Aidan:

Hello and welcome to the Ideal Nutrition podcast. My name is Aidan Muir and I’m here with my co-host Leah Higl and this is episode 198 where we’re going to be talking about how micronutrient deficiencies impact energy levels. We’re just going to start by going through each one one by one.

Leah:

So we’re going to start with one of the most obvious ones or the one that comes to mind first and that is iron. So we start here because when we have a deficiency of iron, this can lead to a reduction in haemoglobin in the body, which then reduces oxygen transportation as well. So that can lead to feelings of fatigue, lethargy, amongst other things. But in this particular context, very huge impact on energy levels most of the time.

It is arguably one of the most common deficiencies in the world with around 30% of the world’s population said to be iron deficient. When we think of Australian statistics, they are a little bit better than kind of the general total population of the world. But it’s still like over 20% of women are iron deficient. And that number gets even higher when we think about specific groups or subpopulations of women in Australia, particularly plant based people, where we see this happen quite commonly, particularly in my practice, where I work with a lot of plant based menstruating people like iron deficiency is super, super common.

But also for people that just have really heavy menstrual bleeds, people that are like very, very active. So there are definitely people that are more at risk, but generally across the board, it is very common.

Aidan:

Fatigue and low energy is a common symptom of a B12 deficiency as well. And it’s pretty much for the same reasons as iron, where it impacts red blood cell production and also just reduces oxygen transportation. Obviously in the plant-based community, like B12 is super, super relevant, but

Another lesser known one I’d say is that the ability of the body to absorb B12 from food declines with age. So deficiency is a lot more common in older adults. So at a population level, B12 deficiency is not that common, but research looking specifically in Australian aged care facilities has found that 14% of people were deficient and another 36% weren’t far off. Once again, Australian statistics are likely to be better than a lot of other countries, but that’s still pretty relevant because even when you look at the not far off categories, it’s pretty relevant for a lot of people.

Leah:

The third one we’re going to have a chat about is magnesium. So this is kind of a lesser known one potentially, but it is often linked with energy levels. And there are a multitude of ways that it could be playing a role in this. So one example is that it is involved in ATP production. So that could be relevant, but we’ve also talked about the role of magnesium in sleep.

And we know that being magnesium deficient can reduce the quality and quantity of sleep that you get. And this could have an indirect impact on energy levels coming from magnesium deficiency. There is also an association between magnesium supplementation and improved depression scores.

So a 2023 meta analysis looking at all the relevant randomised control trials in this arena found significant improvements from rectifying magnesium deficiency or taking magnesium and the depression scores themselves. So this could translate to subjective energy levels. So between its role in ATP production, its correlation with sleep and mental health, it is one to keep in mind when thinking about overall energy.

Aidan:

It’s an interesting one with the mental health stuff where I often find when looking at research that mental health and nutrition is sometimes simplified down to one thing, like for example, gut health and mental health and stuff like that. But even when you see like the magnesium thing, it’s like, actually even just supplementing magnesium. So we’re not messing with gut health here. That seems to improving mental health. So any dietary approach that’s improving gut health in the majority of cases, it’s also increasing magnesium intake, usually a combination of factors as well. Going through vitamin D next.

So low vitamin D is associated with fatigue, but it’s also associated with everything. So it’s not as clear cut as you’d hope. And the reason why it’s associated with a lot of things is because low vitamin D is also typically just a sign of low exposure to the sun because we get vitamin D from the sun. Low exposure to the sun could impact sleep quality. Like we have all this stuff about how if you see sun in the morning and your eyes are kind of scanning like the blue light and then you see sun in the evening, so on and so forth, it does actually improve your sleep quality.

Therefore, it obviously would make sense that if you were getting less sun exposure to get poor sleep, that would lead to fatigue. That’s one of so many examples how this could play a role. Another example is that vitamin D deficiency in men is linked with low testosterone. Once again, it’s a bit inconclusive where some researchers found that just supplementing vitamin D has helped with that. Others have not found that. once again, it could just be a proxy for sun exposure.

