The Iron Curse with Dr. Christy Sutton | 1186 | Dave Asprey

Copper deficient anemia looks like iron deficient anemia because what happens is if you don't have enough copper, you cannot absorb iron correctly.

Thank you. That's one of the biggest things you could learn from the show. If you're doing iron and all these things and it just doesn't work, you have a copper problem, not an iron problem. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today we're going to do an episode on something that's been of interest for so many years. What I've learned from being in the longevity field for about 20 years now, believe it or not, is that if you can't make enzymes and fold proteins, it doesn't matter what longevity drugs or therapies you do because the body doesn't work. And, and one of the primary causes of widespread dysfunction is mineral imbalance or mineral deficiencies. And the problem is so much worse now than it was 10 or 20 years ago. And there's a bunch of reasons for it that we'll get into in the show, but there's two minerals that are in opposition to each other and it's something that's tied directly to anemia and iron overload, and it's zinc and copper. So I found an expert who wrote a book on this based in part on personal need and also just on deep science so that we can get into this what's going on with zinc and copper and iron. And you can spend 100 bucks a month on the cool longevity supplements. I do, and I tell you which ones those are. But if your minerals are off, they're probably not going to work very well. So start with foundations. And the good news is minerals are affordable and some of the high end stuff gets to be pretty premium. So we start with what's most broadly effective and we start with what's least costly. If you can get that down, you don't break the bank, you feel better and you probably live longer. That's why the episode today, the book that's the topic of our interview, is the Iron Curse. Is your doctor letting high iron destroy your health? This is a problem. And Our expert is Dr. Christy Sutton, who is a chiropractor who's focused on understanding the root causes of health problems. And the reason that she does this is similar to the reason I started the biohacking movement, personal need. In her case, her husband's hereditary iron overload called hemochromatosis and a pituitary tumor. Set off one of those things where I'm going to take care of a loved one and I'm going to figure it out. And this is one of the biggest motivations for creating evolution in our understanding of medicine and functional medicine. Longevity is personal need a family member, yourself, when your kids go to the ends of the earth for something like that, because it matters. And then, wait, that changed everything. Maybe it matters to everyone else. Dr. Christy Sutton, welcome to the show.

Well, thank you. Thanks for having me.

You're based in Dallas and you just made the drive in pretty hot.

Yeah, well, I had air conditioning, so it wasn't too bad.

I love Texas. I don't mind the heat as long as I get my sunshine. All right, talk to me about iron. Is it good for you or bad for you?

Well, it's essential. It's a double edged sword. So you cannot live without iron. We need it and it's precious. This is why our body has made all of these different ways to keep iron and not let go of it. Like some other minerals like copper, our body has a way to remove excess copper. Whereas iron, it's so precious, it's so important that our body has basically found ways to hoard it from. For the coming fast or the coming long winter where we will not be getting enough iron, so we need it. However, you can have too much of a good thing. And if you, especially if you have like a hemochromatosis gene where you absorb more iron, then you're more likely to develop high iron. And if you develop high iron, then iron can become this very toxic free, radical inducing element that basically creates tons of inflammation and damage throughout your whole body. And so it's good and bad. You don't want to. You can die from not enough iron and you can die from too much iron.

There's this mindset out there, if something's good for you, more must be better. And if something's bad for you, you shouldn't have any of it. And I see this with exercise. You know, there's some so called longevity doctors are saying only two hours a day will keep you younger. That's an overdose. Right. And you'll also see people who say, oh, cortisol is bad for you, so don't have any cortisol, which also will kill you. So it turns out there's like a Goldilocks zone for people, right, where everything works. Is it the same for men and women?

So that's a good question. Is it the same for men and women? Yes and no. So women and men largely have the same needs for iron. It's, you know, we need it to have energy. But the difference is that women tend to lose iron more. So women tend to lose iron through menstruation, childbirth, and men don't have to deal with that. So men tend to develop a higher level of iron. Um, and then women also. Well, not only do they lose more iron through menstruation and childbirth, but women being put on birth control, that can increase iron absorption. Um, so. And then men, Men, they. If they take testosterone, they're going to increase iron absorption. So there's lots of different things that change iron absorption, but basically, the ranges for what's acceptable for men and women are only really different because if you take 100 women, they're going to have lower levels of iron than 100 men.

So we set our standard ranges based on averages for people, maybe not based on what's optimal.

100%. Yeah. So, yeah, this is the problem with looking at a lot of iron labs is that they. They get a thousand people and they say, okay, this is the average ferritin, but they're looking at a thousand people that are unhealthy. If you look at. And then the average is, you know, anywhere from 20 to 400 for men. So. But if you look at healthy, that's a whole different range. A healthy range is a much narrower range. So, unfortunately, the lab ranges for ferritin and iron saturation have allowed things to go much too high. And there is an optimal range. However, like, for women who have a history of anemia, like myself, I would want to be on a higher end of a ferritin, which is your stored iron. I would want to be, you know, at least 50 to 100, whereas a man with a history of hemochromatosis and high iron, then I would want for them to be, like, on a lower end, more, maybe not even higher than 50, just because they have the propensity to go high, whereas women have the propensity to go low.

Often in the world of longevity, one of the things that lots of people ask is, why do women live eight years longer than men? And one of the predominant theories is, well, if you bleed every month, you're dropping excess iron, and high levels of iron basically cause rusting. It's excessive oxidative stress in your cells, which is why hemochromatosis is a bad thing. And so we think maybe the lower levels are healthier. And I'm wondering, is there a case for those of us in the longevity field, even if we're men to drop it. And what if we're women and we say, well, I know I don't have anemia, or maybe I'm perimenopausal or post menopause or just in menopause, you might want to have your levels relatively low, but not too low. Do we have, like, longevity numbers versus. Yeah, regular person numbers?

Yeah, 100%. So there have been some good studies on as far as looking at ferritin. Ferritin, while it's not a perfect marker to measure longevity with because ferritin doesn't just measure iron stores, but it also measures inflammation. So it can be a little bit misleading. But if you look at ferritin in the studies, there's a recent study where they were actually looking at Covid mortality and people that were more likely to die from COVID they found if the range was 20 to 100, if you were lower than 20, you were more likely to die from COVID which In my opinion, 20 is too low. If you're over 100, then you're more likely to die of COVID And so I'm pretty comfortable with 100 as a cutoff. Like, I think that should be the lab high for men and women is 100. That's not the lab high for a man or a female. So then there's, that's, that's. That research is specific to Covid. However, it does look at longevity or risk of dying. There's another, better study where they looked at ferritin, and this was a big meta analysis, and they basically looked at ferritin and longevity, and they found. And this study was good, but it had one caveat. The caveat was that they grouped everybody into either over 200 ferritin or under 200 ferritin. And so. And then after they went over 200, they categorized it to over 300 and over 400 and over 500 and over 600, and they stopped there. So they didn't start with over 100. However, what they did find was there was a linear correlation from over 200. With each increase in 100, there was a dramatic decrease in one's longevity. So by the time you get to the over 600 group, which is a really high ferretin by all standards, that's high, then you're knocking off multiple decades, two decades off of your life, just if you're in the over 200 ferritin. So this is a huge thing for longevity, and it's an easy thing to monitor. And.