WANT TO KNOW WHY WOMEN OUTLIVE MEN?
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Yup, because we bleed every month!
There are MANY reasons to fight for your period ladies. Aside from the bone building, heart protective, brain defending attributes it provides us, our periods ALSO help us detox every month- particularly iron.
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First, before you come at me and say that your period has caused you to become “anemic” and you’re wondering why we would want to detox iron, I would ask you to go check out my post here about how it’s rare to be anemic.
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But here’s a quick run down: If you’re anemic, you most likely are not ‘low in iron’, but low in your ability to make a protein called ceruloplasmin. Ceruloplasmin is what binds to copper which helps us mobilize iron in and out of tissues, activate oxygen (turning it into water in our system), supporting iron absorption in in the gut to transferrin and more. Ceruloplasmin, in other words, helps copper do its job.
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It is very rare that you would be low in iron because your body is supposed to be recycling 24mg of iron a day. Yep, RECYCLING, meaning whatever you already have in you is being used again.
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Most people lose about 1-2 mg a day just through cell shedding, sweating, our gastrointestinal system, etc. Whatever we shed, we can easily make up for it via diet. I mean, just 1 piece of chicken =3 mg of iron.
So if we’re recycling 24mg a day, shedding only 1mg, and we need 25mg to support red blood cell production, 24+1=25mg, we are perfect the way we are.
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Menstruating women actually have been shown to absorb 3 times more iron than men, so why would we need more when our body’s natural ability to absorb more is there?
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Too much iron has been shown to overwhelm the recycling system, slowing down our ability to recycle iron which can then cause the body to tuck iron into our tissues as a means to protect itself and to hide it from pathogenic bacteria (because iron feeds pathogens).
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Conversely, not detoxing iron can lead to vitamin E depletion (which isn’t good because it helps balance hormones) which can cause estrogen to rise, which can increase inflammation, and the domino effect continues.
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So yeah girl, your monthly bleed is like a life saving gift!