My Iron Overload Protocol

A 5-page quick guide for how to manage iron overload, incorporating the new information on manganese overload.

I have combined the practical insights from my research into iron and manganese overload outlined in Iron Overload: Forget What You Thought You Knew with my classic insights available in much of my earlier content into a new 5-page quick guide to managing iron overload.

Too much iron in the body causes fatigue, joint pain, depression and mood swings, hair loss, chest pain, dizziness, impaired sexual function, menstrual problems, and abdominal pain. It raises cholesterol, increases the risk of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and it causes general wear and tear on tissues that accelerates the aging process.

People predisposed to carry too much iron are also predisposed to carry too much manganese. 

Manganese overload causes headaches, irritability, insomnia, depression, and eventually loss of balance, problems walking normally, and Parkinson signs such as rigidity and tremor.

None of these symptoms are specific to either problem. For example, a complex I disorder can cause Parkinson’s, copper deficiency can cause tremors, having a rough life can cause depression, B vitamin deficiencies can cause irritability, and so on. 

Further, many of these issues could require opposite actions to solve. For example, fatigue and dizziness could be caused by iron deficiency or iron overload. If you do a coin flip, you have a 50% chance of selecting a strategy that makes you worse.

This underscores the importance of testing. 

Most approaches to testing are inadequate. For example, many people use ferritin as a marker of iron status. On its own, ferritin is uninterpretable. Ferritin is equally impacted by iron status, inflammation, and oxidative stress. A classic textbook form of anemia, called anemia of chronic disease or anemia of inflammation involves high ferritin, functional iron deficiency, and clinical anemia. This is because inflammation has increased the storage of iron in ferritin and made it unavailable to make red blood cells. If you just use ferritin, you will conclude such a person needs to donate blood or restrict iron, and this would just make their anemia worse.

Further, nearly all genetic testing misses the long tail of people with uncommon or rare mutations. Hence, many people have bloodwork suggesting iron overload and the genetics say “nope, you don’t have it,” but the genetics were only run on the two most common variants. But there are actually 215 variants known to cause iron overload, meaning that 99% of the variants are ignored.

Finally, it is almost universally unrecognized throughout the entire medical system and the entire health and wellness space that iron overload genes predispose someone equally to manganese overload. This is HUGE. Everything you could do to lower your iron status, donate blood, eat less iron, chelate iron, all of it will make manganese overload worse if you do not give equal care to the manganese problem.

About 9% of people need to care about this, and this protocol helps you determine whether that is you, and if it is, what to do about it.

This protocol is for reserved for Masterpass members. You can learn more about the Masterpass here.

Masterpass members can download the protocol here: