Anemia Considerations for Hiking

Video Transcript

"Something else you need to think about when you go backpacking is as you get higher in altitude, the amount of oxygen in the air is much less. And so the basic, like, what's going to happen is you're not going to be able to run as fast, you're going to get winded a lot more quickly and a lot more easily. So, something that you may not have considered, and this is especially for girls who are like my age, between the ages of like eighteen and like twenty-something, it's actually possible that you could be anemic and not know, and you'll find out when you go backpacking because you will hardly be able to breathe. And so, it's not a bad idea to actually go to the doctor and see, get a blood test to find out whether or not you're anemic, and all you have to do is take iron supplements if you are. If you're not anemic, it's very unhealthy to take iron supplements, but if you are, it's an easy problem to solve, but if you don't know that before hand, which you could not, I didn't know for a really long time, and then you find out when you're in the mountains, if could actually be a really, really dangerous problem."