Latest / Love Your Gut / Ep. 127: Who's Eating Your Iron? 3 Hidden Reasons Your Ferritin Won't Budge

Transcript

Ep. 127: Who's Eating Your Iron? 3 Hidden Reasons Your Ferritin Won't Budge · Love Your Gut

• 0:03
  Dr. Heather Finley: Welcome to the Love Your Gut Podcast.
• 0:05
  Dr. Heather Finley: I'm your host, Dr.
• 0:06
  Dr. Heather Finley: Heather Finley, registered dietitian and gut health specialist.
• 0:10
  Dr. Heather Finley: I understand the frustration of dealing with GI issues because I've been there and I spent over two decades searching for answers for my own gut issues of constipation, bloating, and stomach pain.
• 0:21
  Dr. Heather Finley: I've dedicated my life to understanding and solving my own gut issues.
• 0:25
  Dr. Heather Finley: And now I'm here to guide you.
• 0:28
  Dr. Heather Finley: On this podcast, I'll help you identify the true root causes of your discomfort.
• 0:33
  Dr. Heather Finley: So you can finally ditch your symptoms for good.
• 0:36
  Dr. Heather Finley: My goal is to empower you with the knowledge and tools you need so that you can love your gut and it will love you right back.
• 0:43
  Dr. Heather Finley: So if you're ready to learn a lot, gain a deeper understanding of your gut and find lasting relief.
• 0:48
  Dr. Heather Finley: You are in the right place.
• 0:50
  Dr. Heather Finley: Welcome to the love your gut podcast.
• 0:55
  You know that feeling where you finally go to the grocery store and you stock the fridge, you stock the pantry, you're so proud of yourself, and then four days later, you open the pantry and the fridge, and there's basically nothing in there, and you're doing the math.
• 1:11
  You're like,"I literally just went to the grocery store." This is how it feels with kids, right?
• 1:17
  If you live with kids, you understand this.
• 1:20
  You're like,"My life revolves around making food, thinking about food, cleaning up food, cooking food," right?
• 1:27
  So it all makes sense.
• 1:28
  You're like,"Oh yeah, we have a bunch of kids living here, and people that eat food, so of course we're out of groceries." But if you don't have kids and you don't have a roommate and your groceries are missing, you would be scratching your head, wondering,"Where did the groceries go?" So this mystery only stays when there's no roommate.
• 1:48
  So last week, on last week's episode, we talked about why iron doesn't always fix ferritin, and that ferritin is more of a savings rather than just, like, a dial that you turn.
• 1:59
  So if you missed that, go back and listen to that because this episode is more of the sequel, and it will help make a lot more sense in your head.
• 2:07
  So I wanna talk today about one specific reason that your deposits keep vanishing because for some of you, that reason is that somebody truly is coming into your fridge and eating the groceries.
• 2:21
  So the frustrating part that I wanna be upfront about is that is the thing that can be hidden for years.
• 2:29
  Your iron panel, a blood panel, is like a balance sheet, so it tells you how much is in that account, roughly how much is moving, depending on what labs you have, how full the trucks are, all the things.
• 2:42
  It's a genuinely useful place to start, but a balance sheet cannot always tell you who is spending the money.
• 2:50
  So you can run a full Monty iron panel, which is what I recommended as a first step last week.
• 2:56
  You can see your ferritin of an 18.
• 2:59
  You can see that your saturation is low.
• 3:01
  You can correctly in- conclude that absorption is the problem, but then you're kind of stuck because absorption is the problem opens up a lot of categories, and it doesn't tell you what to do immediately.
• 3:14
  So A lot of smart women like you listening to this podcast end up addressing absorption as just kind of a vague thing.
• 3:23
  They're like throwing apple cider vinegar and bitters and all these things.
• 3:27
  But the three things I wanna go through today are very specific, and they will show up on specific testing.
• 3:33
  And in my experience, they are they are wildly under-looked for women with a ferritin that will not move, because nobody can connect gut infections and iron numbers.
• 3:45
  So one just thing before I get into it, most women with a stuck ferritin or a lot of people that have a stuck ferritin don't have an infection.
• 3:55
  So I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that everybody listening to this episode has a parasite.
• 4:01
  But what I will say is that if you have tried working on absorption, you've tried working on a lot of things, and maybe you have co-occurring GI symptoms, it could be worth looking into some of these things, especially if taking iron has really exacerbated your GI symptoms.
• 4:17
  It can be worth ruling out.
• 4:20
  All right, so here are the top three suspects that I wanna talk about today.
• 4:24
  There are more, but this is what I wanna talk about today.
• 4:27
  So suspect number one is H.
• 4:29
  pylori.
• 4:30
  H.
• 4:31
  pylori is the most common infection in the world.
• 4:34
  It is a bacteria that lives in your stomach, and depending on which population you look at, something like a third of to half of the people in the world have it.
