Men store up to 4.6 times more Iron than age-matched women

miraddo

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"This article summarizes research conducted during the last 2 decades that addresses the idea that stored iron plays a role in the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis and that iron reduction through phlebotomy may play a role in the treatment or prevention of atherosclerosis. Body iron stores rise after adolescence in men and menopause in women. This rise has been linked to the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis through iron-induced oxidation of low-density lipids and foam cell formation."
 

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rr1

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Good find. Some extra points from Ray Peats article on iron:

- Iron is a potentially toxic heavy metal; an excess can cause cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses.
- Other heavy metals, including lead and aluminium, are toxic; pans and dishes should be chosen carefully.
- Iron causes cell aging.
- Drinking coffee with iron rich foods can reduce iron's toxic effects.
- Use shrimp and oysters, etc., to prevent the copper deficiency which leads to excess storage of iron.
- Avoid food supplements which contain iron.
- Take about 100 units of vitamin E daily; your vitamin E requirement increases with your iron consumption.

Also people have had success lowering ferritin using aspirin, lots of milk, 1tsp of cilantro with meals, IP6 and tetracycline antibiotics.
 

Don

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Thanks for both posts, I agree and am on my own lowering iron adventure. Blood donation plus copper rich foods.
 

SonOfEurope

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This is why I laughed when on the forum I was told an adult male could get low iron by avoiding meat and taking chelators for a while.

I think it'd take a long time of that before I'm iron deficient even by the deranged systems standards.
 

redsun

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Misleading title. Yes this is about ferritin and not total body content of iron but the variation between total body stores between men and women is not that different. Average male has about 4g of iron and women about 3.5g.Yes men store more ferritin but women are much more likely to have anxiety, depression, anemia (and the fatigue and other negative symptoms associated with it), hypothyroidism, and restless legs syndrome then men. All of these conditions are associated with low ferritin.

This is why I laughed when on the forum I was told an adult male could get low iron by avoiding meat and taking chelators for a while.

I think it'd take a long time of that before I'm iron deficient even by the deranged systems standards.
Its very possible and there were a few here who have done it and posted about it in the past where they were eating tons of dairy which will inhibit iron absorption dramatically because of the calcium. You dont need chelators, just eating a ton of dairy especially every meal and avoiding heme iron sources can do it. How fast it develops depends on how much you have stored and if you lose more then normal. Men have higher hemoglobin levels as well as RBC count then women due to androgens and its also androgens which increase iron absorption by reducing hepcidin.
 

DrJ

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Men are supposed to fight and bleed in battle lol.

But I think it's good to get ferritin and TFS measured from time to time, especially after 30. I learned I had hereditary hemochromatosis right at the threshold of when it starts to get serious but I think it would have been better to find it a few years sooner. Which I might have with earlier testing because my ferritin and TFS were already getting at high end of "normal" at mid thirties but I didn't get the genetic test til several years later. It's fairly common in Northern Europeans.
 

tankasnowgod

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Misleading title. Yes this is about ferritin and not total body content of iron but the variation between total body stores between men and women is not that different. Average male has about 4g of iron and women about 3.5g.
What are you basing that on?

Iron Researcher E.D. Weinberg has stated that Ferritin is the best measure of full body iron stores. And this seems consistent with all of the other iron researchers I have seen. So, if the averages you cite aren't using ferritin to measure full body iron stores..... how are they measuring it? And where does this "average" come from? And what age where these men, and what year was the average calculated? All of these things make a big difference (as men in general accumulate more iron as they age, and iron intake has risen over the years).

Personally, I don't believe the averages you cite. A pint of blood has between 200-250 milligrams of iron (and it is remarkably consistent, no matter how iron loaded the person is), so right there, that would be between 2.4-3 grams of iron in blood alone. So the "average" man eating all time high intakes of iron and not generally losing blood (not only from not menstruating, but from a lack of intestinal parasites and bloodletting and such) only has 1 gram more of iron in his body?

