 Well recently I posted on Instagram about throwing away your cast iron skillet and boy Did I stir up a hornet's nest we got so much Feedback that I wanted to spend an entire episode talking about iron and the good things about iron and the bad things about iron So here's why I came to tell you to throw away your cast iron skillet First of all, I have no skin in the game. I got no dog in the fight I spent a lot of my time in the south where I loved my cast iron skillet use my cast iron skillet This was before I began measuring serum iron in my patients and myself I follow people's serum iron on an every three months basis now Why do I do that? because there is substantial evidence Some of which I've credited in my book the plant paradox more recently a study That I credited in unlocking the keto code that iron ages us iron Rust us and believe me. We do not want to rust Strikingly studies have been done of people who routinely donate iron through blood donation versus people who don't donate blood and Low and behold people who routinely donate blood live about seven years Longer than people who don't donate blood and a more recent study shows that the people who donate the most regularly Actually live longer than people who donate less frequently. So why is that? one more thing Women in general live about seven years longer than men Why is that? because ladies for a good half of your lives once a month you donate blood and Men no longer wrestle saber-tooth tigers. So we don't donate blood on a routine basis And that actually explains one of the interesting longevity disparities between men and women now sadly we Really really really want to absorb iron and make no mistake iron is critical to make hemoglobin The molecule that carries oxygen around our blood make no mistake We have to have iron and because we have to have iron We avidly absorb it through our intestines for one actually really good reason because up until modern times most of us had worms and parasites in our intestines that actually Sucked iron out of us actually caused micro bleeding In fact when I was in medical school in Georgia in the 1970s We would make rounds and pull we all had little tweezers and we would pull hookworms out of the noses of kids because hookworms were endemic in our population in the south Even in the 1970s and we saw a lot of anemic kids and adults with hookworms or other parasites Nowadays we really don't see that very much. So we were designed to absorb iron as much as we could now Because all of these studies show that iron is something that ages us I started looking at my patient with iron overload and a number of patients actually have a gene That makes them really absorb iron and those of you who have Hemosiderosis know that the treatment for you is actually Frequent blood donations to get rid of all that iron that you aggressively absorb And I take care of a lot of patients with hemociderosis. Okay, so that's why we absorb iron so aggressively That's why in my patient population. We ask People with high iron levels first of all to stop using their cast iron skillet if they're using it and one of the things that's surprising is a great number of my patients men and women who have high iron are Using cast iron skillets and I found that if we could get them to give up their cast iron skillet Then recheck their serum iron level three months later It was normal and in fact one of my patients wrote in the comment section on Instagram that she's one of my patients and we tried twice to Have her get her cast iron skillet back and every time she started using her cast iron skillet up went her iron levels Okay, so that's the point of all this now We also have people that aggressively absorb iron from dark green leafy vegetables And if they're not using a cast iron skillet and they still have high iron levels We ask them to get rid of those dark green leafy vegetables like spinach kale Swiss chard and switch to lighter green and that usually does the job If that doesn't do the job we ask them to start drinking tea Black tea or green tea or English breakfast tea orange pico tea. Just not herbal tea The cool thing about teas is that teas really block the absorption of iron in fact during the day in the office I drink four to five cups of tea every day Just to keep my iron levels low and this will apply to Those of you who are listening who have low iron levels and we'll get into that next What do you do to absorb iron besides use a cast iron skillet besides eat dark green leafy vegetables? Take vitamin C Before a meal or before you're going to have dark green leafy vegetables Vitamin C really helps you absorb iron. So those are the tricks Okay, is it ever okay to use a cast iron skillet? well number one if you have heavy menstrual periods and You menstruate frequently and you have low iron. Yeah, it's a great way to get iron into your system And I have nothing wrong with that if you have low iron I'm all in favor of getting your iron up and you're the person who I want to use a cast iron Skillet, I want you to get dark green leafy vegetables in you every day And I want you to take a vitamin C before every meal and those are great tricks to get your iron levels up Occasionally we have to give you iron pills The problem with iron pills for a lot of particularly women is it makes you nauseated or constipates you So if you're going to take an iron pill make sure you're taking some magnesium along with the iron pill and Make sure you take vitamin C Every time you take the iron pill that'll really help you second if you're anemic make sure your doctor is checking your serum iron level and Make sure that your blood cell indices like MCH and MCV are normal That could indicate that it's not an iron problem at all that you're anemic So this is easy to sort out just make sure your doctor is doing all those steps like I do in all my patients secondly, there are a great number of people who have low iron levels that have Nothing to do with being a menstruating female If you're a man and you have low iron levels Guess what? There's a really good reason for it and they're Worth looking into first of all most adult males with a low iron level We need to be looking for either an ulcer or a polyp or even an intestinal cancer And it's easy to discover just recently. I had one of my patients with a new low iron level And sure enough he had a couple of bleeding polyps in his intestines Luckily, they weren't cancerous and low and behold when he had his polyps out the next time we saw him His iron level was back to normal. Yay Now older adults may be anemic But their iron levels are perfectly normal Many older adults suffer from what's called myelodysplasia which is Simplistically a pre-blood cancer and most of the time we don't have to do anything about that So the point of all this is Just because you're anemic doesn't mean you have low iron Same thing if you have too much iron make sure That you are taking the steps that I asked you to do Okay, one more thing that I see primarily in my vegans and vegetarians who are anemic Many of you are women You have a very high phytate diet What the heck is a phytate? phytates are part of the plant defense system to prevent being eaten by you and To prevent their babies their seeds from being eaten by you My interest in the plant defense system centers around lectins Which is are designed to convince you that it'd be a bad idea to eat Certain plants and certain plant babies, but phytates are part of that defense system as well and phytates Block the absorption of minerals and iron just happens to be one of the minerals that phytates block So phytates are actually present in grains. They're heavily concentrated in grains. And so if you're Getting most of your nutrition from grains and beans are loaded with phytates and you have low iron and You're not having heavily menstruing female Please look into lowering the phytate content and you'd be amazed how well that works in my vegetarian and Vegan patients in raising your iron Finally Please please please stay away from calves liver folks in my upcoming book You're gonna find out how dangerous calves liver is for you And I'm sure I'm gonna get a lot of comments about it and trust me. I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska I have nothing against beef Until now and I've written about this extensively and the studies just get Overwhelmingly sad about the dangers of calves liver Here's the solution have all the chicken liver you want Chicken livers are great for you if you have low iron Okay Last but not least just because you're anemic does not mean your iron level is low and Low normal iron levels predict doing very well length wise longevity wise Finally, what about my grandmother? Everybody wrote in who's 92 years old and used your cast iron skillet all over life Great your grandmother may very well have had Other reasons why she was anemic like for instance Parasites most of us up until the current generation had parasites in our intestines and good for her And who knows we probably used cast iron skillets because we did better because the parasites kept sucking iron out of us And just because grandma made it to 92 Using her cast-iron skillet actually exception proves the rule Study after study shows that a low normal iron is beneficial to you long-term More amazing episodes just like this one watch now Aluminum pans unless they are lined with ceramic You should throw them away as well because aluminum in itself is toxic to our brain