• 4:44
  Plenty of people never know because it can just be kind of quiet sitting there, and they may not even have symptoms.
• 4:50
  But it can do something very specific that matters enormously for iron, and that is that it turns down your stomach acid production.
• 5:01
  So if you think back to last week's episode, iron shows up in your food or in supplements in a form that your body can't actually use, so it takes stomach acid to convert it to the form that can cross into you.
• 5:16
  So acid is the can opener, and H.
• 5:18
  pylori breaks that can opener.
• 5:21
  So you bought the groceries, they are in the kitchen, and the one tool that you actually needed to open them is sitting there broken, so you can't really keep buying more cans, right?
• 5:33
  It does a second thing, which is that it irritates the stomach lining enough to cause slow, low-grade bleeding if it is advanced enough.
• 5:43
  That does not mean that everybody having this has the same thing.
• 5:47
  So some people don't notice this.
• 5:49
  It can be like small, steady loss.
• 5:52
  But this is part of the, like, draining the tub faster than it's filling.
• 5:56
  So it can hit you from both of those directions, and it is one of the better documented reasons for a woman's iron deficiency, especially when not responding to iron.
• 6:07
  What makes H.
• 6:08
  pylori really sneaky is that it doesn't always just announce itself as a stomach problem.
• 6:13
  Some women get the obvious, like reflux Stomach burning, nausea.
• 6:19
  Plenty of others get nothing, or they have that, like,"Oh, I just kinda feel full, like I have a brick in my stomach." they might not even notice it.
• 6:27
  They're just, like, uncomfortable, and they naturally, almost like subconsciously, just stop eating as much because they feel like they're getting full really quick.
• 6:35
  So if you've been told you have low stomach acid or maybe you're on reflux medication, you feel worse after a protein-heavy meal, um, it can be worth looking into this.
• 6:46
  Low stomach acid is usually a symptom of something, and this is a common symptom of that something.
• 6:53
  So that is the reason that I started with H.
• 6:56
  pylori, because it's very common, and it can be a real reason that you are struggling to get your ferritin up.
• 7:04
  So suspect number two is Giardia and company, so parasites.
• 7:10
  Giardia specifically because of where that parasite loves to live.
• 7:15
  Iron gets absorbed in a small stretch of your small intestine right at the top, um, the duodenum and the beginning of the jejunum, and Giardia loves that place as well.
• 7:28
  So what Giardia does is it flattens the surface.
• 7:32
  So your small intestine should be like a shaggy rug.
• 7:35
  It has these, like, finger-like projections and that is what helps you to absorb nutrients.
• 7:43
  So if we were to stretch that out, it would be like the surface area of a tennis court.
• 7:49
  And Giardia takes that shaggy carpet, it damages that shaggy carpet.
• 7:54
  So you can kind of picture the difference between trying to dry off with like a very thick plush towel or trying to dry off with like Saran Wrap or maybe like parchment paper.
• 8:08
  The same footprint, but a tiny fraction of that absorption.
• 8:12
  So that's why a Giardia infection doesn't just affect iron.
• 8:16
  It's going to take fat-soluble vitamins, B12, minerals down with it because they all get absorbed around that same area, which is why a lot of women often have these really confusing deficiencies that don't seem necessarily related to each other.
• 8:32
  And then they get handed these random supplements for separate things.
• 8:36
  So the clue here is usually timing plus travel.
• 8:40
  If your symptoms started after a trip, camping weekend, food poisoning, maybe you went to Bali.
• 8:47
  We see a lot of clients like traveling abroad.
• 8:50
  Any kind of post-infectious stuff is a real category.
• 8:54
  I have a whole episode on that But what does your stool actually look like?
• 8:58
  Because if you have greasy, floating, foul-smelling stool, that can be fat malabsorption.
• 9:05
  Fat malabsorption especially that started after traveling or food poisoning, that is a clue.
• 9:11
  Again, I am not saying that everybody here has a parasite, because not everybody does.
• 9:16
  But some things that just context clues that we wanna look for.
• 9:20
  So the evidence is much stronger for Giardia than for some of the other organisms that show up.
• 9:26
  Like Blasto, for instance, gets treated very aggressively by a lot of practitioners, and it may or may not be the issue.
• 9:35
  So this is where comprehensive stool testing can be really helpful to just see generally how...
• 9:42
  what is the landscape of the entire gut Suspect number three is bacteria, and this one is like the actual roommate in the most literal sense.
• 9:52
  So bacteria love iron.
• 9:55
  They-- Iron is actually a requirement.
• 9:58
  It is essential to almost everything living, which means the organisms in your gut are loving iron just as much as you do.
• 10:06
  So some of them are so good at it that they make dedicated little hooks to grab iron out of their environment and pull it in before anybody else can.
