Your Thyroid Needs The Right Fuel – Diet & Nutrition Matter…
Below is the transcript of Dr. Osborne’s Video titled – “How Diet and Nutrition Affect the Thyroid”. Enjoy!
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Hey, Dr. Osborne here, and we’re back. Had a problem with the video feed, so we’re starting again. Hopefully many of you who were kicked off or bumped off the video feed can now get back on on the live feed. Again, we’re talking today about how nutrition impacts or affects the thyroid. On that topic, before we dive deep into it, I want to make sure that several of you are hearing me loud and clear, and are getting access to the live feed. Again, chime in and tell me hello, let me know that you’re there. I want to know that you can hear me. We got into this about two or three minutes into this, and a lot of the video crashed. Chime in and let me know that you can hear me, and once I start seeing some of you guys chiming in and telling me that I’m coming in loud and clear again, we’ll get started again today.
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Okay, looks like you’re back. We’re back. Hopefully you guys are all back, and we can get started into this program again. Today, picked Doctor Osborne’s brain, what are we talking about? How nutrition affects the thyroid. Let’s talk a little bit about basic nutrition, and basic thyroid function first. Now, what is the thyroid? It’s that little butterfly shaped gland in your neck where there is cartilage, it’s called your cricoid cartilage, it’s where that cartilage sticks out. On either side of that, you got that butterfly shaped gland in your thyroid gland. One of its primary functions is it pumps out a hormone called T4. That T4 hormone is what sets the metabolic pace of the body, it’s what regulates energy production, it’s what energizes cells to be able to produce adequate energy.
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Somebody with a low thyroid, for example, might have problems with low energy, and hair loss, and dry skin, and low libido problems, and constipation problems, and poor energy, and lethargy, and joint pain, and muscle tightness, and muscle stiffness, an un-endearing fatigue, even after rest.
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Those are really common symptoms of a person with a low thyroid. Now, some people will gain weight, although that’s not 100% mandatory. Many people will gain weight, but some people will actually lose weight, being hypothyroid, which is kind of the antithesis to common medical thinking is that people with hypothyroid will tend to gain more weight. I’ve actually seen patients having other diseases associated with it, they’ll actually not just gain weight, but they’ll lose weight. They’ll be wasting. Maybe part of their disease is that their gut is broken too, so they’re malabsorbing nutrients, and that’s why their thyroid is malfunctioned, but they’re actually losing weight because they’re malnourished.
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Again, the textbook symptoms most people talk about are weight gain, but it doesn’t have to be weight gain. Actually, many of you know, my good friend, Isabella Wentz, the thyroid pharmacist, and she had her big, big, big battle with thyroid problems, and she actually was one that had lost a lot of weight, not really gained a lot of weight. She is a perfect example of how, if we fall to these kind of medical conceptions and beliefs of everybody with a low thyroid has to present with weight gain, then we’re going to miss a lot of potential problematic people that are having thyroid problems. At any rate, the thyroid’s dysfunction is very, very critical at maintaining normal energetic production by the body.
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Now, if we look at certain things that we know will impact or affect the thyroid, one of the things that dramatically from a good perspective that we know, it’s been really well studied, is gluten. You probably heard all about gluten. If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you’ve heard me talking about grains and different forms of gluten and how that can trigger autoimmune responses in this process called molecular mimicry, and in some cases, that creates antibodies against their own thyroid, or against their own thyroid hormone, or against their own thyroid hormone receptors.
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There are a lot of research studies, at this point it’s no longer a question as to whether or not gluten can impact or cause Hashimoto’s or hypothyroidism. It’s an issue of is it causing yours. It’s that well studied and there’s that much information out there about it. We absolutely know gluten as a trigger. Where do we find gluten? Depending on who you talk to and depending on who you ask, if you follow me for any length of time, you’ve read my book No Grain No Pain, and I talk about gluten but I also talk about many forms of gluten. In essence, most people will say that wheat, barley and rye are the grains that contain gluten, but in reality, wheat, barley and rye are only three grains that contain gluten.
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There are lots of different kinds of gluten and they are found in all the different forms of grain and in my experience in helping patients recover their health, most of those people absolutely need to be on a grain-free diet, not a traditional gluten-free diet where they’re only omitting wheat, barley and rye. If you’re there and you’re on this episode of Pick Dr. Osborne’s Brain and you’re thinking, “Okay, I’m already on a gluten-free diet,” but you’re eating corn, you’re eating rice, you’re eating sorghum, you’re eating the pseudo-grains like amaranth, quinoa and buckwheat, and you’re still struggling, the very first thing you should probably do is pick up a copy of No Grain No pain and read it and start that 30 day protocol and that diet and see how much better you feel after 30 days.
