Anemia Explained Simply

Anemia can be a big problem and it's more common than most people realize so today

we're gonna talk about the basics and explain them so you know what to look for

Hey I'm Dr. Ekberg with Wellness For Life and if you like to truly master

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Everyone's heard of anemia, but it's not so clear. I remember even back in school

it took me a while before I really understood the wide implications it can

have and here's why because anemia has to do with blood and blood has to do

with oxygen delivery and why do we have oxygen delivery well we breathe so that

we can make energy and supply oxygen for all the cells in the body and if you

have anemia that means you're breathing you're taking in the oxygen but you

don't have a proper delivery system your delivery system is broken or weak we're

exhausted so anemia is enormously important if you have anemia if your

oxygen delivery capacity goes down by 30% then every cell in your body gets

30% less fuel than it should so you can see how far-reaching that could be so

the signs and symptoms are things like fatigue pallor which means you pale skin

you look pale or whitish decreased concentration because you don't have the

energy to think properly weakness because you don't have the energy for

muscle contraction dizziness because you don't have the energy for the brain to

proper signals properly so and the list could be endless pretty much because it

can affect everything. How do we measure this? we're just going to talk about the

very very basics so when you get the test you know what to look for and if

your test doesn't include these then you know to ask for them red blood cells

this is simply a count of how many red blood cells you have per milliliter of

blood and the number of bloods red blood cells

your body is enormous as a matter of fact 70% of all the cells in your body

are red blood cells somewhere between 20 to 30 trillion cells out of about 40

trillion all red blood cells and if you look at it from the top it looks like a

circle but if you look at it from the side it's what's called a biconcave disk

it's thinner in the middle so it folds easy because these things are because

when these things get out into the very finest of blood vessels called

capillaries then sometimes it's so tight to get through that they have to fold

themselves in order to make it through so the shape is enormous ly important

and we're going to talk about later how if that shape is abnormal then they

don't function and they get eliminated the MCV stands the V stands for volume

that's all you need to know it's the size of the cell because a large cell

can hold more hemoglobin it can have a larger oxygen carrying capacity than a

smaller cell and oftentimes if your body can't make the right size if they're too

small then it compensates by making more of them a larger numbers you have to

compare these things a little bit hematocrit is the number multiplied by

the volume so the hematocrit is the total percentage of your blood volume

that is red blood cells if we packed them all together then there should be

about 40 to 45 percent of the blood should be cells by volume and hemoglobin

is the oxygen carrying compound it's a protein that is part our and it has a

component of iron that can bind to oxygen and carry it out into the tissues

so obviously if you have more hemoglobin you have more oxygen carrying capacity

if you don't have enough hemoglobin you can't carry that oxygen properly so your

oxygen carrying capacity what determines if you have anemia or not depends on the

total number their size and how much hemoglobin they

have in them so any one of these that is decreased could mean that you have

anemia so if we look at some of these numbers then for a male men have a

little bit more of all these than than women so the normal range for men should

be four point one to five point six and if you notice that's a pretty large

range it's like almost a 30% difference from the upper to the lower number so we

really want to understand that there's a sweet spot here and typically you want

as a man you want to be somewhere around four point seven give or take a couple

of tenths but by the time you're down to four point one you're already borderline

anemic same thing for women this range is three point eight to five point one a

little bit less but the sweet spot is about four point three the size is

important also and here normally we have a huge range from eighty to ninety eight

but in functional medicine where they look at optimum value then they have

narrowed it down pretty pretty precisely that the ideal size is pretty close to

ninety give or take a couple of points so by the time it's down to eighty five

it's already too small indicating that the body doesn't have enough iron to

build these things properly hematocrit again is the total volume of cells and

the range is 36 to 50 in men the sweet spot somewhere around 45 give or take a

couple for women a sweet spot is 40 give or take a couple hemoglobin for men it's

12 points 5 to 17 again that's a pretty large range we want to be close to the

middle of that range and the sweet spot for men is about 14 and a half and for

women is 14 so there's a lot of women out there who are in the eleven point

eight or 12 something range that have already lost about 20% of their

hemoglobin so they're borderline anemic and yet on the

blood tests they're in the range so nobody really gives them any information

on that nobody raises any flags on that when people think anemia the classic

standard solution is iron and it's not quite that simple because even though an

iron deficiency anemia means that all of these will be decreased that in the

absence of iron the body can't keep up with any of these four values there are

other values that we need to look at when we look at iron in the blood work

then the first value we get and the only value we get in most blood work is the

serum iron that's how much free iron is floating around in the bloodstream ready

for the body to use for manufacture of red blood cells but it's a pretty poor

indicator of total iron stores because 60% of all the iron is bound up in the

red blood cells that's where the iron is doing its work about 4% is sitting in

muscles and the rest serum and ferritin is available for the body to make new

red blood cells to utilize as raw material but only 1% of that is in the

serum and 30% is in the ferritin so if you really want to look for if you need

iron you don't want to look just at the serum you want to look at the ferritin

and then we want to understand that even though iron is important there are many

other factors that are maybe even more common in today's society because very

few people are deficient in iron actually they might be losing iron for

various different reasons or not being able to utilize it but a lot of people

get enough iron and more importantly too much iron is extremely toxic and we're

seeing more and more people today with iron toxicities so let's look at some of

the other factors now if if it's not just iron then what else do

we have to look at well just look at the steps that have to work in order for the