Hemochromatosis patients accumulate a lot more, and often don't show visible symptoms until they have about 20-25 grams of iron accumulated, and in some of the worst cases, they have 50 grams of iron accumulated. I think a lot of men in their 30s and 40s carry 10-20 grams of iron, a lot more than your cited average, but still not enough to see visible iron overload symptoms.
 

redsun

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What are you basing that on?

Iron Researcher E.D. Weinberg has stated that Ferritin is the best measure of full body iron stores. And this seems consistent with all of the other iron researchers I have seen. So, if the averages you cite aren't using ferritin to measure full body iron stores..... how are they measuring it? And where does this "average" come from? And what age where these men, and what year was the average calculated? All of these things make a big difference (as men in general accumulate more iron as they age, and iron intake has risen over the years).

Personally, I don't believe the averages you cite. A pint of blood has between 200-250 milligrams of iron (and it is remarkably consistent, no matter how iron loaded the person is), so right there, that would be between 2.4-3 grams of iron in blood alone. So the "average" man eating all time high intakes of iron and not generally losing blood (not only from not menstruating, but from a lack of intestinal parasites and bloodletting and such) only has 1 gram more of iron in his body?

Hemochromatosis patients accumulate a lot more, and often don't show visible symptoms until they have about 20-25 grams of iron accumulated, and in some of the worst cases, they have 50 grams of iron accumulated. I think a lot of men in their 30s and 40s carry 10-20 grams of iron, a lot more than your cited average, but still not enough to see visible iron overload symptoms.
I dont know how the researchers determined all of this. But I am sure if you look at their references you can find some answers. Reference 7 is a the source for this claim. Its an acclaimed nutrition book.

There should be at most 2500 mg of iron in the blood since the average amount of blood in an adult is 10 pints. Of course larger men would have more blood but it should not be 3g in just the blood alone for most people which matches the research below. 20% of the body iron ferritin matches the study the OP originally linked with average ferritin levels being around 100-140 ng/ml.

The number I have seen is 1 ng/ml of ferritin equals about 8 mg of iron in storage. If we go with 140ng/ml, its 1120 mg of storage iron in ferritin. So 3620 mg of iron on average in the blood and ferritin and the rest (about 15%) in myoglobin and all the iron dependent enzymes and proteins such as cytochromes and enzymes needed to synthesize amino acids, collagen, neurotransmitters, etc.. If we go to the end of the reference range for most labs of 300ng/ml, this would still only be about 2400 mg of iron stored as ferritin which would be around 5000 mg of total body iron. In the case of HH this is obviously different but I wasn't referring to that.


" In Homo sapiens, the complex regulation of deposits allocation (↑ release if ↑ requirements) and erythrocytes (RBCs) cycle assures the metal to be conserved in complex forms bound to proteins, with the intestinal passage (↑ absorption if ↓ reserves) being the main regulatory point of body iron balance. These mechanisms assure a total body iron of about 2.3 g in women and 3.8 g in men, with almost 60–70% being incorporated in the main circulating protein hemoglobin (Hb), 20% in iron deposits of ferritin, and about 15% in other proteins, mostly myoglobin in muscle tissue together with heme and non-heme enzymes and the iron transport protein transferrin (Tf) [7]. "

I dont know if the total iron intake today is at an all time high but when we consider all the factors that affect its absorption, in people without HH, it doesnt matter as much as you would suspect. The added non heme iron to fortified foods is so poorly absorbed to begin with, as well as naturally occuring non heme iron which is the most common source of iron. Absorption rate of heme iron from meats and such can be about 35% at most and still calcium can reduce both non heme and heme iron absorption even further. Commonly red meats (burgers at least) are consumed with cheese. And there are a few other absorption inhibitors as well to also affect it as well as hepcidin which also helps reduce risk of iron overload.