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Gluten is one of the probably most well studied known dietary factors that will impact or affect the way that your thyroid hormone works. Another one is sugar. When I say sugar, I’m not talking about natural sugars. I’m talking about processed sugar, dextrose, glucose, fructose, maltodextrin, treacle, invert sugar, all the different forms of processed sugar, even organic processed sugar. Many of the food manufacturers have gotten wise to people wanting to avoid sugar, so they’ve come up with different ways to say it and to label the food package. For example, succinate, which is a form of organic sugar is still sugar. It’s still processed sugar, and it can still be a problem for many people.
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You want to understand that avoidance of processed sugar has got to be a priority, and for some people they’re saying, “Gosh, I can’t eat gluten, I can’t eat grain, I can’t eat sugar, what am I going to eat?” If you’re thinking that, it’s because you don’t have long enough experience under your belt of being on a healthy diet. The very first thing you want to do is start with experimenting, start with learning. Start with getting in the kitchen and learning. Start with new recipes, and start experimenting because this is the only way you’re going to get through it. If you continue to justify yourself that you’re going to eat sugar, if you continue to justify to yourself that you’re going to eat grain and try to manage your thyroid, I hate to disappoint you, you’re going to be in for a heck of a problem on your hands.
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Sugar is a big one. Grain is a big one. What’s the other? What is another really big food that we know is going to impact thyroid function? Well for many people soy, and when I say soy I mean GMO, really particularly GMO soy. Soy can be a goitrogen, which is a food that can hinder thyroid function, but particularly soybean or the soy products. A lot of the people in the vegetarian market, soy can be used to take on the flavor of lots of different foods that you cook it in. For example, if you cook soy with vegetables, a lot of times that soy, that protein the soy will take on the flavor of the vegetable and that’s why soy is such a versatile thing to cook with.
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Again, somebody suffering with a thyroid condition whose even particularly or potentially on a vegetarian diet who’s using a lot of soy substitution in that diet, not the best of ideas for somebody with a thyroid condition. Soy has a goitrogenic and specially genetically modified soy because now you have another added element of the food, which is pesticide, which can also contribute to a malfunction in autoimmune process and a dysfunction of the thyroid. We’ve got, again, overviewing, we said gluten, we said sugar, we said soy.
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Dairy is another food, let’s go into number four, dairy. Dairy, a lot of times, the reason you don’t see gluten-free, casein-free diets is because the protein casein can mimic gluten. For those with gluten sensitivity issues, a lot of times dairy is the holdup. It’s the thing that’s keeping their thyroid from improving because the casein in the dairy is mimicking the gluten and it’s creating the autoimmune response against the thyroid. Dairy is another big, big trigger. Now not all dairy is equal, and so I’ll say this. There’s dairy and then there’s conventional dairy. Conventional dairy would be your typical cows that are loaded up with antibiotics, that are force fed grains and that are milked incessantly, and that milk has got recombinant bovine growth hormone in it, the grains that the cows are being fed are GMO grains, so there’s glyphosate and there’s other hormone and other pesticide traces in the milk.
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In some cases, a lot of the dairy in and of itself is being produced from genetically modified cows, so the protein in the dairy itself is actually somewhat foreign to human bodies and has that high potential for allergenicity triggering. You’ve got to be careful with dairy. Now some of you say, “Well I buy organic dairy.” Well it can be organic dairy, but if it’s organic and the cow is fed organic grain and that’s typically the case, it still means that that milk in and of itself could be coming from the wrong kind of cow. It means that the high level of omega 6 concentration of the dairy can become very much a problem for a lot of people in terms of inflammation. Remember, autoimmune thyroiditis is an inflammatory disorder, and we’re trying to calm down inflammation, we’re not trying to increase it.
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Eating foods that are very rich in omega 6 fats can increase your body’s inflammatory response, and you don’t want to do that even with an organic dairy if the cows are being primarily grain fed. Remember, cows are grazing animals, they need exercise, they need sunshine. They need socialization in their communities, and if we pen them up and we put them in cases and we force feed them food, even organic food, that still doesn’t make that dairy healthy. Remember, you’re only as healthy as what you eat eats. I love animals. I’m not a vegetarian and I’m not scared to eat animals, but I love animals and I want the animals that are being sacrificed for our food to be well taken care of during their life and well fed, because one, it’s important from a humane perspective, but it’s also important from your health perspective.
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Again, you’re only as healthy as what you eat eats, if we’re talking about animals and animal byproduct. Dairy can be a very, very big trigger, and you want to know that. We got, again, grain, we’ve got sugar, we’ve got soy, and we’ve got dairy as four very, very big potential triggers for autoimmune thyroiditis. Somebody wrote in the question, through email, they wrote in, “Can you talk about Graves’ disease. Now I’ve been talking about Hashimoto so far. Hashimoto’s is an autoimmune condition where there’s low thyroid. Graves’ is an autoimmune condition where there’s high thyroid. Guess what, the good news is the same triggers that trigger low autoimmune thyroid disease are the same that trigger Graves’ disease. If you’re wondering if you have Graces’ disease and you’re listening to this conversation, you need to take the same things into account.
