Iron deficiency anemia needs iron supplementation, but iron supplementation should not be too blind. What harm can excessive iron do to the body?

In daily life, many people think that "the more blood in the body, the better". Therefore, regardless of anemia or not, they always follow advertisements, eat whatever they say on TV, and try to eat blood-enriching food.

According to research, once iron is absorbed by the human body, there are few other ways to excrete it, except for a part lost with blood loss. Excess iron in the body is stored on protein and combined into ferritin.

This kind of storage gradually increases with age. Studies have found that excessive intake and storage of iron will increase the risk of heart disease. Before menopause, the incidence and mortality of coronary heart disease in women are significantly lower than those in men, and even if their blood cholesterol is at a high level, coronary heart disease rarely occurs. In the past, it was thought that estrogen secreted by women played a role in protecting the heart, but later it was found that the incidence of heart disease increased greatly because the ovaries of women who had undergone hysterectomy were intact and estrogen was still secreted. Scientists have analyzed that this may be due to the loss of blood and iron.

The combination and separation of hemoglobin and oxygen are closely related to iron. Too much iron may promote the increase of oxygen free radicals and have obvious superoxide effect on the body. Too much iron storage will lead to unstable free radicals destroying healthy tissues and damaging the heart. In addition, the interaction between ferritin and cholesterol in blood will aggravate heart disease. The incidence of heart disease in patients with high protein is twice as high as that in patients with low ferritin.

If methemoglobin is combined with high low density lipoprotein and high cholesterol, the incidence of heart disease will increase to four times.

Studies have shown that methemoglobin is more dangerous than high cholesterol, hypertension and diabetes among all the risk factors of heart disease. Therefore, people should not abuse blood-enriching foods and drugs in their daily lives. Some experts also believe that men and postmenopausal women over the age of 35 should monitor the blood ferritin content, and if the content exceeds the normal range, measures should be taken to reduce it.