Iron : The Real Cause of Iron Deficiency

Hello. Hello. Welcome. You’re listening to Dr. Martha Reid at Doctors Choice Integrative Medicine in downtown Vancouver. A space where I bring passion, inspiration and nourishment to the conversation of your health.

So, I was going over some blood work with one of my patients yesterday afternoon and, you know, young woman (in this case, young being in her mid thirties) and this young woman… we were going over her blood work and I noticed that her iron was low. And she said, “oh, yeah, yeah. But that’s totally normal for me. I’ve always had low iron.”.

Oh, Okay.

“Yeah, my mom has low iron too”. 

I said, Oh, Okay. Do you know why you have low iron?

“Oh, no, it’s just totally normal for me. It’s always been that way.” 

I said, Oh, Okay. Well, there’s some pretty clear reasons why you would have low iron, and I think it’s important that we check those out.

She said, “Oh, no one’s ever told me that before!”

I said, Yeah, yeah, let’s let’s talk about that. I said, number one, if we are deficient in our iron, it’s possible that you’re not absorbing it, which begs the question, what’s happening in your digestive system? Are you properly digesting your foods to release the iron out of them? And then are you actually absorbing those nutrients across the gut barrier?

And she said, “Well, I’m vegetarian and I don’t eat a lot of red meat. So that’s probably the problem.” 

And I said, Well, there are a lot of vegetarians that don’t eat meat and have great iron. So again, it may be that you’re not digesting it. Yes, of course we need to eat iron rich foods, but lots of vegetables have tons of iron, right?

I said, So you’re eating greens?

She’s like, “Oh yeah, it’s a mainstay in my diet.”

Dark, leafy greens?

She said “Yeah”

And I said, how are you eating them?

“Oh, I eat them raw. I put them in my smoothies, I have them in my salad.”

So, I said that therein might be part of the problem. So yes, dark, leafy greens are an incredible source of iron and in fact they’re a really good source of calcium too. But we don’t release the iron well from our darkly leafy vegetables unless they’re cooked. And the reason for that is that the fibrous bonds of those plants hold the iron so tight that unless you break those bonds, you don’t release the iron out of the food to absorb it properly. So it ends up just being, you know, part of the roughage and fiber that cleans out your digestive system, which is absolutely fantastic and important, but you could get so much benefit from those dark, leafy greens if you got the iron out of them.

I said, so what you need to do is you need to cook them.

And she said, “Yeah, but I mainly have them in a smoothie, so I’m going to have a hot green mess for breakfast.”

Nope, nope, nope. I promise you, you’re not. What you do (and this is how I do it to get that iron into my smoothie) is I fill my food processor with an arrangement of dark, leafy greens. So, typically speaking (in my household), that’s going to be spinach and kale and arugula, might have a bit of cilantro and parsley and other leafy things that are just starting to go a little bit yuck. And I throw those into the smoothie into the blender. I will then add some jewel dates because those also have iron in them and they will help to sweeten the bitterness out of the greens. Meanwhile, the kettle is on the stove and (quite quickly) perking joyfully for my coffee, which I love. (And I will teach you all about the wonderful benefits of the benefits of coffee down the road.) But for now, the kettle’s boiling and I pour hot water over those greens just until they go BING, bright green. Okay? You don’t need a ton. You just need to break the bonds and you know you’ve done it when the colour changes.

So, literally speaking, I have a nine cup food processor. I fill it to the brim with greens, which is at least three handfuls, and then pop five mineral dates, and then I pour the hot water over and when the water sinks to the bottom, then maybe there’s an eighth of the food processor has hot water.

So anyway, the colors are bright green. And now I started blending and then I will add in all of the other nutrients that I want. I typically will put zucchini in and I put avocado, I might put extra cucumbers. Sometimes I’ll put chickpeas, then I put in banana, and now I’m going to hide all of those green things so that the incredible critics in my house (I have two young boys) will actually drink the smoothie.

So now I put in frozen berries and cherries and blues and raisins and strawberries, and we put all of that in, get it blending, blending, blending. And then I add the liquid of choice, potentially protein powder and all these other wonderful things. But the point is to get the iron at this point out of the greens so that you can properly absorb it to change your iron status.

