So I was reading, or rather listening to an article on Natural News about fingernail health and after hearing about something called “ridges” on one’s nails, I decided to take a look at my nails and I saw that I have vertical ridges on my nails! Although these ridges are very small and hard to see unless you look very closely, I got a little upset thinking that I might be anemic. So I went and read about the symptons and one of them was fatigue, which can lead to one feeling depressed! So we have a little bit of a chicken and egg complex here… I was sad because I found out I am iron deficient, and one of the symptons of iron deficiency is a form of depression…
So anyway, I decided that I should take the necessary precautions and advise my readers how they can avoid getting an iron deficiency, which according to the Natural News article is a possible cause for anemia, which is a cause for ridges in ones nails.
The culprit: Tea drinking
Drinking too much tea, which is what I have been doing since the summer of 2012 is the culprit for decreasing your body’s iron absorption, which in turn leads to anemia, which leads to ridges in one’s nails. This however only applies to non-HEME sources of iron, which means if you eat very little or no meat and drink a lot of tea you are risking low iron levels in your body. So the advice I found on the internet is a bunch of lists of foods high in iron, and the advice was to not to drink tea right before, during or after a meal. The tannins in the tea bind to the iron and prevent your body from absorbing the iron. There are many ways to still drink tea, even herbal tea and to avoid these poor effects, but the best advice was to:
- avoid tea with meals
- add milk or lemon to your tea
- get Vitamin C with your iron
- get your iron from meat sources.
See this article on VeeTea.com for more information on how to deal with drinking tea and iron absorption:
http://www.veetea.com/site/articles/tea-and-iron
How I “listen” to natural news everyday:
I purchased a license to the IVONA Text-to-Speech Software (http://www.ivona.com) for around 79 US Dollars. All you need is one voice, I got Salli, she sounds pretty good. So I get an email each morning from Natural News and I simply select all the text, copy it and paste it into a large document in my IVONA Reader, then I simply press play and start my work!
See this article on natural news to learn more about fingernail health:
Fingernail health is an indicator of overall health and wellness – http://www.naturalnews.com/007750.html