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In essence, don’t separate the to disorders just because one is manifesting as hyper and one is manifesting as hypo. All autoimmune disease has the same fundamental origin. What we’re talking about today applies to both conditions and I want you to understand that. There are some nuances that we’ll get into here shortly as well about the differences, but we’ll get into those shortly. Another big topic out there on foods that can be triggers for hypothyroidism or for thyroid disease are the goitrogens. These are foods like the cruciferous vegetables. Soy is a goitrogen but the cruciferous like broccoli and cauliflower and Brussels sprouts, which these foods contain what are considered to be goitrogen based products, which can suppress thyroid function.
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Now I haven’t seen that really. There’s studies on that, but I haven’t seen that translate 100% clinically. In my experience, if you have people who are using broccoli or cauliflower or Brussels sprouts or cabbage, that’s not the deal breaker in the thyroid condition. Now you can get in trouble if you’re eating too much of those foods. In essence, if you’re doing a lot of juicing and you’re half a pound of cabbage in your juice and it’s raw and it hasn’t been cooked, you’re going to get a lot of that goitrogenic activity, which can suppress the thyroid. If you’re eating cruciferous vegetables, my advice is if you have a thyroid condition, don’t stop eating cruciferous vegetables, just cook them well before you eat them and don’t make them the primary staple foods of your diet. You’ve got to have other variety coming through in your diet, so that you’re not, again, getting a food suppressing effect of the goitrogen.
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Those are probably the biggest or I should say the most common food based triggers for thyroid hormone disruption. Let’s talk about a missing food element that’s going to be helpful for the thyroid to function. Now those of you who have ever followed me, I have a pretty comprehensive video and article that I did on my white board for thyroid hormone function and the chemistry and the vitamins and the minerals that play a role in that. If you haven’t seen that, you can search that on my YouTube channel at Glutenology. You can check that video out. I highly encourage you to do that as a post to this live session, but what I want you to understand is that there are some key nutrients that are involved in the way that your thyroid hormone is producing. I’m going to start from the top and work my way down with those key nutrients so you have a better understanding of that.
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This is going to answer a lot of your current questions, which is what tests do we run, what tests do we ask our doctor for to evaluate our thyroid. Most of the time, what happens, the doctor runs a TSH, a thyroid stimulating hormone test. If that number is high, he says, “You have hypothyroidism.” If that number is too low, sometimes they come back and say, “You have hyperthyroidism.” That’s the mainstay of what medical doctors in this country, in the U.S. at least and probably in most developing countries are going to order is this TSH test. Now TSH is a regulatory hormone produced by your pituitary gland. It starts in your brain. Thyroid stimulating hormone is the hormone produced by your brain, and it travels to your thyroid gland from your brain and tells your thyroid gland to make T4. T4 is thyroid hormone.
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When you hear the term thyroid hormone or thyroxine, that’s what we’re talking about, it’s T4. Let’s go backward again. TSH has to be made first. What is TSH made out of? In essence, what does your body need as raw ingredients? Think of your body, think of the different hormones and the different tissues in your body, thyroid tissues, different organs like your heart, your lung, your spleen, your kidney, your liver, your bone. They all need ingredients to be made. It’s like if you’re building a brick house, you need ingredients. You need wood, you need brick, you need mortar, you need nails, you need screws. You also need people who are going to use the hammers to screw or to hammer in the nails and people with the screwdrivers to screw in. You need people but you also need raw ingredients, and your thyroid is no different.
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To produce thyroid hormone from top to bottom, you need raw ingredients. Your body needs certain raw ingredients. It doesn’t just magically produce thyroid hormone. It needs the raw ingredients to do that. What are the raw ingredients that go into producing the TSH, the stuff that your brain makes to stimulate your thyroid gland? Well the number one raw ingredient is protein. That’s right, protein. Where I see a lot of women especially with thyroid problems and regulatory problems is they’re on low protein, high carb diets. Somebody chiming in about the ketogenic diet. Can the ketogenic diet be helpful? Yeah, the ketogenic diet can be extremely helpful if it’s the right diet for you. I’m real hesitant to just mass prescribe a diet for everyone regardless. Even though I wrote a book, No Grain No Pain, which is a mass recommendation, if you come to see me in my office, you’re getting tested.
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We’re actually going to dive into the deep of what it is that you as a unique person biochemically need. We’re not going to guess a lot. This is why so many of you have so many questions because either you’ve probably been guessed that or you’ve been guessing yourself, and so there’s just a lot of noise and a lot of answers. If I give you fundamentals and educate you, then now you can ask better questions. Again, let’s go back up, TSH. It’s made in your brain, you need protein, number one ingredient to make it. Now how much protein is enough protein for a person? Everybody’s a little bit different, but if we want to use an average calculation to determine how much protein a person needs, use this calculation. Take your body weight in kilograms. Your body, let’s say you weigh 100 pounds. You’re going to take your body weight in pounds and you’re going to divide that by 2.2.