One way we know it’s not as strong of a proxy for sun exposure is the mental health side of things as well. So low vitamin D is linked with depression. You could once again use that logic of sun exposure, but the way, the reason why I say it’s, it’s got to be more than that is we do actually see vitamin D supplementation by itself has some mildly positive evidence for helping them. So we also see that vitamin D deficiency sometimes has fatigue as a symptom identified, but it’s hard to make a strong link.

So I’m not going to make any strong claims here about it being a huge association or anything like that but I think most people should probably care a little bit about vitamin D, get a blood test if it’s easy. If it’s not easy for you, like once again, just looking at lifestyle being like how much sun do I get? If I don’t get heaps, maybe supplementing vitamin D as well.

Leah:

So that’s covering the main four nutrients we would think about that have a pretty decent link, but we also have a few honourable mentions in this space. The first one is zinc. So zinc deficiency can contribute to low energy. And addressing deficiency, it can do a couple of things. It can increase testosterone production in men, but also across the board, just improve immunity in general. So both of which could translate to improved energy levels upon rectifying that deficiency. But if levels are good, so we already have adequate intake of zinc through food, adding more is unlikely to help.

The second one is folate and folate is involved in red blood cell production. So this matters for very similar reasons to iron and B12. So it’s something to think about. And then the third honorable mention is iodine. And this is particularly in relation to its impact on thyroid function. So a low iodine intake can result in issues with general function of the thyroid. And that in turn can lead to feelings of fatigue, although it’s pretty rare in Australia.

Fun fact, all commercial breads in Australia actually have to be made with iodised salt because iodine deficiency was once a major public health issue. But there were certain things put in place in the general food system that have alleviated that. So it’s really, really an issue these days.

Aidan:

So now we’ll talk about what you can do with this information. So testing when relevant is a good idea. So a blood test is super helpful for looking at things like vitamin D, B12 and iron. If you have low B12 or low iron, I think it makes sense to address those things. With vitamin D, I would go a little step further and say that if you’re on the low end of the healthy range, it might be good to bump that up a tiny bit, but there’s weaker evidence for that than there is for just addressing a deficiency. It’s really easy to test for those things.

Magnesium, unfortunately, would rarely show up as deficient on a regular blood test. There is a specific red blood cell magnesium test, is arguably a lot more accurate and it shows a lot more deficiencies as well. But it’s not really practical to access that in Australia. I had a brief look into that quite some time ago, just to see like, if I’m talking about this, is this even possible to get? And it seems very hard to get in Australia. So I wouldn’t worry about that. Instead of what I would do is I just assess your dietary magnesium intake in comparison to needs.

If you want a very much oversimplified way of doing that, you can just look up the recommended daily intake of magnesium and then put your daily intake of food into an app like chronometer. And then you can see, are you massively below that number? And if you’re significantly below that number, it would make sense to increase your intake of that. But if you weren’t going to get a blood test, because although I talk about this, not many people are actually going to go do that. I do that in general for the L1 suit. Like with the vitamin D thing, I’d be like, do you get a lot of sun? With the B12 being like, do you eat a lot of animal-based foods? If you do, you’re probably gonna do pretty well there.

Although the older app older person aspect is still relevant there, which is where I come back to getting a blood test. And similarly for iron, just being like, you getting a lot of iron rich foods? Not going to go too deep on that, but like obviously red meat is a great source, but there’s so many other options, like even other protein sources like chicken and fish, they have a bit of iron and then you’ve got all your plant based iron sources as well. If you had a low intake of red meat, I would kind of just check, are you trying to get a lot of iron in? Because if you weren’t, then you might have a lower intake than ideal.

Leah:

This has been episode 198 of the Ideal Nutrition Podcast looking at micronutrient deficiencies that could potentially impact energy levels. Hopefully you found it interesting. If you could leave a rating or review, it’s always greatly appreciated, but otherwise, thanks for tuning in.