masterjohn Lite,
where the name of the game is
"Details? Shmeetails. Just tell me what works!"
And today we're going to talk about why managing
iron status with diet is generally a bad idea.
Now, in the last episode, I talked about
why most people who avoid iron in foods
don't actually need to. And I talked about
how I need to manage my iron status,
and yet with a little bit of blood
donation, I can eat all the iron that
I want, and I don't have any problems.
The theme of this episode is a little bit
different. This is on the dangers of
managing iron with diet. So, I had a
consulting client once who was an
intermittent client. We met twice
separated by a year or two, and
in the second appointment, his zinc and
copper levels were getting dangerously
low. And I said, "What have you been doing
differently with your diet?" Turned out
really the only thing he had been doing
differently with his diet was he started
eating less liver, red meat, and shellfish
in order to bring his iron levels down.
So what happened? Well, liver, red meat, and
shellfish were his most important
sources of zinc and copper. And it just
so happens that everything that's high
in iron is good for you in some other
way. So for example, the red meat is a
great source of zinc; the shellfish, great
source of zinc, copper, and
many other minerals;
the liver, great source of copper,
especially. Liver is also a great source
of vitamin A. Liver is also a great
source of vitamin B12. Eating liver once
a week can give you a lot of nutrients,
insurance against a lot of deficiencies
that you can't get when you remove
that liver. We looked in the last episode
at my results showing that I was eating
10 ounces of red meat a day, and it was
contributing to less than a tenth of my
total iron and less than half of the
daily requirement that I should eat.
So even eating 10 ounces of red meat is not
going to push you over. Liver supplies about
three times as much iron as red meat
does, but who here is eating 10 ounces of
liver a day? I recommend eating liver
one to two servings per week. At one to two
servings per week, you can afford to get
a fairly hefty dose of iron. It's still
not enough to meet the RDA for that day,
and it's certainly not going to meet the
RDA for the week. Are you going to cut
out the legumes from your diet, which are
probably your best source of folate,
which are certainly your best source of
the mineral molybdenum? Are you going to
cut out the vegetables from your diet,
which are the best source of polyphenols,
which are probably an excellent source
of vitamin C, which are probably an
excellent source of folate?
We could go on and on and on with these
things. There's no food that you can take
out to bring iron down that isn't going
to potentially give you deficiencies of
other nutrients. So managing iron status
with dietary iron is a bad idea.
Now, you could add iron absorption
inhibitors. Well, there's plenty of iron
absorption inhibitors in the natural
foods that you eat. If you just eat meat,
starches, and vegetables you'll have iron
absorption inhibitors. You can add
phytate in order to chelate iron, and yes,
there are medical contexts where that
might be necessary, but as a
general principle, that's a great way to
induce a zinc deficiency. Does it help
you with iron overload to get a zinc
deficiency? Not really, so it's not a
great idea. Adding calcium is a way of
reducing some of the iron absorption in
your food. I actually do think this is a
great idea if you're adding about 300
milligrams of calcium from food,
or if you need to, supplements,
per meal. But that's just meeting your
needs for calcium. So yes, you should do
that because you don't want to be
deficient in calcium. But you don't want
to start adding grams of calcium to the
food as a means to manipulate the iron
absorption in the food because then you
can not only get too much calcium, which
as we talked about in a previous episode,
maybe contributes to heart disease in
some contexts, but also grams of calcium
can inhibit the absorption of a bunch of
other minerals in your diet. So what
should you do? Well, unless there is a
reason that you need to do more than
this, the first line of defense should
always be to donate blood.
If you're ineligible to donate blood, you can ask
your doctor about phlebotomy. Sometimes
that might not be available to you, and
in those cases, I can see working on some
of these other issues. Sometimes you
might be in a medical state where you
can't sacrifice blood to lose. In that
case, I see working on this from other
angles. But for most people, the first
line of defense should always be to
donate blood because 90% of the
iron in your body is in your red blood
cells. That is absolutely not true for
the copper in your body, for the zinc in
your body, for the other nutrients in
your body. That's not to say that you
don't lose anything else when you lose
blood. It's just to say that you are
highly selectively losing iron far more
than anything else when you lose blood
in a way that is not true through any of
the means that you can manipulate iron
absorption from your food or any of the
ways it can manipulate the iron content
of your diet. And so this is why, unless
there are contravening reasons in
specific cases, it is always better to
manage iron status with the amount of
blood donation needed to bring those
numbers into range, which you discover
primarily by trial and error and
remeasuring the tests, rather than to
Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com, and this has
been Chris Masterjohn Lite.