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Whatever you weigh in pounds, divide that by 2.2. That equals how many kilograms you weigh, whatever that is. Let’s say you weigh 55 kilograms. Now you’re going to take that number, your body weight in kilograms, and you’re going to multiply it by .8. That’s how many grams of protein you need in a day to maintain your current status. Not for new growth. If you’re working out really avidly and you’re only eating .8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight, it’s not going to be enough for your recovery. It’s not going to be enough for you to build muscle and make all the hormones that are protein dependent. You need more protein than that, again, depending on what you’re doing. If you’re an aggressive exerciser, .8 grams per kilograms in protein is probably not going to cut it for you. It’s going to be more like 1 to 1.2 grams per kilogram of body weight.
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We can always start out with a baseline of .8, and that’s a pretty safe place to start. Now if you’ve got a kidney problem, that’s something else to consider. We don’t have time to consider everyone’s unique illnesses in this forum, but if you’ve got a major kidney disease, there are some doctors, if you’ve got kidney disease they’ve got you on a low protein diet. If you’re one of those types of people, you do have to be careful and monitor your kidney function so that you don’t overload your kidney with too much protein. That’s pretty rare. Even I see people on high protein diets, on ketogenic diets, even with poor kidney function thrive and do very, very well. It’s one of those areas that should be monitored, but it’s not necessarily just because you increase your protein, that doesn’t necessarily doom your kidneys to some bad fate. I want to just clear the air about that, because a lot of people are paranoid and petrified about damaging kidneys when protein is what will be considered by the status quo to be too high.
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A lot of registered dieticians and nutritionists and other people will tell you that if you go over that .8 number, you’re way too high and you’re going to damage your kidneys and that’s just not true. It doesn’t pan out. It pans out only on paper, it does not pan out in theory and reality when you’re dealing with people. Again, still monitor it because it’s the smart thing to do. We’ve got protein being the fundamental ingredient that helps us produce TSH. What else do we need to make TSH? We need magnesium, we need vitamin B12 and we need zinc. Those three micronutrients, magnesium, B12 and zinc are also necessary to produce TSH. We’ve got protein, magnesium, zinc and vitamin B12. If you’re anemic, if your vitamin B12 levels are low, you can have a bad thyroid. You can have poor thyroid function right off the bat because you’re not capable of making the TSH into your brain to be able to drive T4 or thyroxine production from your thyroid.
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Those are the raw ingredients for your brain. What are the raw ingredients for your thyroid. Now that the message is received from your brain to your thyroid, the message is there and your thyroid is being told make T4, well let’s define what T4 is. T4 is protein plus iodine. That’s basically what T4 is. There’s a particular protein you need, it’s an amino acid called tyrosine. You need tyrosine to be able to make thyroxine. The tyrosine is like the backbone. I want you to think of your T4 as a fancy sports car like a Ferrari, whatever fancy sports car you like. Ferrari, Lamborghini, whatever you like. I like the Lamborghini myself. Whatever you like. The frame of the car is the protein, it’s the protein backbone of your T4. That is made out of tyrosine, which again, it’s an amino acid.
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On this race car, you need some really, really sharp, super hot tires that are designed to go at high speed, because if you get this racing car out on a track and you’re taking a turn at over 100 miles an hour, then the friction generated from the torque of the car and the motion of the wheels is going to blow those tires out. Imagine each tire on your super souped up car, your tyrosine based sports car is made out of iodine. Each one of those tires represents a molecule of iron. That’s what the four means. The four is how much iodine, how many molecules of iodine are in that thyroid hormone. There’s four. Think of that Ferrari or that Lamborghini. The frame is tyrosine, the tires on the car itself so that it can roll, those tires are made out of iodine, and if you don’t have iodine or enough iodine, then you’re not going to have big fat racing tires on your thyroid hormone. You’re going to have little tiny spare tires.
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When you go to take that corner, it’s going to blow out and your whole metabolism’s going to shut down and you’re going to be in a bad way. I’ve told you I was going to give you some things to do. Iodine, where do we get iodine? If we’re looking at the diet, we get iodine primarily from things that come out of the ocean, out of salt water. Not from lake fish, not from general things. Let me rephrase. Most of our iodine comes from the ocean, not from lakes, not from rivers. You want to eat fresh seafood. That’s a great source of iodine. Kelp is a great source, or seaweed if you like [inaudible 00:23:10]. Those are good sources of dietary iodine.
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Now a number of years ago, the government stepped in because epidemic goiters, a goiter is what happens when your thyroid gets too big because it doesn’t have enough iodine. The cells in the thyroid get bigger trying to make thyroid hormone, but they don’t have the raw ingredients to do that, so the cells respond by getting bigger and try to compensate for that, and that’s what a goiter is. Again, it’s an enlargement of the thyroid when the thyroid function is starting to fail, and iodine deficiency is one of those reasons. It wasn’t very long ago that iodine deficiency was such a problem in the United States that the government stepped in and said, “How can we get iodine in the diet of people?” Here’s why iodine deficiency became an epidemic.
