10/15/2026
Every red blood cell you've got right now has about 120 days before your body retires it and builds a new one. Most of us never stop to think about where the iron from that old cell goes. The good news is that it doesn't get wasted - your spleen and liver catch it, pull the iron back out, and hand it straight to your bone marrow to build the next batch.
Your body runs its own recycling system.
There's a hormone behind that process called hepcidin, made by your liver, that decides how much of the recycled iron actually gets back into your blood. When inflammation runs high, hepcidin rises and more iron gets held back in storage instead of released. That's part of why bloodwork can look fine and you can still feel drained, the iron's there, it's just not being let out.
So if you're already eating iron-rich foods and still feel tired, you might try calming down the inflammation that might be keeping that door shut instead of reaching for the next supplement on the shelf. Understanding what your body's inflammatory pathways are reacting to can also help. A Food Sensitivities test can help figure that out and anti-inflammatory herbs and foods are definitely part of the equation.
(For learning, not medical advice.)
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