The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 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’.
While something indeed is missing, it’s not iron.
Consider the following two graphs on research trends from the scientific database PubMed:
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.
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.
Low hemoglobin levels in blood are often used to diagnose ‘Iron Deficiency Anemia’, and then additional iron supplements and even iron infusions are prescribed.
Iron Deficiency Anemia is more accurately described as “Iron Stuck Anemia”, meaning we can’t access stored iron. The body only requires 1 mg per day of absorbed iron to maintain adequate levels in the body. The current recommendations of iron for men is 10mg per day, and for women is 18 mg per day, and if you grew up in America, it’s likely you have more than enough iron in your bank of body stores.
What’s often missing when hemoglobin levels are low 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. For more information on this process, as well as what to do about it, please see The Root Cause Protocol by Morley Robbins.