If you've ever been anemic and then come out of it, you know what a gift of health and life it is to have healthy blood. Even lab ranges that are technically borderline can show up with strong feelings of fatigue, sleepiness, difficulty going uphill/ upstairs, and stars that cloud your vision. Symptomatic anemia is just as important to treat.
Once you are anemic enough to feel it, it is hard to correct with diet alone; be sure to take the iron supplements your doctor recommends, or to get your hands on this syrup.
Schedule an appointment with your local acupuncturist and herbalist to determine and correct the digestive or menstrual issues that are causing you to become anemic in the first place. This can easily become a loop of chronic illness, and East Asian medicine can treat it effectively.
This is the protocol I share with my patients, which includes my mother's recipe for chicken livers with sour cream (delicious!). There are other tasty recipes out there for chicken liver pate. This very diet is the one that increased my hemoglobin 2 points in 2 weeks when I was 5 months pregnant and anemic.
Eating for Anemia
Eat wild-caught salmon regularly. Frozen or smoked is probably the most affordable way to do this. Salmon salad is a great way to have a little bit every day.
Eat small amounts of chicken liver regularly. It's important to buy high quality organic ones. The way animals are raised and processed impacts us all in mundane and spiritual ways. On a very physical level, when you eat an animal’s liver you are eating the organ that processes everything that animal ate. The same way you wouldn’t want a farm worker, the soil, or our creaturely kin tp be exposed to toxins, you don't want to ingest an organ that filtered pesticides or herbicides.
My mom’s chicken liver with bacon and sour cream recipe:
Ingredients
1 pound organic chicken livers.
1-2 onions
high quality sour cream (here in California I like Strauss’)
few slices pasture raised bacon
Cooking Instructions
Fry bacon to your liking, take out and break into pieces
Fry onions in the bacon fat until soft and transparent
Fry livers (that you have cleaned, trimming any connective tissue or tiny gallbladders that sometimes get left on) in the onions. Stop when they are just pink in the middle. If you over cook they get grainy and have an unpleasant texture. Add back the bacon
Stir in spoonfuls of high quality sour cream to your liking
Eat over short grain rice
Drink nettle tea, one a day if you can
Eat steamed dark green veggies and beets. Eat roasted sweet potatoes without added sugar.
Avoid smoothies and yogurts. These cold foods make it difficult for your digestive system to assimilate vitamins and minerals from your food and turn them into flesh and blood.
My colleague Jacqueline’s post with bone broth recipe.
If you are chronically anemic, or easily become anemic after getting better, there is a larger imbalance at play. Come in for an appointment so that we can treat the root cause of your illness.