• 10:16
  So when there is an overgrowth, whether that is in the small intestine where it doesn't belong, or even in the large intestine, you have competitors to a supply chain that is already pretty tight.
• 10:28
  So it's not because you are eating too little iron, it's because your bacteria are taking it away from you before you can get to it.
• 10:36
  The second layer of this, which is important it kind of connects the episode from last week, is your body is not naive about this.
• 10:44
  It knows that most things that would like to make you sick need iron to grow.
• 10:50
  So when your body senses ongoing bacterial activity, it actually is very smart and it locks iron away.
• 10:58
  So it pulls iron out of circulation, and it stashes it in your tissues and makes it unavailable specifically to starve out whatever's growing.
• 11:07
  So your body is literally just trying to protect you, which if your tank is already full, which I talked about last week, your ferritin might read low.
• 11:18
  Your body is actually sitting on iron, but it just refuses to release it.
• 11:23
  So every milligram of iron that you swallow is getting hidden away because your body does not want-- it's decided that a temporary shortage of iron is safer than feeding a gut infection, which makes sense, right?
• 11:36
  So your immune system is doing its job correctly, but it's just been doing it so-- for so long that now you're having tons of symptoms.
• 11:44
  Maybe you're short of breath, or you have rapid heartbeat, or your hair's falling out, or you're exhausted.
• 11:51
  There is one where I'd most want inflammation markers alongside your iron because the combination of low ferritin and, and like an elevated CRP tells quite a bit of a different story than ferritin on its own And can just give us some insight there.
• 12:09
  So I've done full episodes on SIBO, iron, all the things, constipation, so you can go back and listen to those episodes.
• 12:19
  So let me be clear when I say this, because what I don't want you to do with this is just please do not go buy a parasite cleanse.
• 12:27
  I know that can be the impulse, like,"Okay, fine, I'm just gonna go do a parasite cleanse." I understand that because when you have been stuck for years, and finally you're like,"Oh yeah, maybe it is parasites," or,"Maybe it is this thing," the urge to act is overwhelming.
• 12:43
  But you cannot treat an infection off a symptom list for a few reasons.
• 12:48
  Number one is these three overlap so much on how you feel: tired, bloated, constipated, iron that won't budge, food sensitivities.
• 12:58
  Like, you can't always tell these things apart, and they genuinely need different approaches.
• 13:04
  So just taking random stuff to kill random things is setting you up for a protocol gone wrong.
• 13:12
  And if you go after an overgrowth in your gut and it's already inflamed with a lining that's already damaged, and your body's already running on empty, you could make yourself worse versus better.
• 13:24
  So there's an order of operations here, which is where actually working with someone on this could be very beneficial.
• 13:31
  So what do we actually wanna do?
• 13:34
  First, like last week, first go get an iron panel if you haven't.
• 13:38
  Um, I would try to get a full Monty iron panel, including inflammation markers, um, because that can be super helpful.
• 13:46
  And second is get some advanced testing and work with a practitioner.
• 13:52
  If you have GI symptoms co-occurring, a GI map is an excellent place to start to tell you whether there's parasites, whether there's H.
• 14:00
  pylori, whether there's bacterial overgrowth, whatever it is.
• 14:04
  So the combination of blood work plus stool testing can be so powerful because together you can have the full story, which is kind of the whole point, right?
• 14:15
  We don't want a vague test and, you know, not test and just kind of guess.
• 14:21
  So if this is interesting to you, if your ears perked up and you're like,"Oh, this is something that I haven't explored," I am teaching this in way more depth this Sunday, the 27th, in my live training, Why Iron Isn't Enough.
• 14:37
  So you're gonna learn exactly the process that you can go through to look at this, how to actually fix your ferritin, so you can see what each of these situations look like.
• 14:47
  I'm gonna give examples of clients, so you will leave feeling hopeful and inspired and knowing what you can actually do to fix your ferritin.
• 14:57
  So if you haven't signed up, make sure that you're signed up.
• 15:00
  It's Sunday the 27th, 3:00 PM Central.
• 15:03
  There will be a replay available for seven days.
• 15:07
  I do that on purpose because how many times have you signed up for something and then never watched the replay?
• 15:12
  The perfect scenario is that you can come live because we do live Q&A, we do live coaching.
• 15:18
  I would love for you to be there live.
• 15:20
  It is always so much fun, and I seriously cannot wait.
• 15:24
  My webinars are probably one of my favorite things that I do, along with this podcast.
• 15:29
  So join on Sunday.
• 15:31
  The link to join is in the show notes.
• 15:34
  I cannot wait to see you there and answer all your iron questions.
• 15:37
  But I hope that today gave you something to think about, something interesting, and a little insight into maybe why your iron or why your groceries keep disappearing.
• 15:46
  So I will see you next week on the next episode.