Iron Deficiency Symptoms and Causes of Anemia – Dr.Berg

Did you realize that over a billion people on this planet are deficient in iron? I was actually pretty surprised to hear that. So today we're going to talk about iron deficiency anemia. So here are the symptoms. Fatigue. Pale, like you're losing color. Brittle nails. You get those little grooves in your nails. Hair loss. Thinning of the hair. Twitching. Feeling irritation. Pica. You crave dirt or clay. You have the urge to consume ice or chew on ice. Restless leg syndrome. Now there's actually more, but these are the main ones. Now the question is what is causing this? Well, excessive menstruation. Excessive bleeding. And by the way, if you're female and your cycles are very heavy, that means you have estrogen dominance. I'm going to put a link down below for you to watch later, but there's some things you can do to reverse that problem. Number two. Ulcers. It could be an ulcer in the stomach or even the small intestine that you don't even know about. Number three. Hemorrhoids. I have a very good video on this. You want to support your liver. There's a really good remedy. I also have a remedy on this as well. I'm going to put the link down below. It's taking zinc. Number four. Colon cancer could potentially cause anemia. Number five. Dietary. You're a vegan and you're only consuming beans and grains and plants. Those foods have what's called non-heme iron and you only absorb a very, very small amount. It's like 1.4% of the iron. You'd have to consume a tremendous amount of plants to get your iron. The problem is a lot of the plants and grains have certain things like oxalates or phytates that block iron. The best source of bioavailable iron is called heme iron. It's from seafood, red meat, poultry, eggs, and even insects have a high level of heme iron. Just in case that you may get that urge late at night if you want a snack. I'm being very sarcastic. Number six. Certain antibiotics can deplete you of iron. Number seven. Low stomach acid. A lot of people have this. They don't even know it. As you age, you lose the stomach acid and now you cannot absorb certain minerals, especially iron and even calcium. Number eight. Malabsorption. If you have some type of problem in your colon or you're missing a gallbladder or you had surgery, as in gastric bypass, that can leave you with a hard time absorbing iron. Number nine. This is fascinating. I'm going to create a separate video just on this, but inflammation can deplete your iron. How? Well, both good bacteria and bad bacteria, as in pathogens, need iron to grow. What happens within your immune system, your body, as well as your good bacteria, tend to lock up or bind iron during an infection, during a fever, and during inflammation. What happens as a survival mechanism, your body prevents the pathogens from getting a hold of the free iron. That is one strategy to help limit their growth. Now, what's supposed to happen is after the infection, the inflammation goes away, but what happens if you have chronic inflammation because you have some type of autoimmune condition, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, or whatever? That is going to end up depriving your whole body of a lot of trace minerals, iron being a very specific one. The more chronic the inflammation, the more anemic you could be. Now, you might say, well, I'll just go ahead and solve this problem by taking more iron, right? Well, you're going to actually feed the pathogens, and then they can actually grow and you'll create an imbalance. How do you solve that? What you do is you get rid of the actual source of the inflammation. There's a couple things that I would recommend. I'm going to put the videos down below, but number one, fasting, periodic prolonged fasting is essential, and a lot of vitamin D. Both of those can help reduce the inflammation without adding in the iron for the pathogens. Now you know the symptoms and what causes anemia. If you haven't seen my video on chronic inflammation and anemia, I'm going to put it up right here. Check it out.