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We had initially, when America was settled, it was settled on the east coast and then we had all these people go from the east coast and traverse over to the west coast. You have two sides of the country, coastal people, access to seafood, but then you had the people that got dropped off in the middle. No access to seafood. They were eating diets that were devoid of seafood or fish, and so iodine deficiency was a lot more common in those individuals. The government did something actually that was pretty smart. They said, “Look, we need to get salt involved in this because everybody uses salt to basically stabilize food. Everybody uses salt because salt is the main preservative during this time.” We didn’t have all these different weird chemical preservatives then, so salt was used to preserve most foods.
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They knew that if they added iodine to salt, that you would get those people and all those epidemic goiters, you’d get that under more manageable control. That’s why when you buy a bottle of salt from the grocery store, typically you’ll see this word iodized salt. That’s why is that the government got with the salt companies and said, “Look, we want to fortify this salt, because everybody uses salt, to make sure that everybody gets enough iodine because not everybody has access to this fresh seafood.” That’s the way that worked.
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Now what has happened since then is with hypertension, high blood pressure and with heart disease on the rise, what is everybody saying? They’re saying, “Don’t eat salt. Salt is bad for you. Salt causes heart disease.” Now all these people are going away from salt, which is where a lot of peoples main source of iodine was, and we see this record numbers of thyroid diseases going up and up and up. That’s kind of where we’re at. My point in all that and in saying all that is it doesn’t mean I want you to go out and buy iodized salt because iodized salt is chemically processed, it’s not all that great for you. What I would like you to do because you have some options is to eat more seafood, is to eat more fish, is to potentially eat kelp or seaweed, so you can get some natural sources of iodine in your diet.
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Now we got the frame of the car, we’ve got the tires on the car, which are made out of iodine. Think of your thyroid gland as a car factory. You’ve got an assembly line, you’ve got workers, you’ve got to put in a steering wheel, you’ve got to put in a brake pedal and you’ve got to put in a gas pedal. What’s necessary to do all that? Internally inside your thyroid gland, your thyroid uses a ton of vitamin C. Now the vitamin C is very, very important to add those iodine tires onto your thyroid hormone. You need vitamin C to do that and you need Vitamin B2 in a large quantity from your thyroid. You need those nutrients. Why? Why do we need so much vitamin B2?
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There’s something in your thyroid gland called a symporter. A symporter is what allows for the uptake of iodine, so it’s what allows when you’re eating from your diet and all that iodine from your food gets absorbed into your bloodstream, how does that iodine get into your thyroid gland? There’s a little mechanism called a symporter and that symporter is B2 driven. Vitamin B2 is very critical for it to work, so you need lots of B2. You need lots of vitamin C. The other nutrient that’s primarily necessary to form your T4, your thyroid hormone is vitamin B3, also sometimes referred to as NAD, nicotine adenine dinucleotide, NAD or vitamin B3. You need vitamin B2, you need vitamin B3, you need vitamin C, you need tyrosine and you need iodine to make T4. Those are the raw ingredients.
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Again, going back to that brick house analogy, if we’re going to build a brick house we’ve got have bricks. If were going to build thyroid hormone, we’ve got to have the ingredients to go into building that thyroid hormone. Once you have T4, now you have this brand new shiny Lamborghini, Ferrari, whatever you like. We have this brand new fast, fast super speedy car. We want to get in it and we want to drive it. Now imagine it’s sitting there in your driveway and you don’t have the car key and you don’t know how to hot wire it, so it’s just sitting there, so it’s like this beautiful, fast awesome machine that you can’t drive. That’s what T4 is. T4 is inactive thyroid hormone. It’s what your thyroid gland makes and now once you make that, it’s bound to different proteins. Albumin is a protein, there’s thyroid globulin.
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There are a number of different thyroid based protein in your blood that help carry your thyroid hormone, your T4 through your blood and some of it goes to your liver, some of it goes to your muscle and to your other tissues where it gets converted into T3. Think of T4 as, okay, you’ve got this face, super nice race car, but it has to be transported to the different tissues of your body before it can be turned on activated. If we’re using this car analogy, think of the proteins that carry your thyroid hormone as those big trucks on the highway that you see that are carrying like 20 cars at the same time. They’re carrying all those brand new cars to different dealerships all over the country. That’s what those proteins in your blood, like albumin, do, they carry the inactive thyroid hormone, which is T4 to the different tissues. A lot of it goes to the liver where now we get a key to start that engine.
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There’s this process called deiodinization, which is where we take that T4 with four iodine tires and we remove one of the tires. Now I know this doesn’t quite fit our car analogy when we think about it on the racetrack at this point, but in order to activate our thyroid hormone we’ve got to remove a molecule of iodine, and in order to do that, we’ve got to transport that T4 to the different tissues so that that can happen. A lot of that happens in the liver. That’s why people with liver problems can also have thyroid problems because their liver’s not very good at converting T4 to T3. That’s why a lot of people with chronic muscle inflammation don’t have a very effective thyroid function because muscle helps convert T4 to T3 as well. Those are two of the bigger tissues that will do a lot of that T4 to T3 conversion.
