3 Deficiencies Holding You Back | Extra Mile

Oli Patrick (0:00)

Welcome to UNTAPPED the Extra Mile with me, Oli Patrick, but no Spencer Matthews. Spencer once again delivering on his dad duties, managing his brood, and he's left me here to tackle some of the questions that we know you've got from the running community and broader health and wellbeing. So we've got some great questions today picking around the topics of deficiencies. Have you got them? If you've got them, what might they be? How would you test for them? What's the impact of those on health, wellbeing, running performance and more? And let's see if we cover some of the questions you might naturally have. So deficiencies, I've got Bella with me today.

Bella (0:33)

Hello. People are probably sick of me by now.

Oli Patrick (0:35)

They're far from sick of you. They're delighted to hear your voice again. I think I saw some nice comments about the quality of your voice.

Bella (0:40)

Oh really? I need to check those out.

Yeah, so I'd love to start by diving into one of the most sort of common deficiencies, I think. I think it's one in five for women. But iron, how can I know if I'm deficient in iron?

Oli Patrick (0:54)

That's a great question and that's a lot of people. One in five, 20% for those mathematicians out there. And that's a nutritional deficiency. And that's interesting because we believe that iron has a critical role in producing hemoglobin in our blood. So iron and our body's ability to manufacture the actual base product of blood run hand in hand. If we think about one in five having inadequate iron in their diet, that doesn't guarantee that one in five would suffer from low hemoglobin, which is often colloquially called anemia. So this concept of anemia is I just don't have enough of the ability to carry oxygen through not having enough hemoglobin, which sits within my blood. And therefore, the theory would be people with low iron intake are more likely to have some degree of anemia. And that means that blood can't do what blood does, which is get oxygen everywhere.

If I come into London, which I do frequently, I'm in London today, and I jump on the tube, there's always an advert for iron. You might have seen this as well, Billy.

There's an advert for an iron supplement, and it says every time, are you tired?

And that's, you know, everyone's like, oh, I must have iron deficiency anemia, because fatigue is, of course, one of the main symptoms of anemia. And it's very easy to point at a potential iron deficiency as the reason someone's tired. We know in the UK that most people are tired a lot of the time. So we've got one in eight people classifying as tired all the time on a recent YouGov study. And then further to that, one in four people tired most of the time, which puts us over 30% of people who are tired most of the time or more. And that's a pretty incredible statistic. So if I see an advert on the tube going, you may be tired because you have inadequate iron, which means we believe you don't have enough blood to carry oxygen, that narrative, of course, makes sense.

The reality is the only way to know this is to run a blood test. When we look in our blood, we call that hematology. And if you run a hematology blood test, you're going to find a couple of interesting things, the most notable one being hemoglobin. And hemoglobin would be the thing that your GP looks at to say, we believe you may not have enough iron to actually provide the building block of the thing that carries oxygen in your blood. And that then would lead them to an interesting discussion of, was it that you were deficient in your nutritional intake, or was it that your body isn't absorbing that iron particularly, or is it because you're losing blood somewhere?

And that, again, as much as that's a slightly sinister connotation, we're always interested that not having enough in the body doesn't mean I didn't take enough in. It might be I didn't absorb it properly, or even I'm losing it somewhere. So those are the questions a GP would ask when they found a low hemoglobin level. From a performance point of view, when we see iron deficient anemia or any anemia, it often manifests as breathlessness. So that's quite an interesting sign of fatigue. Suddenly, I'm sort of over breathing for the same effort. And if you are a runner and you're used to trotting out a sort of four and a half minute K pace, and your heart rate is generally, you've sort of calibrated what that heart rate would look like and what zone you'd be in. And suddenly, your breathing rate is a little bit increased, a couple more breaths per minute, or your heart rate is higher at the same exertion level. It's perfectly reasonable to think, was that about a lack of hemoglobin? And is that something I should check out with a GP?