What Your Ferritin Is Telling You, Healing on a Budget & More

Dr. Charlie Fagenholz (0:02)

Hey, everybody, welcome to this week's episode of Red Pill Your Healthcast. My name is Dr. Charlie Fagenholz, here with Lauren Johnson, and we are going to talk more this week. We've been enjoying this, what do you want to call it, Lauren? This, not platform, but this version of podcasting, where we kind of have just a nice conversation and on different things that people ask. But instead of Q&A based straight up, we get to have just a good conversation on the topic or topics and see wherever it takes us. There's no pre-planned anything.

So this week, we are going to start off with what a lot of people have been asking, Lauren and myself, we both said, hey, you're getting a lot of this, and we both agreed, is ferritin. People love to ask about ferritin. And Lauren, you said that you kind of dealt with this personally as well. So give us your thoughts and we'll see where it takes us.

Lauren Johnson (0:59)

Yeah, I have seen this a lot over the years. I saw it in pediatric space, like from when doing well child checks. I do recommend that one year olds get, or nine months to one ish get checked for ferritin alongside that lead check. And it's just a little finger stick, but a lot of babies can end up anemic because of this little ferritin. Now, some people will say it's physiologic. It happens because the mom's stores have dried up at this point. Baby is just now getting started on solids and hasn't had time to build their stores. And so it's physiologic and it will get better. And I agree, but because we have more and more babies that have more and more gut issues, more and more babies that have feeding issues that are not eating the meat that they used to right from the start, things like that. I think we do have more and more babies with true anemia from iron deficiency and where it's not just like a little low grade, low iron, where it actually becomes anemic. Which is what happened with Henry. Henry was, and this is common with Down syndrome, but it's also common with the normal population too.

But even more so with Down syndrome because of their host of gut issues. And he was, his hemoglobin was nine.

When I checked up, he was about almost six months old. And I had just done blood work to meet with a naturopath that specializes in Down syndrome. And his hemoglobin was nine. His ferritin was like five.

And so I don't normally treat based off of like one number, especially just ferritin.

But because he was anemic and his platelets were high, we went on and treated for maybe six weeks with iron because of where he was at. And I didn't want him to end up having further issues. But typically that would not be my approach. Do you like to treat with iron? Like how would you suggest if somebody gets a low ferritin, say it's a child, what would be your first thing that you would do?

Dr. Charlie Fagenholz (3:15)

Black cumin oil. Okay. That's the first thing I would do. I would do it like, I've never used supplements that are like high dose iron. I've only used supplements that have it naturally in there and it's usually pretty low dose. Because I'm always asking, like back to what you were saying, like, is there gut infections that are stripping it? Is it low stomach acid that they just can't absorb it?

You know, is it low copper? You know, is a cofactor off? Is there, how is the vitamin C, right? Like vitamin C is used to make cortisol. So is there something that's stripping their cortisol or creating excess cortisol to when they're depleting their vitamin C stores now they can't absorb iron. So I take that approach usually. I know there's obviously different cases and stuff like that. And people who have been like low forever, like do iron infusions and feel great. I mean, I'm not taking that away or anything like that.

But generally, I like to start more of that route of like ask the why, not just the what. But it's very important to understand that we're talking like ferritin is what it's the storage form of iron.

So it's more of storage more than iron in your cells, in your blood. And it's created by the liver. So it's like, so what, how's the liver? How's the gut? Like ferritin is an acute phase reactant, which means that it elevates in the presence of inflammation. And so if it's high, you think inflammation. But if it's low, then you start thinking, okay, so what is going on to where we're not storing iron? How is the liver health? It can liver even make ferritin?