The #1 Anti-aging Hack

Dr. Berg’s Healthy Keto and Intermittent Fasting Podcast

Dr. Eric Berg

Health & Fitness

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2024

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

DATA:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles...

The Most Powerful Antioxidant (Melatonin)

▶️ • The MOST POWERFUL Antioxidant Is Mela...

Did you know that too much iron can decrease longevity? Your body makes hydrogen peroxide that is used by the immune system to kill microbes. When hydrogen peroxide combines with iron, it can cause serious cellular damage.

People with iron-deficiency anemia often have dysfunctional iron, which means it’s unavailable to the red blood cells. This could be why we are not seeing a decrease in anemia even though we've increased iron in the food supply.

Iron overload may increase your risk for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer, heart disease, and more. Excess iron causes oxidative stress and increases inflammation.

As we age, we naturally accumulate more iron. Around 70% of our iron is stored in protein in the blood that helps carry oxygen. Ferritin should be inside your tissues to protect you from free iron and control when iron is released. This very efficient system recycles iron in the body.

Certain pathogens, microbes, and infections use iron as fuel. This is why the body protects free iron. Some people feel better after donating blood, indicating they have too much iron.

Too much iron without enough copper is a big problem. If you think you have this problem, limit iron exposure before taking a copper supplement. Iron is found in enriched flours, grains, and refined carbohydrate products. Shellfish, organ meats, sunflower seeds, and dark chocolate are good sources of copper.

To combat oxidative damage caused by iron and other factors like alcohol, smoking, pollution, and junk foods, you’ll want to build up your antioxidant reserve. Glutamine found in red meat is vital, but protein is the most important! It’s especially important to consume enough protein as you get older.

Zinc, manganese, magnesium, and selenium can increase antioxidant networks to help you regulate excess iron. Quercetin, curcumin, black tea, and increasing melatonin are also very beneficial.

Lactoferrin is the most powerful chelator for iron. It’s found naturally in dairy and can be taken as a supplement.

Transcript

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0:00.0	There is a hidden reason why people are aging a lot faster than they should be. And this is really
0:05.3	important. And unfortunately, a lot of people are not concerned about aging until they start to age.
0:10.5	At any age, you need to know this. If we have too much iron, we do not live as long. And it's related to
0:15.8	iron deficiency anemia. If most of us are deficient iron and we get it in the diet, obviously that should
0:22.7	improve it to some degree, right? On the flip side, we're accumulating more and more iron. There's an
0:27.8	incredible paper by Professor Bruce Ames. I'm going to put it down below, which talks about some
0:32.8	research that he did in identifying old tissue versus younger tissue as it relates to iron. Well, we have all sorts of
0:40.6	amazing systems in the body to protect us against iron. Iron russ out our organs. If you took
0:48.8	something called hydrogen peroxide, you probably have it in your medicine chest. You take hydrogen
0:52.9	peroxide and put it in an open wound and you see it bubbling up and it kills bacteria. Just think about adding hydrogen peroxide to iron. It's going to be severely reactive. That creates a lot of damage within your cells. The DNA of the cells, the membrane, the mitochondria. I'm not drinking hydrogen peroxide, so how would that be a
1:12.0	problem? Your body makes hydrogen peroxide. Not to mention our immune system uses hydrogen peroxide to kill
1:17.7	microbes. But if that system breaks down, all hell breaks loose. I think what happens with these
1:22.6	anemic kids, they have something called dysfunctional iron, where iron is locked up to the point where it's not
1:28.8	available to the red blood cell so they become anemic, yet at the same time they might have too
1:33.2	much. Here we are adding all this iron to the food supply, and we're wondering why it doesn't work.
1:38.2	It may be even making things worse. Too much iron will really put you at risk for Alzheimer's,
1:43.3	Parkinson's, cancer, heart disease,
1:46.3	because iron can create a lot of oxidative stress. Too much oxidation without having the buffer,
1:52.1	which is the antioxidant networks. You can get antioxidants from food and supplements,
1:56.2	but your body makes antioxidants. In fact, that's way more important than the antioxidants from the food.
2:03.3	A lot of people also have chronic infection. They get inflammation. And then on top of everything,
2:09.4	the fact that we are getting older and we're aging means that we're going to naturally
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