Iron Deficiency: Causes, Symptoms, and What You Can Do

When your body doesn’t have enough iron, a mineral essential for making hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen. Also known as iron deficiency anemia, it’s one of the most common nutrient shortages worldwide. You might feel tired all the time, get dizzy when you stand up, or notice your fingernails are brittle or spoon-shaped. These aren’t just random quirks—they’re your body asking for more iron.

Hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying molecule in your blood that depends on iron to function drops when you don’t get enough iron from food or lose too much through bleeding. Women with heavy periods, pregnant people, teens going through growth spurts, and older adults with poor diets are at highest risk. Even athletes and vegetarians can struggle because iron from plants (non-heme iron) isn’t absorbed as easily as iron from meat (heme iron). That’s why simply eating spinach isn’t always enough—you need vitamin C to help your body absorb it, or sometimes, a supplement.

Iron supplements, oral or intravenous forms used to restore low iron levels are often the fastest fix, but they’re not one-size-fits-all. Some people get stomach upset from pills, others need IV iron because their gut can’t absorb it properly. And here’s the catch: taking iron without knowing you need it can be dangerous. Too much iron harms your liver and organs. That’s why testing your ferritin (your iron storage level) and hemoglobin before starting supplements matters more than guessing.

What you’ll find in the posts below isn’t a generic list of supplements or miracle foods. It’s real, practical info from people who’ve dealt with this—how symptoms show up differently in men versus women, why some meds make it worse, what lab numbers actually mean, and which treatments work when diet alone fails. No fluff. No hype. Just what you need to know to fix it, safely and for good.