 If cancer is indeed a so-called ferrotoxic disease, a consequence in part of iron toxicity, that would explain not only the dramatic drop in cancer rates after blood donations, but also why people with higher levels of iron in their blood had an increased risk of dying from cancer. Why women who bleed into their ovaries are at high risk for ovarian cancer, and why those suffering an iron overload disease called hemochromatosis have up to 200 times the risk of cancer. There's even been a call to go back and look at some of the chemotherapy trials that kept taking blood from the chemo group to check for side effects, maybe just the iron removal from the blood draws accounted for some of the apparent chemo benefits. Iron may be a double-edged short. Iron deficiency causes anemia, whereas excessive iron may increase cancer risk, presumably by acting as a prooxy and generating free radicals. Iron deficiency anemia is a serious problem in the developing world, but in mediating countries iron excess may be more of a problem than iron deficiency. Body iron stores accumulate insidiously with ageing due to the fact that intake exceeds loss and our body has no good way of getting rid of excess iron. Ferritin is a blood test measure of our backup iron stores. The normal range is 12 to 200, but just because it's normal doesn't mean it's ideal. In the blood donor study, those who developed cancer were up to here. The average for men, maybe over 100. This suggests that quote-unquote normal ambient levels of iron stores may be noxious and constitute a problem that affects large segments of the population. So there may be a need to redefine the normal range based on disease risk rather than just following a bell curve. Thus iron deficiency may exist when ferritin levels decline to less than about 12, whereas ferrotoxic disease may start to occur with levels greater than about 50. Harvard recently looked at blood donations and colorectal cancer and found no connection. But the range of ferritin levels they were looking at were like from here to about here, right? And those are the ones who reported giving blood like 30 or more times. So maybe instead of draining our blood to reduce excess iron stores, why not just prevent the iron overload in the first place? If you measure the iron stores of men that stay away from heme iron that get all their iron from plants, their levels come in right around where the cancer-free donor group came in, which may help explain why those eating plant-based diets tend to have less cancer and other diseases associated with iron overload, such as prediabetes, as well as diabetes.