"Do you believe that giving blood is safe or could it possibly lead to some health issues?"

As long as the person extracting the blood is competently trained, it should be safe to donate blood. Donating blood on a regular basis eliminates heart disease in some men, because it is the fastest and surest way to remove excess iron from the body. Iron build-up is a chronic problem for men world-wide. Normal men, who are not vegetarians, should definitely avoid all supplements containing iron. Few women have excess iron during their childbearing years, due to menstrual blood loss, and this is one of the reasons why women rarely develop heart disease before menopause. Then heart disease quickly becomes one of the top killers for women too, once the iron begins accumulating throughout the senior years. The infamous blood-letting practices of the past were exclusively practiced by the mainstream medical establishment, and in certain cases, it actually worked! Excess iron likely played a strong role in those cases. I believe that it was Linus Pauling who discovered the iron problem, and he also discovered how to compensate using resveratrol supplements and grape products like red wine.