 Are you suffering from insomnia, heart palpitations, headaches, perhaps candida, sebo, joint pain? There are many ways iron overload in your liver can manifest itself. I'm going to share my understanding of it and I was planning on selling this as a video course but you guys can support me by sharing the YouTube video or purchasing my book down in the description below. So there are many blood tests related to iron status. Unfortunately, none of these are indicative of liver iron status. You have to get an actual liver biopsy or an MRI scan of your liver to see the iron deposits. However, we can use some of these markers as an indicator there might be something wrong. Ferritin is a protein in the body in the blood containing iron that releases it when needed. This can mark inflammation in the liver. Serum iron is iron contained in the liquid left over from blood so there are no blood cells present. Transferrin is a protein that binds to iron and transfers it. Uibc is unsaturated iron binding capacity. This is transferrin not bound to iron. Tibc is total iron binding capacity calculated with serum iron and unsaturated iron binding capacity. Then we have transferrin saturation which is serum iron divided by total iron binding capacity. These are usually used as markers for anemia. Ceruloplasmin is a ferroxidous enzyme. It is the major copper carrying protein. It is regulated by retinol, the animal form of vitamin A. We have liver enzymes which can be irregular in states of damage but if you only have slight iron storage in your liver these might not be elevated. So very important to check your liver enzymes to mark liver inflammation. And then we have hemoglobin which is the red blood cell count. This is important later as your hemoglobin needs to be above a certain number in order for you to actually donate blood to reduce your iron overload. In my case my ferritin was slightly elevated. It was 470 and the maximum in the range is 450 and my liver enzymes were high as well. So thankfully you have come across this video and we'll be able to address this issue before it gets any worse. And regardless of whether you've been on a carnivore diet, a standard American diet, a vegan diet, it's very likely that there is some iron deposited in your liver because modern diets are deficient in zinc, copper, vitamin A, retinol, magnesium, various nutrients needed to regulate iron in the body. So let's go over this hypothetical scenario. First you come across Frankie's video and you thank him by sharing the video with your friends. Then you get a blood test and something is irregular. Your ferritin slightly elevated, your liver enzymes are off, or maybe you do have candida or SIBO and you speculate your past diet was deficient in copper and zinc and maybe had too much iron whether it's fortified foods or meat. If you can get a scan or a biopsy of your liver, unfortunately I don't have health insurance at this point in time so I'm unable to do this. This is important because we don't have a gauge for how much iron is stored in your liver so we don't know how much blood we have to donate. So ideally you see a hematologist, unfortunately hematologists which are blood doctors aren't usually educated on this issue. Some of them are. Some of them have dealt with iron overload and people with hemochromatosis, people that have iron issues in their liver, but you might have to shop around quite a bit to find a good one. You don't have access to either of these things. Even if you do, you should donate blood ASAP. You can only donate blood every three to four months and you might have to donate blood 20, 30 times to remove all of the iron from your liver. As you can imagine, four or five, six years to fix this issue at a rate of donating blood every three months isn't what we want. You can have that hematologist schedule phlebotomies which are blood draws that can be done more often in circumstances such as this. There is no way for your body to remove all of that iron from your liver once it has reached that point. Yes, the body does lose some iron through sweating. It uses iron for various metabolic processes, but we are talking such a large amount of iron that it would take lifetimes of activities like that to remove it. A lot of people say, oh, can I fast? Can I go on a raw diet? Can I take this? Can I take that? You need to donate blood or there are various mineral chelators that are injected intravenously. If you're not putting a needle in your arm, you're not reducing your iron intake. This is a substantial amount that needs to be removed from our bodies. I'm sorry, guys, but this is the only way to do it. So you start donating blood, that's the first step. You start mobilizing iron out of your liver back to make red blood cells. Now we have to address the diet because that was what caused the issue in the first place. It's helpful to get a hair mineral analysis to know what our copper to zinc ratio was as we don't only need to balance copper and zinc, we need to make sure we're getting enough of it. Even if you have too much zinc from a past carnivore diet, even if you're deficient in copper, the real issue is that we're not getting enough of either as well as the fat side of the vitamins, especially vitamin A in the form of retinol. This can be done by following the dietary principles that I advocate in my carnivore diet course, in my book The Ancestral Indigenous Diet, as well as my YouTube video How to Get Started on a Carnivore Diet. You can also consume dairy. Calcium is the only substance known to inhibit iron absorption to some degree. This is not a definite, it's not like you have some butter with your steak and the iron doesn't get absorbed, but it has been shown to help. Can you be anemic and have this issue? I believe you can because anemia doesn't really have anything to do with liver iron stores. You could have plenty of iron stored in your liver, but if you don't have the B vitamins to make red blood cells, if you don't have the copper, the zinc, the retinol to mobilize iron, you're going to be anemic despite your liver turning into a solid block of steel. Iron is the most dangerous oxidant. You don't want anything to do with this. Things like SIBO, things like Candida, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, small