InsideTracker Operations Manager Ryan Cohen opens up on how he took control of his health and performance by doing something selfless and simple: donating blood. Not only does donating save lives, it can also help with optimizing one’s iron levels.
I’m 30 years old. I’ve been lifting weights twice a week for five years. My Red Cross profile says that I’m a gallon donor. An avid Quantified Selfer, I keep tabs on all sorts of personal data: hours slept, steps walked, pounds, lifted, and, of course, the quantities of vitamins, minerals and hormones in my blood.
Over the past year, I noticed a troubling trend: my iron levels were rising.
For many InsideTracker users, this is usually a good thing. Higher iron levels can mean that your blood is better able to transport oxygen to your cells for intense endurance work, like running or cross-training. Too much iron, on the other hand, is bad news. Chronically elevated iron levels are associated with symptoms like fatigue, joint pain, and can progress to serious organ damage, diabetes, even heart failure. This was a problem I was motivated to solve.
A lot of people use up their iron through endurance work, or, in the case of women, lose it through menstruation. I don’t do any regular cardio, and haven’t for years, simply as a matter of personal preference.
A year ago, every marker in my iron group was optimized. So what was causing iron to build up in my blood to nearly toxic levels? What had changed? Looking back, I realized that a year ago was around the same time I started working for InsideTracker.
Before joining the company, I donated blood to the Red Cross and local hospitals as often as I could - sometimes four or five times a year. After I came to InsideTracker, I stopped donating blood because I was frequently getting blood draws in order to test new features and new vendors. I didn’t want to lose too much blood too often and suffer from anemia.
Was the fact that I hadn’t donated blood in over a year the reason my Iron marker now showed up as Very High on my InsideTracker dashboard?
I decided to test this hypothesis with a good old-fashioned bloodletting. Incidentally, elevated iron is the only condition for which bloodletting is the medically recommended cure.
What can your blood tell you about yourself? Take a deep dive into your biochemistry.