I've been ill a lot over the last couple of years. I'm also being knocked about by the whole peri-menopausal malarky, including having very heavy periods, some of them very close together. If I bleed every other week, I can't get iron into my body fast enough to keep up, and the consequences are dire fatigue, and other, more serious unpleasantness with serious risks if it gets more out of control than it already is.
Iron is a curious substance. I'm not a chemist, which has made poking around in this harder going. The language I am going to use is not scientific, it's illustrative. Almost all forms of life need iron - there are some bacterial exceptions, apparently. So in theory you can get iron from eating plants, but iron rich plants also often include things that inhibit the uptake of iron, which is unhelpful. There's also a shape issue. The kind of iron you can get from eating meat is pretty much the right shape to stick in your own red blood cells and keep going. Plant iron is a bit different. Heme and non-heme if you want the technical terms.
I've seen a lot of information online about iron-rich plant sources. However, there's also the issue of how much your body can extract and get into use and at what speed. For me, it's not been enough and it's not been fast enough. I've been taking supplements, I've been eating my iron-rich plants alongside vit C sources. I'm not winning. In fact it would be fairer to say that I have lost repeatedly, and badly, and I can't go on like this. Many internet sites give the impression that plants have more iron in them than meat does and that iron without meat is easy. Technically this is true about the iron quantity, but if you struggle to get that plant iron out and struggle to turn it into something you can use, it doesn't do much for you. It's not a simple issue.
I've been a vegetarian for about 13 years at this point. Including a small amount of red meat in my diet would probably solve these problems for me. Eating beef is a really awful environmental choice and I have a lot of concerns about animal welfare, too. By the looks of it, the odd tin of beef soup - perhaps one a week - might be enough to turn things around for me. The alternative is massive uncertainty, and needing more medical support - which is in short supply in the UK as it is. I feel that the more responsible choice is to change my diet.
Yes, you can use medical interventions to manage periods, but that's not a consequence free choice, either for my body or for the environment.
Unless you're dealing with something similar, I'd prefer not to have diet or medical advice in the comments and I thank you in advance for not doing that. I've spent a lot of time looking at this, and there are other issues with my body that impact on my choices, and I don't want to get bogged down in those details. I'm taking this as an opportunity to flag up the issue that if you're only giving this a few minutes thought, the odds are I've already considered it, and this is always true for other people's health issues. Hearing from people who are dealing with the same, or similar, can be really valuable.
My main reason for sharing this experience is because I'm tired of seeing it asserted that everyone has the same options and food choices available to them. I have really limited options at this point and none of them are good or happy choices for me. None of them are what I really want, and there are a lot of considerations in deciding which is most responsible. Being so ill I can't function isn't a responsible choice. I hope this is only temporary, because I'd prefer to be vegetarian.
No comments:
Post a Comment