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What’s required to do that conversion is selenium. Now we’re getting to another nutrient that you’re going to need for that thyroid conversion. You need selenium to grab onto one of those iodine molecules and pull it off of your T4, so now what you’re left with is T3. T3 is what we consider to be the active form of the thyroid hormone. Now what T3 does, there is what’s called a nuclear receptor. What does that mean? That means think of a cell. You’ve got this spherical structure, and on the inside of the cell if you remember your biology, you have the nucleus, which is th center of the cell where the DNA is. It’s where the DNA information is stored. Well on the outside of the nucleus, so there’s a cell inside the nucleus, so on the outside of the nucleus, we have little receptors called nuclear receptors, hence the term nucleus.
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Nuclear receptors, these are like little antenna that stick off of the membrane around your DNA, and so thyroid hormone, T3 has to pull up to that like a lock and the key. That little receptor sticks out like a keyhole and then the T3 hormone goes into the keyhole and turns it and activates your genes, and that’s what ramps up your metabolism. How does that happen? In order for that to happen, I said first you’ve got to have the T4, you’ve got to covert it to T3. That’s like changing the key so it fits the right configurating of the keyhole, and now you need vitamin A and vitamin D to bind to your T3, and when they bind together they form like a super key that will unlock your DNA and ramp up your metabolism.
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Those are the fundamental nutrients that you need. I skipped one because you also need iron. Iron is important for T4 to T3 conversion as well. Then the last one that you need is at the very end, you need omega 3 fatty acids around the membrane in the cell for the hormone to be received appropriately. If we look at all those different nutrients that are necessary for the thyroid hormone, just from stimulation, from your gland, from your brain to your gland to the production of T4 to the conversion of T3, then to the activation of the DNA to ramp up our metabolic rate, you need starting from top, you need magnesium, you need protein, you need zinc, you need vitamin B12.
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We get to the thyroid, what do you need? You need iodine, you need tyrosine, which is an amino acid that’s primarily derived from protein. You need vitamin B2, you need vitamin C and you need vitamin B3. To take that T4 and to covert to T3, you need selenium and you need iron. Once you do that, once you have T3, for the T3 to be able to communicate to your DNA, you need vitamin A and you need vitamin D, and then for the final step, which is to turn on and ramp up the metabolism you need lots of omega 3. If you don’t have those nutrients, if you’re missing even one of them, you’re going to have some form of biochemical thyroid suppression meaning your thyroid pathways are not going to work efficiently.
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Now this looks different for different people because some people have severe selenium deficiency. This is a deficiency so bad they are what are called poor converters. They’re not converting hardly any of their T4 to T3, and so they’re taking thyroxine because their doctors prescribed them thyroxine, but they can’t convert. Thyroxine is T4, they can’t convert to T3, so it doesn’t do them any good. They feel worse being on the medication. They actually go backwards. They act as if they’re hyperthyroid and only it doesn’t solve their problem. It doesn’t ramp up their metabolism. It doesn’t create a solution for the issue at hand. There are some people that have, and I’ve seen this very rare times when we see people with severe B2 deficiencies and they have a genetic snip that makes them susceptible to B2 deficiency, and they just can’t get the iodine into the thyroid gland as easily or as effectively as other people.
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Doesn’t matter where you fall on that spectrum. My point in saying all of that isn’t so that you go home and memorize all that and regurgitate that back to your doctor. My point in saying that is that if you don’t have your doctor measuring for those nutrients, you’ll never know why your thyroid hormone isn’t functioning properly. You’ll never know why. It’s one thing to be given a medicine. Doctor can say, “Yes, your thyroid is low. Yes, you have thyroid antibiotics. Here’s the medicine. Don’t ask me anymore questions. Just take this medicine for the rest of your life. That’s normal.” That’s not normal. That’s crazy.
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Why is it broken? We know that it’s broken. When the thyroid breaks down, we can measure that it’s broken. We don’t want to know that it’s broken as much as we want to know why it’s broken. If you understand the basic nutritional biochemistry behind how your thyroid hormone is produced and metabolized, now you’re going to have a better, clearer understanding of what can be measured to assess why it’s broken. If you’ve got a vitamin B deficiency, that’s an easy fix. We can take vitamin C, we can eat foods that are richer in vitamin C. If you’ve got an iodine deficiency, same thing goes. Magnesium deficiency, same thing goes.
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You want to have a doctor who is looking at these parameters and saying, hypothetically, “Mrs. Jones, your thyroid is low, but I want to dig a little bit deeper. I want to find out why your thyroid is low. I don’t want to just tell you that it’s low and doom you to some kind of ill begotten fate where you’re completely powerless to do anything or change anything about it.” At the very minimum, if we’re just talking about nutrition and we’re just talking about vitamins, minerals, amino acids, those things that I just talked about have to be measured effectively to determine whether or not the individual has a deficiency that is contributing to a fundamental breakdown in their body’s ability or capacity to generate and metabolize thyroid hormone. That is the only way we’re going to find a solution. That is the only way we’re going to get to any kind of realistic end point.
