So I'm gonna let you take it from here, Emily, and, and go for it.

Thanks, Chris.

I'm excited to act as your pseudo host today.

Yeah, so for my master's capstone project at UNC in the nutrition dietetics program, we were tasked with picking a public health problem and, uh, making a, a intervention for it.

So the one that I picked was iron deficiency anemia in adolescent female athletes.

And in my research for that project, I came across some of Dr. Corey Dugan's research and found it super helpful for my project, so I decided to reach out to see if he'd want to pop in as a guest speaker, and here he is.

So I'm really excited about this collaboration.

It's poorly absorbed, and research has demonstrated, well, one of the biggest randomized control trials on the, the Lucky Iron Fish, as it's called, is, um, it suggests that it doesn't improve ferritin or hemoglobin.

So what do you got, Emily?

Yeah, absolutely.

So you probably grew up hearing that oats are healthy and oatmeal is healthy.

I don't know if everybody necessarily loved oatmeal as kids, but let's go over why they're so good for us.

The primary thing is that they're really rich in this type of soluble fiber called beta-glucan fiber.

It's been shown in studies to help lower cholesterol and and serve as a great prebiotic for your gut bacteria.

Oats just have a lot of complex carbs.

have a very well-controlled A1C.

[laughs]

Yeah, you'll just get that in, like, regular protein, and your body will, like, break it down.

So when your body processes methionine, homocysteine is just kind of ...

It's a product of that process.

And we know that B12 plays a huge role in converting homocysteine back into methionine, and B6 kind of helps convert it to a, a different amino acid called cysteine.

So a lot of B vitamins are working to convert homocysteine into other things.

So if you're deficient in any, in, in the specific B vitamins that play a role, B6, folate, or B12, if you're deficient in any of those, that process is a lot less efficient, and so you'll see an elevated level of homocysteine in your blood.

Anyway, what did, what else do you wanna say about homocysteine?

And then slowly declines?

Yeah, this is something I didn't learn until a few years back in one of my nutrition classes.

But bone mineral density is basically the indicator of how well your bones are doing and how healthy they are.

If you have a higher bone mineral density, that's a good thing.

And we actually build our peak bone mineral density in early adulthood, like 20s.

It usually peaks around the age of 30.

And then just there's a natural decline, like a slow decline in As you keep aging, which is why you see a lot of osteoporosis and things like that in your older age, because it kind of like has this shape of it.

So what do you got, Emily?