She was just like, “Oh, I had no idea.”

I’m like, right! There you go!

So that’s one place to look. The second cause of why you might be iron deficient is if you’re bleeding out somewhere, right?

So men, for example, who don’t have a monthly bleed don’t lose iron the way that we do as women, we lose iron if we’re bleeding regularly every single month. But it ought not to be a super heavy bleed. This also is a whole other conversation to pay attention to, right? We have this notion that our menstrual cycles are meant to be horrendous, and we have that notion because so many of us have horrendous menstrual cycles. So that becomes the norm. In fact, that’s not the way it’s designed to be. It not it ought not to be that it leaves you on bed rest for three days with a hot water bottle getting a divorce, like nope, nope, nope, nope, no.

So regardless, though, if you have a really heavy menstrual bleed, we need to address that. But that might be a cause of why you don’t have high iron stores. But let’s say you’re someone who doesn’t have a heavy menstrual bleed. What else might be going on? Well, this leads us back potentially to the digestive system. Do you have inflammation in your digestive system? Are you struggling with underlying health conditions of your gut for example, IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, or IBD (which is Crohn’s or colitis)? If you are, you might be dealing with some minor micro bleeds, little teeny tiny bleeds. It’s like a faucet dripping water. And over time, that’s a huge loss. Well, from an iron point of view, that can be a major loss of Iron.

The third area that we will be deficient in iron may be secondary to us growing things in our bodies that we’re not aware of. Now, what that brings to mind for many of us is cancer, right? And cancer can be a really scary word. I had a very wise oncology professor a long time ago who said to me, “You know what, cancer is a word. It’s not a sentence.” And so whenever I get tripped up about that word, I remind myself of that. It is a word, not a sentence. However, in the context of us growing things, yes, of course, cancer may be one of those things. We could be growing tumors.

That being said, there are a lot of tumors that are totally benign, meaning they’re not harming you. They’re not putting you on a path to an end you would not like. So one of these types of growths is called a fibroid, which are quite common these days for women. And they have to do with having too much estrogen in the body. So too much estrogen and we are going to make these growths of fibrous tissue within the uterus called a fibroid.

Well, any time we’re growing something, a collection of cells are used. Cells require iron. Iron is needed to build cells. So if you are building something with cells, you are using iron to do it and you might then be depleted in iron. So, it’s worth looking into that.

1. What’s happening in my menstrual cycle, is it regular, is it comfortable, is it easy?
2. What’s happening in my digestive system? Is it regular, is it comfortable? Is it easy?
3. What am I eating on my plate? Do I have iron rich foods on my plate? Got to, I have them there first, then am I digesting them?

So what’s happening with my upper digestion? Am I making stomach acid to break my food to part? Am I making digestive enzymes from my pancreas and my liver gallbladder producing the bile to break the foods apart so that they’re in tiny individual nutrient forms like marbles or Lego pieces that just lock on to the receptor in the small intestine or come in through their gated channels to get into the small intestinal cells and then get dumped into the bloodstream and then off they go delivered to the liver.

So, you have to eat the foods, digest the foods, absorb the foods. You need to know if you’re growing things that you’re not intending and you need to know what your menstrual cycle is doing and don’t normalize the things in life that are not normal.

So, if anyone else is struggling with iron deficiency and doesn’t realize that there’s a root cause to that (and things you can do about it), please come in and see me because my goodness gracious, iron isn’t just affecting low energy, it affects our mood, it affects our immune system, it affects our hormone status. So, so many of the things that contribute to our vitality and our health require iron.

Thank you so much for spending this time with me and joining this conversation. If any of the things that you’ve heard today have landed with you, moved you, resonated with you, and you’d like to pipe in, I would sure love to hear from you. Some of the best conversations happen right in the medicine house with me and the easiest way to do that.

Pop over to the website www.doctorschoiceintegrative.com. Book a discovery conversation with me. It’s called a discovery call, and it’s a complimentary 15 minute slot where we can explore health together. I’d love to do that with you. Hope to see you there.