Anemia can be a big problem and it's more common than most people realize so today
we're gonna talk about the basics and explain them so you know what to look for
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Everyone's heard of anemia, but it's not so clear. I remember even back in school
it took me a while before I really understood the wide implications it can
have and here's why because anemia has to do with blood and blood has to do
with oxygen delivery and why do we have oxygen delivery well we breathe so that
we can make energy and supply oxygen for all the cells in the body and if you
have anemia that means you're breathing you're taking in the oxygen but you
don't have a proper delivery system your delivery system is broken or weak we're
exhausted so anemia is enormously important if you have anemia if your
oxygen delivery capacity goes down by 30% then every cell in your body gets
30% less fuel than it should so you can see how far-reaching that could be so
the signs and symptoms are things like fatigue pallor which means you pale skin
you look pale or whitish decreased concentration because you don't have the
energy to think properly weakness because you don't have the energy for
muscle contraction dizziness because you don't have the energy for the brain to
proper signals properly so and the list could be endless pretty much because it
can affect everything. How do we measure this? we're just going to talk about the
very very basics so when you get the test you know what to look for and if
your test doesn't include these then you know to ask for them red blood cells
this is simply a count of how many red blood cells you have per milliliter of
blood and the number of bloods red blood cells
your body is enormous as a matter of fact 70% of all the cells in your body
are red blood cells somewhere between 20 to 30 trillion cells out of about 40
trillion all red blood cells and if you look at it from the top it looks like a
circle but if you look at it from the side it's what's called a biconcave disk
it's thinner in the middle so it folds easy because these things are because
when these things get out into the very finest of blood vessels called
capillaries then sometimes it's so tight to get through that they have to fold
themselves in order to make it through so the shape is enormous ly important
and we're going to talk about later how if that shape is abnormal then they
don't function and they get eliminated the MCV stands the V stands for volume
that's all you need to know it's the size of the cell because a large cell
can hold more hemoglobin it can have a larger oxygen carrying capacity than a
smaller cell and oftentimes if your body can't make the right size if they're too
small then it compensates by making more of them a larger numbers you have to
compare these things a little bit hematocrit is the number multiplied by
the volume so the hematocrit is the total percentage of your blood volume
that is red blood cells if we packed them all together then there should be
about 40 to 45 percent of the blood should be cells by volume and hemoglobin
is the oxygen carrying compound it's a protein that is part our and it has a
component of iron that can bind to oxygen and carry it out into the tissues
so obviously if you have more hemoglobin you have more oxygen carrying capacity
if you don't have enough hemoglobin you can't carry that oxygen properly so your
oxygen carrying capacity what determines if you have anemia or not depends on the
total number their size and how much hemoglobin they
have in them so any one of these that is decreased could mean that you have
anemia so if we look at some of these numbers then for a male men have a
little bit more of all these than than women so the normal range for men should
be four point one to five point six and if you notice that's a pretty large
range it's like almost a 30% difference from the upper to the lower number so we
really want to understand that there's a sweet spot here and typically you want
as a man you want to be somewhere around four point seven give or take a couple
of tenths but by the time you're down to four point one you're already borderline
anemic same thing for women this range is three point eight to five point one a
little bit less but the sweet spot is about four point three the size is
important also and here normally we have a huge range from eighty to ninety eight
but in functional medicine where they look at optimum value then they have
narrowed it down pretty pretty precisely that the ideal size is pretty close to
ninety give or take a couple of points so by the time it's down to eighty five
it's already too small indicating that the body doesn't have enough iron to
build these things properly hematocrit again is the total volume of cells and
the range is 36 to 50 in men the sweet spot somewhere around 45 give or take a
couple for women a sweet spot is 40 give or take a couple hemoglobin for men it's
12 points 5 to 17 again that's a pretty large range we want to be close to the
middle of that range and the sweet spot for men is about 14 and a half and for
women is 14 so there's a lot of women out there who are in the eleven point
eight or 12 something range that have already lost about 20% of their
hemoglobin so they're borderline anemic and yet on the
blood tests they're in the range so nobody really gives them any information
on that nobody raises any flags on that when people think anemia the classic
standard solution is iron and it's not quite that simple because even though an
iron deficiency anemia means that all of these will be decreased that in the
absence of iron the body can't keep up with any of these four values there are
other values that we need to look at when we look at iron in the blood work
then the first value we get and the only value we get in most blood work is the
serum iron that's how much free iron is floating around in the bloodstream ready
for the body to use for manufacture of red blood cells but it's a pretty poor
indicator of total iron stores because 60% of all the iron is bound up in the
red blood cells that's where the iron is doing its work about 4% is sitting in
muscles and the rest serum and ferritin is available for the body to make new
red blood cells to utilize as raw material but only 1% of that is in the
serum and 30% is in the ferritin so if you really want to look for if you need
iron you don't want to look just at the serum you want to look at the ferritin
and then we want to understand that even though iron is important there are many