intestinal fungal overgrowth, things that many people are suffering from are because of iron. Iron is a building block of life. Like bacteria, these fungus, they love iron. All they want is iron and sugar, and as long as you have a liver that's overloaded with iron, it won't be functioning. Every time you eat something, the bile that is secreted from your liver will essentially be toxic. It'll be full of iron, full of metals that will feed the SIBO, that will feed the Candida. Despite doing all of these things, you might be suffering from SIBO, Candida, things like histamine intolerance, which is why you're getting heart palpitations and insomnia, just from the bacterial overgrowth. In a way, the bacterial overgrowth is preventing you from getting damaged by the metals because the fungus is growing using the metals and then you excrete that in the bowel movements. This makes things very complicated because despite doing all of these things, then you have to do an antimicrobial protocol and fix these things, which is very difficult to do. I can go over that if you guys want to reach out to me for a consultation, but this is where it gets complex. We have to use certain herbals like oregano oil, clear it out, constantly make sure we're not overdoing it, get the probiotic bacteria in there, and if you do this correctly, if you do everything correctly, you should be able to conquer the SIBO or Candida within a few weeks to a few months, and then hopefully your liver function is restored in a high enough capacity, so you're producing bile, you're producing stomach acid, everything is working enough to prevent the pathogenic bacteria from overgrowing. One thing I want to be very clear is that everything needs to be in check. There is no quick fix, there is no simple solution, vegan might make this worse, a raw diet might make this worse, fasting makes this worse. Most things might have prevented an iron overload in the first place in some capacity, but at this point in time, there is far too much iron in your liver, hypothetically, for any of these to have any impact whatsoever. Just going to make things worse. So the base diet that I recommend, it really depends on your past dietary experience, but you need to get a certain amount of copper and a certain amount of zinc in your diet. You want plenty of animal foods, the shellfish, the seafood, squid, things like beef liver are going to be copper dominant, and muscle meat, eggs, dairy, that stuff is zinc dominant. So we definitely want to get at least two, three, four milligrams of copper every day, and a corresponding amount of zinc anywhere between eight to 15 times the amount of copper. See what ratio works for you, but you want to make sure you're getting both copper and zinc, but if your hair mineral analysis indicated you were copper deficient or you were zinc deficient, maybe focus on more copper foods or more zinc foods depending on what that scenario was. We also want to make sure that we're getting plenty of retinol, vitamin A, and fat soluble vitamins in general to make sure everything is being utilized. Nutrients are synergistic. That's why we don't really want to supplement anything specifically unless you know 100%, you did something wacky. Like you followed a grain fed corn of war diet for three years and now your zinc is out of control. That's the only scenario where you would want to use like a copper supplement. There's also hypotheticals like taking a small amount of magnesium might help. You might need to take vitamin D3 if you're not getting any sun. You might need to take iodine if you're not eating seafood. There's a bunch of things that can help with the nutrients energy and the absorption. If your foods are high quality, if you're getting plenty of sun exercising, if you're off the grid away from electronics, you're not sucking down estrogenic pollutants in your water supply. Things will correct themselves over time. Granted, you're donating blood, you have scheduled phlebotomy. So hopefully none of you guys are suffering this at least to the extent that I have and that this helps you discover it early on or have comfort in knowing you're addressing and doing things that will prevent this from happening. The modern corn of war diet is incredibly dangerous, primarily for this reason. Even if you were following a high quality animal food diet, it's possible that if you're not getting enough copper, something like this could manifest itself. When you start following a grain fed corn of war diet, that's where you have pollutants, estrogenic chemicals in the meat that make this happen quicker and it's even worse. I'd be interested to see blood work, liver scans, liver biopsies of all these people that have been long term corn of war. They either have good genetics or they have an iron overload in their liver. There's no two ways about it. Perhaps there's a mechanism where indulging in alcohol, doing certain things prevent this from happening. Hopefully there's more further research on this subject. One thing I didn't mention is that hemochromatosis and these iron disorders in general are something that's relatively new even in modern medicine. We've only been studying it for a matter of years. This is really unfortunate that a 27, 28 year old former bartender is the man to go to on this. There are other resources. Morley Robbins has the root cause protocol, but I've heard negative things about that. As soon as I mentioned it, there were maybe like half a dozen people that reached out to me that suffered from issues following the root cause protocol. I've had people mention repeat, but there are people with issues from repeat protocol as well. So definitely be careful about how you're addressing this. Get opinions from as many people as possible and hopefully you guys can figure this out. So thank you guys for watching. As I said, check out my book down below. Share the YouTube video. Those are ways you guys can support me. If you need a source for liver, high quality animal foods, you can check out Frankie's Syringe Meat. We have high quality raw cheeses right now, likely cheaper than your supermarket. Thanks again for joining me, guys. If you do want to reach out for consultations, everything is down in the description below. Take care.