Nutrition Etc...

Iron. I've been thinking about Iron a lot lately. As a part of my New Year's resolution, I started tracking just about everything I eat. For me, it has been a colossal undertaking wrought with being made too aware of what I'm probably doing wrong - on a daily basis. What's more, any attempt to correct malnutrition in one area usually results in an imbalance in another area. Take protein for example - eat more protein rich food, increase fat. Unless you eat chicken as your primary source of protein, you will likely run into this problem. The same is true for calcium. One thing I've noticed in all this diet-tracking is my utter lack of eating whole foods with a balance of vitamins and minerals. It seems that while fighting to regulate my carbs, fat, sugar, protein, and calories, I have overlooked vitamins and minerals! I was so focused on keeping out the bad that I neglected taking in the good. That brings me back to Iron. Recently, I began tracking the days I felt fatigued and was unable to finish my workouts satisfactorily. I correlated my Iron levels with performance and voila!, a negative relationship.

Unfortunately, that's not the whole story. On days that I don't get enough Iron, I'm also low in other essential vitamins and minerals. For example, I am regularly deficient in Vitamin A, Fiber, Potassium, and Iron. While Vitamin A is pretty easy to fix (eat 1 serving of carrots!), the others are a little more tricky. Fiber, for instance, is attainable but I have to eat a lot more bran (harder than it seems) and beans. Also, there are some social consequences to the latter. Moving on... I can probably up-take Potassium by eating a banana but I have to be more aware of sugar that day. Now what about Iron? Like I mentioned before using other examples, this comes with a trade-off. The best way to get Iron is to eat red meat. You can also get it in leafy green vegetables; however, be prepared to eat a lot! But wait a minute. Before I start filling my grocery cart full of spinach, what does Iron even do? To me, Iron was like Winston Churchill (W.C.). I knew they were both very important but I wasn't exactly sure why? Well, a quick Google search revealed the answer (of both Iron and W.C.!). Both ensure sufficient support from allies to keep the "enemy" at bay. You see, Iron (W.C.) is responsible for recruiting oxygen (allies) to muscles (the frontline). To prevent fatigue, Iron ensures muscles receive plenty of oxygen. This potentially explains a bit about my fatigue/Iron relationship. So, I started taking One-A-Day Men's Health to supplement my diet. This seemed to put everything back on track... except it didn't. My multi-vitamin does not have Iron or Potassium. Interesting. Why not? Well, the other day I researched the reason why my multi-vitamin doesn't contain Iron (I'm still not sure why no Potassium). What I learned was that having too much Iron is not good and supplement companies intentionally keep it out of multi-vitamins. Here is the reason why: There's some substantial evidence to support that the body retains Iron and that too much can lead to an increased risk of type-II diabetes mellitus (Aregbasola et al., 2013), stroke (Kaluza, Wolk, & Larson, 2013), and coronary heard disease (Qi et al., 2007; Hunnicutt, He, & Xun, 2014). WOW! Well played Bayer Pharmaceutics for keeping it out of my One-A-Day.

Ok, so I probably need more Iron. But I'm not going to try and get it via a supplement. I'm going to try to get it through whole foods as best I can. And if I don't, I'm going to err on the side of caution and pay tribute to the the old adage, "less is more". While I'm sure that most anything you eat or do is somehow linked to increased risks of negative side-effects, I'll choose to play it safe with Iron. In the mean time, I'll also stick with taking my multi-vitamin and playing the balance game with my diet. If anything, keeping track of my diet has been a great learning experience. It gives me the opportunity to find out what I'm doing (and have been doing) to my body over time. To some extent it's a pain to log this stuff on a daily basis but it's gratifying, too. I continue to learn what's likely good and bad for my body. More importantly, I'm learning what to learn. Until monitoring my diet, I never thought to investigate the role of Iron and the consequences of having too much.