There is increasing evidence for the dangers of iron.
Iron in your body. This article will point the way to living longer, healthier, and with fewer illnesses.
It’s been known for decades that as we age, iron builds up in our bodies.
This applies to women as well as men.
Women who are menstruating will lose a small amount of iron with each period, but in today’s Western diet, we get more iron than we lose.
And so even menstruating women will accumulate iron.
So by the time we’re middle-aged or older, whether we’re male or female, our iron levels are very high…and this makes us sick!
And it turns out that these higher iron levels create huge free radical problems in the body.
So that’s what makes this rat experiment so interesting. The researchers fed some rats a regular diet, and other rats a diet where they restricted iron.
And guess what? The rats fed low iron live longer and were much healthier.
The differences in health were striking. Restricting iron made the rats live much longer and much healthier.
Why does restricting iron lengthen life?
In a more recent study, they tried to answer this with human beings.
And they found that iron does accumulate with age, and that it causes stress in the mitochondria, those tiny organelles in each cell that produce energy.
Iron releases free radicals. It creates plaque in the brain, which lower the functioning of our brains.
The same restriction on iron that works for rats seems to be also helpful for people who want to live longer and live healthier
How can you restrict your iron?
There are several ways of restricting your iron intake.
- Make sure that every supplement or vitamin pill that you are taking contains zero added iron. If it contains any iron whatsoever, throw it out.
Iron is stored very efficiently in the body. So as you eat a lot of high iron food, the iron will be efficiently stored, which is what you do not want.
2. So the second rule of restricting iron is to cut back on your consumption of high iron foods.
These include muscle meat and organ meat, and especially liver. (Muscle meat is the kind of meat that you buy from your butcher or in the grocery store. It’s not organ meat, it’s muscle meat, like leg of lamb, hamburger.)
3. Bind the iron so it doesn’t enter your body. Coffee binds iron, and makes it much less digestible. Consume coffee with each meal of muscle meat, and you will take in MUCH less iron. Studies show that taking coffee within one hour of eating does the job so it doesn’t have to be coffee you drink WITH your meal, it can also be coffee you drink AFTER your meal.
And another thing you can do is give blood.
You can donate blood, usually, one-half liter is the amount that you donate, representing roughly 10% of your blood.
There is a lot of iron stored in blood, so you get rid of iron by donating blood.
If for some reason you can’t donate blood or don’t want to, you can do a donating blood, because anybody is eligible for a phlebotomy, while not everybody is allowed to donate blood.
So those are some of the ways you can get rid of iron, or stop taking in iron.
There are other ways of getting rid of iron such as chelation agents, which I will cover in another study at some point.
For now, recognize the dangers of excessive iron, how urgent it is to reduce your iron intake, and try to prevent the iron that you delete from being absorbed into your body.
Citations
Iron accumulation with age, oxidative stress and functional decline
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0002865
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02435012
Click for more information on Oxidative stress, for Diet & Exercise information, or for information about Functional decline.