5 Comments

This is something I have been curious about for some time but never got round to researching. You know by now my evolutionary perspective so I did not see how we could have iron overload on a natural diet - that is not taking inorganic iron supplements but getting from haemoglobin in food. Food eaten does not just get dumped into the blood but goes through cellular gateways that can determine what gets transported and processed. Of course if you have artificial supplements you cannot know how systems that did not evolve for such will cope. Thanks for this starter.

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I did a deep dive on excess iron a decade ago - a lot of the claims had references that did not show what was claimed. It seems like it was based on a false hypothesis - but the anti-meat people are pushing politics - not science. If you look at hematocrits, they just don't end up seriously elevated. So I think this is just a false narrative to push the self destructive anti-meat agenda.

Anyway, for our hunting ancestors, anyone that could not thrive on a fatty meat diet died out.

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'As a creature that appears to have evolved on a diet of large amounts of heme-rich ruminant meat, we are unlikely to be susceptible to iron poisoning via that route...'

That's the most convincing argument for me. I've always been skeptical about iron overload warnings.

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I ignored your advice and watched the trailer. It's very effective — I'm never eating red meat again.

😵

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One of the effects of low iron?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-024-01754-8

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