By: Jean Johnson for Fibroids1I can’t say that I use all that information I learned about the Krebs cycle in a university nutrition course I took way back when. For that matter, the pages and pages of material on what vitamins and minerals are found in which foods and how they benefit the body has since blurred. But I’ll never forget the professor. She was tough – a daily quiz – and gorgeous. Skin as clear as a Flagstaff night on the Northern Arizona University campus, 7,000 feet above sea level.
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Getting Your Iron
To prevent iron deficiency, choose foods like beans, peas, green leafy vegetables, dried fruits, nuts, whole grains and red meats.
Federal guidelines state that women of childbearing age need 18 mg of iron daily.
The most common symptoms of iron deficiency include:
Irritability
Lack of energy or tiring easily
Abnormal paleness
Increased heart rate
Sore or swollen tongue
Enlarged spleen
Iron Statistics
According to researchers at Cornell University, iron deficiency anemia is the leading micronutrient deficiency in the world, in both developed and developing countries.
Women are 10 times more likely to be iron deficient than men, although low iron status among men is fairly common in developing nations.
In the U.S. 11 percent of women in their childbearing years have iron deficient anemia, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Cornell nutritionists add that 16 percent of the women in the U.S. – and 40 to 60 percent of women in developing countries – are iron-depleted but not anemic.
Physically active women and vegetarians are at particularly high risk for iron depletion.
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“See,” she said, when she returned to class after an exceptionally brief hiatus of just days after giving birth. “I’m back already because I eat right just like you can if you take what I’m teaching you seriously.”
Seriously is certainly how women should take their iron consumption – as my former professor continually told us back then. However she never did separate out the difference between full-blown anemia and just being low in iron.
The professor was a Chinese-American woman with jet black hair that hung in a perfect page boy around her face. Her attire was always impeccable on her trim body, and even though she was pregnant while teaching the course, we hardly realized it because she not only did she know how to dress, she didn’t pack on much weight. Nor did she miss much class after she had her baby.
Indeed her teachings on nutrients proved true. As the latest studies are concluding, no matter if you had a blood test and your physician says you do not have iron deficiency anemia, if you’re feeling tired lately or a little foggy, you might consider evaluating how much iron you’re getting. These days, the news is that women don’t have to have a diagnosed case of iron deficient anemia to suffer the impaired mental and physical performance caused by simply being low in iron.
How Being Low in Iron Affects You
Iron deficiency anemia is the most common type of anemia and occurs when low levels of iron inhibit the production of hemoglobin, a compound which plays an important role in getting oxygen from the lungs and throughout the body where it can be used. Women are 10 times more likely to be iron deficient than men.
When women eat diets low in iron they end up depleting the iron that’s stored in the liver. Once these supplies are exhausted, a woman can become officially anemic since she no longer has enough iron to produce new red blood cells.
Instead of focusing on the end result as physicians usually do, researchers have been looking at earlier stages of iron deficiencies before stores in the liver are used up.
What studies are finding is two-fold:
First : That even modest deficiencies make significant differences in intellectual and physical performance. Second: That women are usually unaware of their iron depletion.
Mental Sharpness and Insufficient Iron
Being low on iron goes beyond simply making women fatigued. Even modest levels of iron deficiency have a negative effect on memory, attention and learning.
“Women need to know this actually is affecting their brain and the way they’re thinking,” said Laura Murray-Kolb, Ph.D. of Pennsylvania State University’s department of nutritional sciences.
Murray-Kolb’s study analyzed the performance of 160 women by using eight different computerized tests. Not only did women who were iron deficient under-perform significantly, they took longer on the tasks. The cumulative effect is substantial according to Murray-Kolb.
“On any one given task, you may not see a huge difference between an anemic woman and an iron sufficient woman, but we do many tasks during the day,” she noted.
Her team also tracked the iron deficient group for four months, placing half the women on placebos and half on iron supplements. “With iron supplementation, we were able to improve their cognitive functioning,” Murray-Kolb said.
Low Iron Levels Affect Physical Performance
In addition to the results from Penn State, Cornell University researchers found that women with low body iron – but who are not quite anemic – must use more effort to do the same amount of physical work than women who are not iron deficient.
“This suggests that millions of women are impaired – working harder than they need to for the same amount of exercise or physical work,” said Jere Haas, the Nancy Schlegel Meinig Professor of Maternal and Child Nutrition and co-director of the Cornell Program in International Medicine.
Haas added that the Cornell study “shows that women who are not anemic but iron-depleted are impaired in oxygen utilization, something we suspected but did not know for certain.”
To obtain their results, Haas and postdoctoral associated Yan Zhu of China, Cornell Ph.D., 1997, first compared 15 normal women with 15 iron-depleted, non-anemic women. Each woman in the two groups exercised at her maximum level of effort. Haas and Zhu found that the “iron-depleted women had lower physical work capacity, and their performance was related to the amount of stored body iron.”
Next, the team assessed iron-depleted women at more normal exercising or work levels. They used a double blind, eight week study in which half the women took placebos while the other half took 135 mg. daily iron supplements. “The body iron stores of the women without supplementation remained constant while those of the group that took the supplements was 5 percent more efficient in their use of energy to perform the same amount of work.
“Only one woman became anemic during the study, but in the rest of the placebo group, we saw a significant reduction in their physical performance compared with the supplemented group,” Haas said. “This suggests that iron depletion not severe enough to cause anemia reduces performance potential at sub-maximum work levels as well.”
The researchers also planned to assess whether iron-depleted women benefit from physical training like women with higher iron status do. “We suspect that iron-deficient women will not benefit from the training as much as women with higher iron status because their metabolic responses to exercise are impaired,” Haas explained.
For women who suspect they may be low in iron, Haas and Zhu say that drinking orange juice that’s rich in Vitamin C can enhance the absorption of this vital mineral which is rich in foods like “legumes, whole grains and green vegetables.”
