Ironing out a dangerous diet
While living in Finland, I met a young attorney who remarked to me that he was slightly anemic. He gave me the lab numbers, and I agreed that he was indeed borderline anemic. “What have you done about it?” I asked. He said his doctor had put him on iron pills.
Since he was a vegetarian, subclinical malnutrition was the likely source of his anemia. However, I pointed out to him, his doctor was only guessing if he didn’t check to see if the anemia was caused by a bleeding ulcer or cancer.
The point of this little story is that blindly prescribing iron to patients can be futile and even dangerous. I first reported on the dangers of excessive iron in one’s diet in 1987 in Health Freedom News, the journal of the National Health Federation. And, more recently, an article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition concluded that a typical Western diet results in high iron levels, not iron deficiency, in elderly white Americans.
Strong evidence suggests that excessive dietary iron can promote infection, cancer, and atherosclerosis.
Check the labels on the processed food you buy. If a label says “enriched,” you are getting iron you don’t want. Most of this enrichment is in processed grains used for bread, macaroni, corn grits, and the like that have been stripped of most nutrients. Adding iron to these junk foods only makes them worse.
Eat plenty of liver and rare meat, and you will never have to worry about nutritional anemia.
How high is too high?
I consider a cholesterol level between 200 and 300 to be within the normal range. If it is above that level, something is broken. But cholesterol has not caused the breakdown. Raised cholesterol levels are simply a sign, just as an elevated temperature is a sign, a protective measure against whatever is broken. You and I know that the actual reason for a “rise” in cholesterol is never found, not by the conventional doctors, not by you or me. It’s best to leave it alone when you don’t know what you are doing. How many doctors test for hyperferremia, hyperhomocystenemia, hypomagnesemia, hypotestosteronemia, or any other cause for the cholesterol rise?
I think the entire cholesterol paradigm is off base, so I don’t test for cholesterol. Most patients have had their levels tested dozens of times, and all the testing has done is lead them down the hall to a cholesterol cowboy who will endanger them with his favorite anti-cholesterol magic bullet.
Read The Cholesterol Myths, by Uffe Ravnskov, M.D., Ph.D., The Cholesterol Conspiracy, by Russell Smith and Edward Pinckney, and The Milk Book by yours truly, and you will know more about cholesterol than you may have ever wanted to!
Keep in mind that elevated cholesterol is not a disease. Rather, it is most likely acting as a protective agent. However, if you are still concerned about your level, a high cholesterol diet will often lower an elevated cholesterol level.
