Free blood?

[ilzolende]

Today, I received an email with the subject line "Give a gift that costs you nothing - and stay to party!" The gift that "costs me nothing" is, apparently, donating blood. I'm not sure what the sender's model of blood is here.

In my personal case I have gone to some lengths to not have a red blood cell deficit and am still not sure I've succeeded. If I wanted to donate blood and still didn't have enough red blood cells, I'd need to research optimal iron supplement use and then try that, increase my vegetable intake and try combining it with more things, and possibly reintroduce more animal products to my diet. (I eat iron-rich vegetables several days a week, often with a bit of kimchi, but I'm not sure the kimchi provides enough vitamin C to properly enhance non-heme iron digestion.)

I've heard that the typical man benefits from occasional blood donations due to it preventing excessive iron buildup. I model the typical woman as having iron issues because I remember interacting with women with iron issues in the past, the normal female hemoglobin range includes areas with low enough hemoglobin to prohibit blood donation, many of the women who are eligible to donate blood menstruate, and globally anemia is a notable women's health issue. However, I hang around with an unusual number of vegetarians and people with health problems, so my model may be flawed.

Comments

[another_normal_anomaly]

Amusing anecdatum: I have almost all the risk factors for low iron (female, vegan, doesn't supplement iron or eat mych greens) and yet my iron is consistently normal.

[brin_bellway]

Yeah, blood is really not free. For a while there I had enough iron for myself but not enough to give away, and now that my periods have gotten heavier I might not even have enough for myself anymore (I'll be going in for another anemia test soon).

And the blood clinic (at least back when I had the iron; I think they've expanded their hours since then) was only ever open in the middle of the afternoon, interrupting everything and making it so you could hardly get anything else done that day. And then I was too weak and tired to do much the *next* day. And there was that time I nearly passed out, but honestly that didn't do as much to dissuade me as the "must block off two days of your schedule" aspect. I have other obligations to fulfil!

[discoursedrome]

Man there's a mobile blood clinic that sets up across the street from where I work once every couple months and even that's not what I'd call "free" since, aside from the associated health issues, it takes 60-90 minutes in the middle of a workday.

Anecdotally it does seem like women and vegetarians are more likely to get turned away from the clinic due to iron deficiencies -- in addition to the stuff you mentioned, I think that because they take the same amount from everyone it probably hits people with lower body mass harder.

YMMV but for what it's worth, I ran into the vegetarian-anemia issue and talked to my doctor about it and ended up on iron supplements with periodic bloodwork, and in the end I found that far easier to manage than trying to get it dietetically, so you could probably talk to your GP about that approach (possibly with a C supplement also). If you're getting your iron checked a lot anyway it's pretty easy to keep a handle on it that way. From what I could tell people's reaction to the supplements seemed to be a bigger limiting factor than their strict rate of uptake, though, so I dunno.

[mindstalk]

I do know what felt like a large proportion of female ex-veg for anemia reasons.