Of course men who use steroids and/or consume a lot of alcohol could suppress hepcidin it enough to cause issue but otherwise it works well. So a lot is going on to prevent iron excess in normal circumstances. The diet would have to be more specific to lead to iron build up. It would have to be low or no dairy or other calcium sources taken with meals and mostly or exclusive red meat in large quantities with starches and other foods also rich in iron. It would be difficult to get iron overloaded without lots of heme iron and obviously this is almost exclusively going to happen in men to begin with. But most people eat a mixed diet and dairy which is high in calcium is often consumed with red meat or with any meal that typically uses dairy products in some fashion.
 

tankasnowgod

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I dont know how the researchers determined all of this. But I am sure if you look at their references you can find some answers. Reference 7 is a the source for this claim. Its an acclaimed nutrition book.
It may be an "acclaimed nutrition book," but the book simply makes this claim in the chapter on iron, and offers nothing by way of a source to back it up. You can check for yourself on page 176. So, I don't know how a claim with nothing to back it up in a nutrition book would trump a study where they actually measured a marker like ferritin, and it certainly wouldn't trump your own personal results if you took a test for ferritin.
I dont know if the total iron intake today is at an all time high but when we consider all the factors that affect its absorption, in people without HH, it doesnt matter as much as you would suspect.
I don't buy this at all. Again, it's disproven by intervention studies, like this one conducted by Dr. Fachinni-


The intervention diet (represented by the blue line) was low iron and high in iron inhibitors and iron binding compounds. It was very effective in lowering ferritin in a relatively short time, as you can see by this graph from the study-

iron graph.png


Ferritin dropped from about 325 to 100 in the first year of the diet, then from about 100 to 50. So clearly, altering the amounts of iron in the diet (along with iron inhibitors) can dramatically change ferritin over time, in this case, 1-2 years. There is no reason not to suspect that higher intakes over the course of decades wouldn't continue to push ferritin (and whole body iron stores) up.

This chart from the USDA shows that iron intake went up from about 14mg in 1909, to almost 23 mg in 2000. And remember, things like intestinal worms (which lower iron, since they feed on host blood) were still common, even in developed areas, in the early 1900s, but had been mostly eradicated by the 1960s.

iron-intake2.png


This is why I think it's probable iron intake is at an all time high, in general (at least in countries like the US). The bump in the 40s is due to iron fortification, and that fortification stayed through the 50s, 60s, and 70s. The jump up in the 80s is also due to an increase in fortification. And you can also buy iron containing multivitamins and Gerotol, which contain quite a bit of iron, too.

The added non heme iron to fortified foods is so poorly absorbed to begin with, as well as naturally occuring non heme iron which is the most common source of iron.
You sure about that?

I have heard the claim that added iron is "poorly absorbed," but it's not like there is only 1 form of supplemental iron. Weinberg talked in his book (published in 2004) about a newer form of iron that was bound to an EDTA molecule to help increase absorption.

And even if it is the "most poorly absorbed," that's irrelevant if the intakes are high. Have you ever seen Total Cereal? The iron levels are very high, "100%" of the RDA for iron (which is 18mg) in just 30 grams (or 100 calories) of the cereal. For comparison, a pound of ground beef has "only" 60% of the RDA for iron (and is going to be more like 800 calories or so, depending on the fat content). Of course, that's a lot more food and calories. It's probably common for people who eat Total to eat 2-3 times the "servings" in a meal (only 90 grams and 300 calories, but 54mg of iron).
Absorption rate of heme iron from meats and such can be about 35% at most and still calcium can reduce both non heme and heme iron absorption even further. Commonly red meats (burgers at least) are consumed with cheese. And there are a few other absorption inhibitors as well to also affect it as well as hepcidin which also helps reduce risk of iron overload.
Even pouring milk on Total cereal isn't going to inhibit 2 days worth of iron ingested in one meal. Especially if done chronically.
 
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