My Quest for Iron as a “Severely Anemic” Consciously Eating Pregnant Woman

It started out with a blood test that I requested.  I had been feeling very exhausted and sleeping a lot.  I figured it couldn’t hurt to draw some blood, check the iron levels. My doctor called me once the results were in to let me know I was severely anemic.  How severely?  Blood tests don’t look at iron directly, but rather at ferritin, which is is a body protein that is used to store iron. It’s the major iron storage protein of the body, so measurement of ferritin levels is an indirect way to measure the amount of iron stored by the body. I was rated a nine, when “acceptable” levels are, in general, 12-300 nanograms per milliliter of blood (ng/mL) for males and 12-150 ng/mL for females.  So the conclusion is/was I need more iron - stat!

My doctor was kind enough to offer me some free iron supplements from the clinic, which I gladly accepted... when I don’t need to spend money, I avoid it!  I also made a posting on Facebook about my dilemma and received lots of helpful information and ideas in regards to restoring my iron levels.  On the surface it seems simple enough, but as I tried to find a solution that fit with my conscious eating ideas,I became more confused, and even angry at times.

The first thing to understand about iron is how easily, or not, it is absorbed into the body.  The two main natural types of iron are heme iron, which is animal based and derives iron content from hemoglobin, and then there is non-heme iron which is vegetable based.  What’s the big deal?  Well, we absorb about 15-35% of the heme iron sources we consume, and only about 2-20% of non-heme iron we ingest.  So although any given food or supplement item may contain a certain percentage of iron, we actually only absorb a portion of that iron, and animal based iron is more readily absorbed.  To top that off, there are many types of foods that interfere with the uptake and absorption of iron, including milk and dairy products, beans and pulses, and even spinach (which happens to be a “good source” of iron, depending how and when you consume it).  Getting confusing yet?  And then of course there are certain substances that most of us regularly ingest, like coffee and tea, that have serious inhibitory effects on the absorption of iron, so much so that in all honesty, when I crunch the numbers, my caffeine intake is a very expensive luxury, in terms of my overall health and bodily function. Lame!  My conclusion when it comes to replenishing iron without supplements and doing it as fast as possible? Organ meats (gag!), lean red meat, or drinking blood? (Maybe a little extreme for some folk!)

So I get it - I’ve got to eat a variety of foods at different times to capitalize on available iron, and I’ve got to do this while not consuming my fave morning beverage.  But I still have to catch up, I’ve got to replace all that depleted iron, but how?  I have a couple options when it comes to iron supplements - there are liquid ones, vegetarian ones, capsule types, and all kinds of chemically derived iron supplements that I can load up on.

I start my quest with the conventional iron supplements from my doctor pictured here:

Now hold on!  Whoa, whoa whoa!  First things first, this iron supplement is some serious heavy metal, delivering a whopping 300 mg of ferrous fumarate per pill...Children have been known to die when they consume over 200mg of iron at once.  I’m pretty sure these wouldn’t kill me, but I do know that my kidneys and liver and going to have to do some heavy lifting to make use of all that iron, all at once.  But pure ferrous fumarate has an iron content of 32.87%, therefore one tablet of 300 mg iron fumarate will contain 98.6 mg of iron, so not terrible but still pretty heavy. Mollusks such as clams, mussels, or oysters  (which are the best naturally occurring source of iron) contain about 28mg of iron per 100g, so I’d have to eat 400g of these critters every day to equal the iron levels of one daily supplement pill.  Gets me thinking...

The icing on the cake, when it comes to these free iron supplements, is that they are LOADED with non-medicinal ingredients that have been relegated to the realm of POISON in my books for a number of years... D&C yellow no.10, FD&C blue no. 1, FD&C red no.2 and 3, FD&C yellow no.6, silicone dioxide, and sodium lauryl sulphate just to name a few!  Yikes!  Most of these food colorants are no longer in use in the E.U., they’ve been banned in fact, as they have been implicated in cancers and numerous serious neurological deficits.  You can reference this article here if you need proof http://www.naturalnews.com/032512_artificial_colors_food.html ... and there are plenty of other studies out there.  As for the sodium lauryl sufate, I have been avoiding that shit for years.  It’s a very common additive in conventional skin and tooth care products that actually alters our genetics when it comes to the skin, making it ultra sensitive and prone to all sorts of serious dysfunction.  (The skin is the largest organ in the body so I figure it’s pretty important).  So I don’t put this stuff on my skin, but now I’m supposed to swallow that along with all these other poisons to get my iron levels up?  Trying to weigh the positive and negatives here, and being anemic is starting to feel like less of a problem than trying to address it!

After posting about this issue on my Facebook account the other day, I decided to definitely look into the Floradix liquid iron supplement (http://requiredforlife.com/floradix) .  This is a vegan friendly alternative to solve iron-deficiency problems that can be found at most health food stores.  For someone who hates spending money, this alternative came with a hefty price tag of $46 for 700ml.  Taking 20mL of this stuff per day, it would provide me with 20mg of iron per day, of the non-heme sort.  Like I said before, I’d only absorb 2- 20% of that kinda iron if I followed all of the iron absorption “rules”.  A bottle this size would last me just over a month if I ingested as suggested.  When I start to think about spending fifty bucks a month on something no-so potent I feel rather hesitant.  Many of my friends gave it rave reviews and even testimonials, but my skeptical mind will not let me discount the power of the placebo...  Hmm.

All this information is swimming around in my head, and I need to make some decisons, address the problem for my growing babe, and take some form of action, but what?  I started questioning the idea of measuring low iron levels in the first place.  I also considered the fact that many pregnant women, especially in the later stages of the game, are labelled “anemic” and “treated” with iron supplementation in a plethora of ways - as in, it’s not a rare condition.  Before my MD called me and told me I was anemic, I was just going with the flow, sleeping a lot because I felt tired... really tired.  I guess the real problem is that we have become so divorced from our environment and the natural food sources it can abundantly provide that we no longer really know how to eat anymore.  Do we listen to our bodies or do we make our bodies listen to us?  What are the consequences of ingesting such large doses of heavy metal in order to obtain a certain reading on a certain test?  For me these are deep questions.  One thinks a lot about a lot of things when having a baby.  At least I do.

I reluctantly swallowed back one pill from the doctor this eve, and said a tiny prayer to my dear kidneys and liver that they could handle what I was about to throw down.  I consoled myself about the unnecessary poisons that I consumed along with it, and asked my body to somehow take care of it, grab those toxins, and excrete them... even if it means I get really stinky armpits for a few days.  I’ll probably take another tomorrow, and then revert back to my multivitamins on a daily basis... at least for awhile.  I’ll also start eating more red meat (and I’m really lucky to have a freezer full of farm fresh meat that I met ready to go, thanks to some human angels).  That’s all I can do for now.

I would be interested in hearing some feedback on these discoveries, and some opinions, because we live in a world with a lot of information and choice.  I value experience and dialogue more than any “expert opinion” these days, especially when these “experts” are funded by the same companies that unnecessarily burden our food and supplement supply with deadly poisons.