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Otherwise, what’s going to happen is you’re going to chase the symptom with the drug for the rest of your life, and here’s the problem with that. I started this conversation with food and I said gluten was the number one food that we know can contribute to autoimmune thyroid disease. That didn’t change. If that doctor put you on thyroxine, which the most common is Levothyroxine or Thyroxal, which is the name of the medication, understand that first of all that medication has corn in it. If you’re gluten sensitive and corn is one of the things you’re reacting to, you’re actually recreating an autoimmune process every time you take the drug that you’ve been prescribed to fix the problem, you’re actually contributing to the problem. Even though it’s in micro dosing, you’re still contributing to the problem because it doesn’t take much grain to trigger an autoimmune response once it starts.
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It’s kind of like a fire, once the fire starts, it doesn’t take a whole lot of wood to keep the fire burning and going, it just requires a log now and again. It’s the same thing. Low doses of your medication, if it’s got grain based fillers, and I see this all the time with supplements too especially products like that have the rice flower, they’re using this rice flower as if it’s a healthy thing or a health filler to put into a supplement. Read your labels on your prescriptive medications. Read your labels on your supplements that you’re using. You’ve got to make sure that that’s not happening. Again, that fundamental understanding of the nutritional biochemistry of how your thyroid hormone is produced and regulated and mated and goes and runs your metabolism, it’s crucial for you to have an intelligent conversation with your doctor.
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Otherwise, what’s going to happen is you’re going to have an unintelligent conversation with your doctor. The odds are, and I don’t want to speak for all doctors because there’s some wonderful, wonderful doctors out there, but the odds are that if you’re going to just the standard doc, he has not studied the nutritional biochemistry of the thyroid, or if he has, he doesn’t understand it very well or he’ll just poo poo it, or she. What I mean by that is they’ll tell you nutrition has nothing to do with autoimmune thyroid disease, which is completely a ludicrous thought process because it has everything to do with autoimmune disease. Your immune system doesn’t just wake up one day and decide to attack you just because of your bad genes. Your immune system wakes up and decides to attack you because it’s confused, overwhelmed, undernourished and it’s created that paradigm based on your behavior.
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You’ve got to backtrack which behaviors that you have in your lifestyle, in your diet, what nutrition are you getting that are going to impact the potential possibility that your thyroid is either going to work or not work. Again, that’s fundamental basic biochemistry. That’s what I wanted to accomplish in this meeting today. I wanted to share that with you. Now I want to dive into some of the questions that are coming in, and I know we’re going to have more questions than what I’m going to have time to answer, but I’m going to answer as many as I can. Linda’s asking, “What about oats?” I think I mentioned earlier that all grain, you’ve got to get grain out. Now Linda, what I want you to do is I want you to go to GlutenFreeSociety.org and type in oats. You can actually do a search type.
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You can type in are oats safe on a gluten-free diet in your Google search engine or whatever search engine you use, and you’re going to find an article on Gluten Free Society written by yours truly, by me. It’s going to talk about the why oats are not a good idea in these types of situations. I want you to go read that because if you’re still eating oats and you’re still struggling with thyroid problems, it’s probably going to be one of the reasons why. Lisa is asking, “What kind of filling carbs can we eat on a gluten-free diet? Is wild rice gluten-free? I just ordered your book yesterday?” Lisa, thank you for ordering my book. Thank you for supporting No Grain No Pain and my mission. The answer to that question is yes, wild rice is okay. What is not okay is wild rice pilaf.
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Now pilaf is when they mix wild rice, which is a marsh grass with other forms of rice like Basmati rice or other kinds of actual rice. That’s no good, but just pure wild rice, the Canadian marsh grass or the Northern Minnesota marsh grass, that’s perfectly fine and it is gluten-free. It is hard to digest, so you need to make sure you cook it long enough. If you’re struggling with gut digestive issues, you don’t want to use a ton of wild rice in your diet because it’s hard to digest. Beyond that, it is absolutely gluten-free. It’s grain-free. The other part of that question is what types of filling carbs can we eat?
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You don’t need filling carbs. Most people don’t need filling foods. What do I mean by that? If you are not full, that’s what that means is that it can mean you’re undernourished in terms of you’re not getting enough calories, but for most people if you’re getting enough calories in the course of your day, it means your malnourished. When your body will not shut down your appetite, when your brain doesn’t perceive fullness or will not shut down your appetite, it’s because you’re malnourished. Your body’s still starving of certain vitamins, minerals or other nutrients. That would be my first thought. However, what kind of carbs are safe to eat? Look, all vegetables have carbs. When we talk about vegetables, lots of carbs in vegetables. If you’re looking for more of a starchy type of carb, the reality is sweet potato is acceptable. There are a number of different varieties. There’s a Japanese, their jewel, there’s garden sweet potatoes. Those are all possibilities.
