Living bodies require iron for many things, including oxygen transport, DNA synthesis, and metabolism and detoxification.
Iron is so important, in fact, that the body has no method for excreting iron, and even has an iron recycling program that reclaims iron from old red blood cells. Our bodies evolved in environments that are far less nutritionally dense, so to speak, than the environment many of us live in now, and the body makes sure it has ways to ensure that it will rarely want for iron, as it’s so crucial for life.
Richard Crichton PhD, in his book Iron Metabolism, states that the human body only needs about 1mg of iron per day. It excretes about 1mg per day passively through the shedding of skin and intestinal cells, and 1mg is enough to maintain body stores unless the body loses large amounts of blood .
The current US RDA is between 8-18mg of iron per day for adults- less for men and more for women due to their menstrual cycle- and many of us consume more iron than that per day, depending on how many fortified, processed carbohydrates we eat. If you’re eating processed carbohydrates, breads, pastas and cereals in America, you are getting far more iron than your body needs in a day.
The stated reason for this high amount of iron in processed foods is that only between 10-20% of the iron we consume is absorbed. The remainder flows through our intestines where it contributes to inflammation and leaky gut and feeds pathogens- we’ve seen this is a primary cause of chronic gut conditions.
When Did Iron Fortification Begin?
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in The United States has mandated the addition of supplemental iron compounds to processed foods in America since 1941, and levels were increased in 1969 to combat the stated problem of ‘Iron Deficiency Anemia’.
In the 1990’s the USDA released a ‘food pyramid’ of recommended food intake per day, and the base of the pyramid was a recommendation of 6-11 servings of bread, pasta and other complex carbohydrates that are frequently fortified with large amounts of iron compounds.
Let’s check the medical research to see what it says about iron.
Over 20,000 Studies on Iron Overload Have Been Published Since 1970
A medical literature search for ‘iron overload’- a condition of too much iron in the body- shows that over 20,000 articles have been published on iron overload since 1970, the year after iron supplement levels were increased by the FDA.
Over 13,700 Studies Published on Ferroptosis Since 2020
Ferroptosis is cell death induced by iron overload. The process was discovered by Pamela Maher and David Schubert in 2001, and at the time they called it ‘oxytosis’. In 2012 Brent Stockwell and Scott J. Dixon coined the term ferroptosis, and in the past 10 years, research on cell death induced by iron overload has exploded.
In the past five years alone, over 13,700 articles have been published on the link between ferroptosis and many of the chronic illnesses we see today, including diabetes, PCOS, Alzheimer’s disease and cancer.
One (Big)Problem is Misapplication of Testing Results
Low hemoglobin levels in blood tests are often wrongly used to diagnose ‘Iron Deficiency Anemia’, and then additional iron supplements and even iron infusions are prescribed. The more appropriate blood test for body iron status is transferrin saturation, which often isn’t measured before iron is prescribed. The best test for whole body iron status is a liver biopsy or liver MRI for iron levels, and as far as I’ve seen, this is only done in research settings or extreme cases of suspected iron overload.
Sometimes when iron supplements are prescribed, hemoglobin levels will go up because large amounts of new iron flood the system. However, the body likely had plenty of stored iron, which means iron wasn’t deficient, the body just couldn’t access it: it was stuck in storage.
Iron Deficiency Anemia is more accurately described as “Iron Stuck Anemia”, meaning we can’t access stored iron.
What’s often missing when hemoglobin levels are low is the ‘iron debit card’ that allows the body to access stored iron. The iron debit card in our body is the protein Ceruloplasmin that liberates iron from the abundant body storage sites.
The lack of recognition of this simple problem of misdiagnosing low hemoglobin levels as ‘iron deficiency’ has likely contributed to the large increase in iron overload in the population. The fall out of this are the many neurodegenerative and metabolic conditions driven by ferroptosis- cell death driven by iron overload.
For more information how to liberate abundant body iron stores and rebuild your metabolism, please see The Root Cause Protocol by Morley Robbins.