Hi Everyone,
I’m interested in this discussion about iron here, as I have read quite a bit about it. Morley Robbins, who wrote “Cure Your Fatigue”, has been looking into iron, copper, magnesium, boron, and the problem with non-whole food vitamins for years and has compiled his own theories about it. I have gone back and read much of the research he references, so it makes sense to me that our ferritin levels are too high and that stored iron is the major cause of cancer and other chronic disease conditions - including aging. I won’t go into details here, because it is well laid out in his book - or on his website, The Root Cause Protocol, but below is the main idea (This is greatly simplified and solely from memory, so I may get some of the specifics wrong. But I am sure that I am correctly presenting the conclusions. I highly recommend reading up on this yourselves):
Ascorbic acid, that we know as vitamin C, has an empty receptor that attracts copper, which causes much of our copper to be bound up in these ascorbic acid molecules. Whole food vitamin C has copper molecules attached to it, so not only contributes copper molecules to the body, but also doesn’t deplete the existing ones. Copper is responsible for the making of the substances that facilitate the exchange of iron in and out of our tissues and blood. Because there isn’t enough of this exchange facilitating substance in our system, we have too much iron in our tissues - this iron doesn’t show up in our blood tests because the iron is trapped in our tissues. The excess, trapped iron in our tissues oxidizes, creating that most feared of substances, the free radical - basically rust - that is considered a toxin by our bodies, causes inflammation, and starts the whole cycle of chronic disease and aging.
If you look into iron and cancer, you will find that cancer cells are loaded with iron and are attracted to it. There are some treatments that even use iron as an attractant to deliver cancer cell destroying substances to cancer cells (the iron is like a trojan horse) - and other treatments that use cancer cells’ attraction to iron to so increase the iron concentration in the cancer cell that even it, as an iron loving cell, is destroyed by the rust toxicity (See artemisinin).
Again, this is not my work or recommendation - just offering information about what info I have found. The book and the website have a lot more info about whole food vitamins along with the imbalances caused by taking synthetic ones (especially, and this one is hard to wrap your head around if you’ve been following along with the common knowledge - not ever taking synthetic vitamin D), about mineral imbalances, especially magnesium and our depleted boron, and more. It is quite a novel set of ideas compared to the status quo and very thought provoking. I, too, gave blood until I got my ferritin levels down, am highly conscious of magnesium levels, and am a stickler for whole food vitamins.