other factors that are maybe even more common in today's society because very
few people are deficient in iron actually they might be losing iron for
various different reasons or not being able to utilize it but a lot of people
get enough iron and more importantly too much iron is extremely toxic and we're
seeing more and more people today with iron toxicities so let's look at some of
the other factors now if if it's not just iron then what else do
we have to look at well just look at the steps that have to work in order for the
body to produce red blood cells and to utilize iron so the first is bone marrow
the bone marrow is the origin for the blood cells so the bone marrow has to be
healthy and there are a small number of genetic defects that where the bone
marrow doesn't produce enough or the right kind of blood cells number two is
the kidney very often in kidney disease when the kidney stops functioning
properly it also stops producing the hormones that the body needs to make red
blood cells so there's a hormone called EPO or erythropoietin which is the only
place that the body makes this hormone that tells the rest of the body how much
red blood cells to make so when we don't have enough arethe repeat and sometimes
because of a poor kidney function now the body isn't making enough because
it's not getting the message to make enough red blood cells third a diet
obviously if we want to make red blood cells we need certain components and the
first one we talked about iron but the next three are b12 b6 and folic acid and
these most often are deficient in vegetarian and vegan diets so if you're
a vegetarian or vegan make sure that you supplement with enough of these vitamins
so that you don't become anemic then once we eat the right stuff we also need
to be able to absorb it and here is where there's an epidemic of digestive
problems and absorption problems in our society stress interferes with the
production of hydrochloric acid and enough quantity of hydrochloric acid is
maybe the most common factor for absorption of iron and b12 then there's
something called intrinsic factor if we don't have intrinsic factor if
it's not being produced enough or if we have an autoimmune disease if we have an
antibody blocking the intrinsic factor we also can't use the b12 and if we have
damaged villi meaning the intestinal membrane in your small intestine
primarily this is where we absorb most of the nutrients if we have a poor
environment if we have dysbiosis or something more severe where the villi
are being destroyed such as in in Crohn's or celiac disease then the villi
can't produce the proper enzymes and they can't perform the proper absorption
and again we become deficient in these things even if they're in the diet and
then we have to ask so all of this the first four is about making red blood
cells but what if we're losing them faster than we can make them and so we
have to ask if there is a bleeding problem and of course this is why women
are much more commonly anemic because they bleed once a month through their
menstrual period some people lose a little bit some people lose a lot and if
they're already marginal in their production that loss every month can be
very significant also people with ulcers can lose significant amounts of blood
continuously and one factor in blood loss can also be aspirin because aspirin
makes all of the digestive tract more leaky and permeable so you lose an
amount of blood through your digestive tract it's like a small bleed every time
that you take an aspirin there is something called hemolytic process that
means breaking down of red blood cells so if in order for them to do their job
they have to be made properly they have to be healthy they have to have all the
components and the nutrients in them in order to live for three to four months
and do their job anything that keeps them from getting healthy
means they're not going to live out their full three to four months and
they're gonna be breaking or being destroyed too soon so drugs can coat the
red blood cells and make them look like they're defective and then the spleens
job is to filter out so the spleen is like an oil filter it takes out the crud
and the the defective red blood cells and the cell debris from the bloodstream
and if something doesn't look like it's supposed to it's the spleens job to get
rid of it so drugs can make the red blood cells look abnormal toxins can do
it toxins can also break the red blood cells or keep them from forming properly
and then there's the genetic component where there are people with sickle cell
anemia or spherocytosis meaning the red blood cell doesn't have this perfect
round or by concave shape and now the spleen recognizes it as abnormal and it
gets filtered out and destroyed all of these things have to work in order for
us to make blood properly to make red blood cells the way they're supposed to
be and iron like we said can be a common problem but there's way more to this
than simply starting to throw in some iron in the body if you're eating a
normal average diet with a fair amount of meat and you are anemic then there's
more likely that there's something else here that's not working that we have to
address first and then we have to find you the right form of iron that is
highly absorbable and that your body can utilize in the proper way just like
everything else that we talked about on this channel and in our office we never
look at one little thing by itself we always look at the big picture we have
to ask what is the root cause why is this happening and then we handle that
root cause and then once we got that under way then we do everything else
that we know to get healthy because every one of these steps that
don't work means that there's some lack of health and the best thing that we can
do to make sure that this works in the long run is to do everything we can to
take care of ourselves so in our office we talk about the chemical structural
and emotional stress that we need to address the whole person holistically
and we have to do it in a way that we support it in the long run not the quick
fixes not the little pinpoint actions to treatments we look at the big
picture we handle the cause and then we work on a long-term lifestyle so hope
you enjoyed this information let me know if there's any more questions that you
have or if you have any experience with any of what I've been talking about
please share this information because the more people that know about this the
more we can build a healthy population and we can have all bunch of healthy
people and happy people around us as always thanks so much for watching