Iron deficiencies are very bad and you should treat them

Thanks for writing this! I especially appreciated the line "so I looked up studies until I got tired", in context.

Did I understand right that when you said "links are affiliate", this means you earn money if someone clicks on them and buys something? If so, I feel quite strongly that this disclaimer should come before any links, and ideally that affiliate links should be starred.

Thanks a lot for writing this post!

Personal experience: When I tried a vegan diet, I experienced gradually decreasing energy levels and gradually increasing desire for iron-rich animal products (hamburgers). My energy levels went back to normal when I went ahead and ate the hamburgers.

So, I'm really excited about the potential of nutritional investigations to improve vegan diets!

For bivalvegans, note that some bilvalves are rich in heme iron (heme iron, from animals, is more easily absorbed than the non-heme iron found in plants).

Again, personal experience: I've found that if I'm still feeling tired after multiple days of rest, consuming food with significant heme iron usually solves the problem. (Think this might have been true one time even when I didn't meet the technical criteria for iron deficiency?)

But, just to reinforce the point that too much iron can also be bad:

Donating blood can improve your cardiovascular health. Elevated levels of iron in the blood puts men at increased risk of heart disease. Donating blood takes iron out of your system (It’s gradually replenished by the foods you eat).

Source.

This is awesome, thank you so much for writing it. Incidentally I wrote a piece on treating restless legs syndrome (RLS), step 1 of which is “fix iron deficiency”: https://henryaj.substack.com/p/how-to-treat-restless-legs-syndrome

I found this a bit hard to read maybe because my biology literacy isn't strong enough. I also skipped the details...

I didn't quite understand why iron deficiencies are "very bad". Here's how I understood it. Is this what op refers to as very bad? 1)

Successful iron supplementation led to improvements averaging >0.5 standard deviations in attention, learning, and memory Iron supplementation

2. Iron supplementation increases endurance.

Do you mean bad on a society scale or is it pointed at the reader?