71: Iron Deficiency in Female Endurance Athletes with Dr Cory Dugan

<p>Your labs came back “normal”… but you’re exhausted, your training feels harder than it should, and something still feels off.</p><p>Iron deficiency is incredibly common in female endurance athletes and if ferritin isn’t being checked, you could be missing a really important piece of the puzzle.</p><p>Today on the Endurance Eats Podcast, we’re talking about iron deficiency in endurance athletes, particularly female athletes.</p><p>I’m joined by Dr. Cory Dugan, a postdoctoral research fellow at the LSU Pennington Biomedical Research Center and a researcher in iron deficiency and women’s health. Cory earned his PhD from the University of Western Australia, where his work focused on iron deficiency management and treatment in active females.</p><p>My goal with this episode, along with my three-part ferritin series on Substack, is to give you the knowledge and language you need to better advocate for yourself at your doctor’s office.</p><p>We’re breaking down what ferritin actually tells us, why hemoglobin alone doesn’t give us the full picture, why female endurance athletes are especially vulnerable to low iron stores, and what we actually know about iron deficiency, fatigue, and athletic performance.</p><p>Because being exhausted all the time shouldn’t automatically get written off as “normal.”</p><p><br></p><p><strong>What You’ll Learn</strong></p><ul><li><p>The difference between iron deficiency, iron deficiency without anemia, and iron deficiency anemia and why knowing the difference matters</p></li><li><p>Why your hemoglobin can look completely normal while your iron stores are already running low</p></li><li><p>Why ferritin is one of the most important numbers to understand when you’re looking at iron status</p></li><li><p>Why there’s still so much disagreement around what counts as “low” ferritin</p></li><li><p>Why Cory advocates for looking beyond the traditional ferritin cutoff, especially in athletes</p></li><li><p>How hard training and inflammation can affect ferritin and potentially make your results harder to interpret</p></li><li><p>Why female endurance athletes have so many overlapping risk factors for iron deficiency, including menstrual blood loss, GI blood loss, sweat losses, foot-strike hemolysis, and exercise-induced changes in iron absorption</p></li></ul><p>And if you’ve ever been told your labs are “fine” while you’re still wondering why you feel so tired, this is an episode I really want you to hear.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Resource