The Iron Panel Decoded: Patterns, Ranges, and What to Do Next
Happy Father's Day! Sarah here , and I'd be remiss if I didn't wish a happy happy to my first Coach , and wow I got lucky. I know we all have different coaching stories, and not everyone had good firsts. I'm lucky in that whether it was formal sports or “sports Fridays” playing a hybrid tennis and kickball game with my sister and I (the Cha Chas, if you wanted to know our team name), my first Coach was all about giving his players the tools and strategies to not just succeed on the court, but in life. I never got a pep talk that didn't fire me up to do better — not because I was made to believe I wasn't enough, but because I had someone truly coaching me to see I had potential I could keep tapping into. Happy Father's Day, Dad!
Vitamin and mineral balancing is one of my favorite topics to write about. In the world of social media, nutrition and health as a whole gets simplified to a game of checkers. Do this, get that. But when it comes to the body, we’re looking at a very complex game of chess.
You can read more here → Why Your Iron Is Still Low (Even Though You’re Taking Supplements)
But before you click over, I want to share something that happened in a strategy session earlier this year, because it’s a better illustration of the blog’s central point.
She came in with fatigue, afternoon energy crashes, hair shedding episodes, and random headaches and lightheadedness she couldn’t pinpoint the cause of. She had a solid training foundation and had been consistent with a supplement protocol for nearly a year based on last year’s blood work.
That was actually part of the problem.
Nobody had reviewed whether that protocol still made sense for her body. She was able to get updated blood work, along with a full iron panel. Alongside her history, the picture was clear: her serum iron and transferrin saturation were both elevated. Iron wasn’t low. It was accumulating in circulation instead of being properly recycled and used.
For her the culprit was in her pill organizer. She had been taking zinc, as well as a multi mineral that contained zinc on top of that.
“Sarah, I thought this blog was about iron?” Yes! And here again: everything connects. So stay with me.
Zinc and copper compete for absorption. Long-term zinc supplementation, even at reasonable doses and with good intentions, can deplete copper. Copper is required to produce a protein called ceruloplasmin, the protein your body uses to mobilize and recycle iron. Without enough ceruloplasmin, iron can’t move the way it’s supposed to.
For her? We stopped the zinc. Added copper-rich whole foods. Supported her liver (where ceruloplasmin is made) and built in a retest timeline, because an intervention without a follow-up is just a guess… which you can see from her case can lead to issues.
YOUR EXCLUSIVE: THE IRON PANEL DECODER
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