body to produce red blood cells and to utilize iron so the first is bone marrow

the bone marrow is the origin for the blood cells so the bone marrow has to be

healthy and there are a small number of genetic defects that where the bone

marrow doesn't produce enough or the right kind of blood cells number two is

the kidney very often in kidney disease when the kidney stops functioning

properly it also stops producing the hormones that the body needs to make red

blood cells so there's a hormone called EPO or erythropoietin which is the only

place that the body makes this hormone that tells the rest of the body how much

red blood cells to make so when we don't have enough arethe repeat and sometimes

because of a poor kidney function now the body isn't making enough because

it's not getting the message to make enough red blood cells third a diet

obviously if we want to make red blood cells we need certain components and the

first one we talked about iron but the next three are b12 b6 and folic acid and

these most often are deficient in vegetarian and vegan diets so if you're

a vegetarian or vegan make sure that you supplement with enough of these vitamins

so that you don't become anemic then once we eat the right stuff we also need

to be able to absorb it and here is where there's an epidemic of digestive

problems and absorption problems in our society stress interferes with the

production of hydrochloric acid and enough quantity of hydrochloric acid is

maybe the most common factor for absorption of iron and b12 then there's

something called intrinsic factor if we don't have intrinsic factor if

it's not being produced enough or if we have an autoimmune disease if we have an

antibody blocking the intrinsic factor we also can't use the b12 and if we have

damaged villi meaning the intestinal membrane in your small intestine

primarily this is where we absorb most of the nutrients if we have a poor

environment if we have dysbiosis or something more severe where the villi

are being destroyed such as in in Crohn's or celiac disease then the villi

can't produce the proper enzymes and they can't perform the proper absorption

and again we become deficient in these things even if they're in the diet and

then we have to ask so all of this the first four is about making red blood

cells but what if we're losing them faster than we can make them and so we

have to ask if there is a bleeding problem and of course this is why women

are much more commonly anemic because they bleed once a month through their

menstrual period some people lose a little bit some people lose a lot and if

they're already marginal in their production that loss every month can be

very significant also people with ulcers can lose significant amounts of blood

continuously and one factor in blood loss can also be aspirin because aspirin

makes all of the digestive tract more leaky and permeable so you lose an

amount of blood through your digestive tract it's like a small bleed every time

that you take an aspirin there is something called hemolytic process that

means breaking down of red blood cells so if in order for them to do their job

they have to be made properly they have to be healthy they have to have all the

components and the nutrients in them in order to live for three to four months

and do their job anything that keeps them from getting healthy

means they're not going to live out their full three to four months and

they're gonna be breaking or being destroyed too soon so drugs can coat the

red blood cells and make them look like they're defective and then the spleens

job is to filter out so the spleen is like an oil filter it takes out the crud

and the the defective red blood cells and the cell debris from the bloodstream

and if something doesn't look like it's supposed to it's the spleens job to get

rid of it so drugs can make the red blood cells look abnormal toxins can do

it toxins can also break the red blood cells or keep them from forming properly

and then there's the genetic component where there are people with sickle cell

anemia or spherocytosis meaning the red blood cell doesn't have this perfect

round or by concave shape and now the spleen recognizes it as abnormal and it

gets filtered out and destroyed all of these things have to work in order for

us to make blood properly to make red blood cells the way they're supposed to

be and iron like we said can be a common problem but there's way more to this

than simply starting to throw in some iron in the body if you're eating a

normal average diet with a fair amount of meat and you are anemic then there's

more likely that there's something else here that's not working that we have to

address first and then we have to find you the right form of iron that is

highly absorbable and that your body can utilize in the proper way just like

everything else that we talked about on this channel and in our office we never

look at one little thing by itself we always look at the big picture we have

to ask what is the root cause why is this happening and then we handle that

root cause and then once we got that under way then we do everything else

that we know to get healthy because every one of these steps that

don't work means that there's some lack of health and the best thing that we can

do to make sure that this works in the long run is to do everything we can to

take care of ourselves so in our office we talk about the chemical structural

and emotional stress that we need to address the whole person holistically

and we have to do it in a way that we support it in the long run not the quick

fixes not the little pinpoint actions to treatments we look at the big

picture we handle the cause and then we work on a long-term lifestyle so hope

you enjoyed this information let me know if there's any more questions that you

have or if you have any experience with any of what I've been talking about

please share this information because the more people that know about this the

more we can build a healthy population and we can have all bunch of healthy

people and happy people around us as always thanks so much for watching