HH326: Key Nutrients-Iron & Manganese

Welcome back to another episode of health hack as I continue talking about key nutrients, and today I want to be talking about iron and manganese. Now iron is best tested in your blood by your PCP to determine the iron levels within your body that your body is needing for you to be functioning at optimal levels. And very often women of menstruating age can have low iron because of heavy periods. And heavy periods can be triggered by hormonal imbalances. And so if that is you, you might want to look into your hormones, we can run a lab test to look at where your hormones are at and adjust your estrogen and progesterone levels, potentially work with your cortisol levels, which are very often a trigger for the hormonal imbalance. And all of that will then help bring your iron levels back into balance. And these are things that are, you know, easy to do with some minor tweaks to lifestyle, etc, some hormonal support some adaptogenic support. When we look at your iron levels in your hair tissue, that's where we're looking for the toxicity levels in your hair. And that can come from iron cookware, it can be excessive iron in your drinking water, it can often be associated with high aluminum levels in your body, and also with feelings of anger. On the flip side, when we see low iron, that can be a sign you can see symptoms of that from poor circulation from feelings of fatigue, weakness, apathy, low mood, and metabolic issues. And so that's those can be signs, they're not the only symptom of low iron, and nor are they only a symptom of low iron. If you have those symptoms that could be indicative of other things, which is why it's always great to be able to run lab tests to see exactly where the imbalances are happening in your body, so that you know what it is that you need to do in order to address them. Now the other mineral that I want to talk about today is manganese. Now, manganese is another energy source for your body. If you are burning through all of your minerals and your key electrolytes, and your body's trying to keep up and manage the stress level that you are under, it will start to use up your manganese levels. And that can then leave you feeling quite depleted once it's once it's gone through and use it all up and you can be left feeling anxious or apathetic feeling like you've got muscle loss feeling weak. The flip side of that when manganese is very high, that can often be caused from drinking Well, water. And so again, testing is not only for testing our body, if you are unwell water, it's important to actually test your well water as well to see what is the mineral balance in your water that you're drinking. And do you need a good filtration system in order to be filtering out the excesses of what you don't need in your body, when we have too much manganese in our body. That can also be triggering issues as well that we don't want the body is always wanting to be in balance. When we see manganese high on a hair tissue mineral analysis test. That's also indicative of the body's going into that alarm, state of stress, the body's used up the electrolytes, it still has manganese left as a source. And now the body is starting to excrete that as the body's burning through it. And that's indicative of that stress state that the body is under. And we want to be calming that supporting all the minerals in our body calming the stress so that we're not getting into that really depleted state. So these are two key minerals and you may not know that much about them. And running labs in order to see what the levels are in your body of all of your minerals just gives you so much information to work with and to understand the symptoms that you're experiencing. So if this is something you're interested in, reach out Melissa at your guided health journey.com