Last year, midway through my pregnancy, my midwife looked at my labs and said,
“Wow, you’re one of the few women whose iron stores are holding. You’re not on iron tablets at all.”

Let me tell you, you need every ounce of iron and energy you can get, because growing a human is a crazy experience.

It wasn’t always like this.

Wind back a few years and I was sitting in a doctor’s office being told the exact opposite:
“Take an iron supplement.”

But low iron wasn’t my real problem.

I wasn’t low on iron intake. I was eating red meat regularly. I was eating beef liver often, one of the most concentrated sources of heme iron there is.

Oysters too, the highest source of dietary iron, full stop.

On paper, I was doing everything “right.”

And my levels still didn’t reflect it.

This is the bit that gets missed constantly:

> Low iron on a blood test doesn’t automatically mean low iron in your diet.

It can mean your body isn’t absorbing what you’re giving it.

Intake and absorption are two completely different problems.  
They need two completely different fixes.

For me, the answer wasn’t in my fork.  
It was in my gut.

The real root cause

In 2023 I worked through healing SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth).

If you’ve been through antimicrobial treatment for this, you’ll know it’s not gentle. The die-off symptoms during that phase were rough. Six months of a genuinely wild ride.

But once that gut dysfunction started resolving, everything downstream of it started to shift too.

Including how I was absorbing iron.

That’s the root-pattern piece so many people don’t get to see:

> A symptom sitting in one part of the body can be a downstream signal from somewhere else entirely.

Low iron wasn’t my problem.  
It was a **symptom** of my problem.

Rebuilding iron the right way

So once the gut work was paying off, the next question was:

“Okay, so how do I actually rebuild iron from here?”

Turns out eating heme iron isn’t enough on its own if absorption is the bottleneck.

Here’s what actually moved the needle for me:

1. Eat heme iron sources regularly, not occasionally,
   Clams, oysters, beef and chicken liver, beef, lamb.  
   Heme iron (found only in animal foods) is far more absorbable than the non-heme iron in plant foods.  
   I planned meals in advance so one of these was on the plate daily, not just when I remembered.
(non heme iron = plants sources not as well absorped in the body)

2. Pair those meals with vitamin C
   It significantly boosts how much iron you actually absorb from a meal.

3. Skip tea, coffee, and dairy around iron-rich meals
   These block absorption if they’re too close to the meal.  
   Same goes for supplemental fibre, calcium, and zinc.

4. Check your stomach acid
   Low acid production can quietly tank absorption even when intake and gut health are otherwise sorted.  
   This is worth asking your clinician about directly, especially if you’re on any acid-suppressing medication.

5. Small levers, real effect 

• Cooking in cast iron 
• A glass of wine with dinner if you tolerate it 
• Not smoking, which adds its own oxygen and immune burden on top of an already-depleted system

Why this matters beyond iron

None of this is a “just take more iron” story.

It’s a “here’s everything that was standing between the iron on my plate and the iron in my blood” story.

And that’s a completely different fix.

If you’ve tried the food side and your levels still aren’t shifting, that’s usually the sign there’s a next layer worth mapping properly:

• acid  
• absorption  
• what’s happening upstream in the gut

Functional Blood Analysis

That’s exactly what Functional Blood Analysis is built to catch.

Not just flagging that ferritin is low, but asking:

> Why is it low when the intake side already checks out?

If you’re in that “I’ve done everything right on paper and my labs still don’t reflect it” place, this is the next logical step.

4 spaces left @ $100 off Functional Bloods Analysis 

Or simply hit reply and tell me:

Has anyone ever looked past your iron number to ask what’s actually happening with absorption?

Georgia x