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You can get carbohydrate from mushrooms. You can get carbohydrate from different types of fruits. Some are going to be sweeter than others and some people don’t tolerate as much fruit in the diet as others, but green bananas would be an example of a carbohydrate. It’s going to be lower in sugar. You can actually eat yellow bananas. There’s nothing wrong with that either. Again, it just depends on the individual. Fruits and vegetables are carbs. What most people, when they say, “What am I going to eat,” what they are generally used to eating as it relates to grain is they’re just generally used to eating every meal is something loaded with grain. Bagels for breakfast, toast for breakfast, cereal for breakfast, and then lunch is some kind of sandwich and then dinner some kind of pasta or noodle or whatever the case might be. There’s really no variety in that diet.
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It’s just pasta or just grain shaped in different forms. That’s not variety. You’ve got more than 300 different fruits and vegetables that are seasonally available depending on the time of the year that it is that you have access to, you just have to experiment with them. There’s lots of carbohydrate in those types of foods. Good question. Part of this is just retraining your brain as to how you think about eating. Don’t think about breakfast, lunch and dinner in a traditional sense where at breakfast I’m going to eat breakfast food, at lunch I’m going to eat lunch food because all that is a construct of marketing. All that you think about and all the patterns and the social things that you think about are constructs of marketing. What I mean is that cereal companies want to sell you cereal, so they create cartoon characters to entertain your children in the morning and they indoctrinate through marketing a concept that breakfast is cereal.
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The dairy industry does it too. You got to put milk in that cereal, right? Again, that’s just an example. That’s not to say that these companies are evil. The bottom line is that you are ultimately responsible for you. No matter what the marketing message that you’re receiving from what company that’s trying to sell you something that’s out there, you are the one who is ultimately responsible. I say that just the way I approach functional medicine I approach line. You need to be in the driver’s seat. You need to be in control. You need to be the one with a filter, filtering the information as it comes in and not just buying everything that you hear, see or read hook, line and sinker.
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I even say that about myself. You have a challenge or a question about something that I say, I’m always open to those. That’s why I have live Q&As every Friday because I want you to be able to ask questions and then you can come back next week and if you research the answer to that question and you had another question on top of it or you had another comment on top of that, this is our open forum to share those ideas and to be involved with each other.
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I got off on a tangent, but I like tangents. That’s how we learn and that’s how we move forward. Let’s see here. What are my recommendations for checking thyroid function? Lab tests. Let’s just go through them. You got to have your TSH checked. You got to have T3, both free T3 and bound T3. You’ve got to have T4 checked, both free and bound. You’ve got to have a compound called reverse T3. Reverse T3 is, let’s make this simple, it’s a mirror image of regular T3. Reverse T3 looks like T3, only a mirror image of it, but it doesn’t work. It’s like inactive thyroid hormone. You remember I said T4 is an inactive form of thyroid hormone? Well reverse T3 is also inactive, and we can measure it. Most doctors are not going to measure it.
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If your reverse T3, in my experience, is above 20, it’s too high. We want it under 20. If it’s about 20 generally what that means is you don’t have enough selenium to convert your T4 to your T3 or you could also be iron deficient. That brings us to the next test, which is iron. Measuring your iron, measuring your ferritin, measuring your total iron binding capacity. Those are all good tests to help evaluate the nutrition around the thyroid. Doing what’s called an iodine loading test, and iodine loading is where you take 50 milligrams of iodine and you collect urine for 24 hours, and then the lab can analyze how much of the 50 milligrams of the iodine that you took came out in your pee, in your urine over 24 hours. It’s called an iodine loading test.
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It’s a very, very nice way to assess iodine deficiency or insufficiency. Then I also like to look at something called halides. We didn’t talk about that today and halides are, they look and behave like iodine because they’re very similar. The different halides that we have, chloride or chlorine is a halide, bromine or bromide is a halide, and fluorine or fluoride is a halide. Fluoride, bromine and chloride are halides and some people have too much of those things meaning I’ve seen patients with fluoride toxicity. We have a neighborhood near my office which over fluorinates the water to the degree that some of the people that have come in to see me have blue rings around their bathtubs, the fluoride levels are so high. Fluoride interferes with iodine uptake into your thyroid gland.
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Think of halides as I don’t know if you come from a big family, if you do you’ll get the analogy, but sibling rivalry. Brothers and sisters competing against each other for mom and dad’s attention and affection. Think of halides as they all compete with the thyroid gland for attention and uptake. If you have too much chloride, then the chloride has a better chance of getting into your thyroid gland than the iodine. It suppresses your thyroid gland’s ability to uptake the iodine. Measuring for halide toxicity is important in evaluating why a thyroid could be broken, and that’s something that I very rarely see doctors do, and it’s unfortunate because it’s very, very critical to have that piece of information.
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Then of course the other thing is to measure all those other nutrients that I talked about, the magnesium, the zinc, the B12, the vitamin A, the vitamin D, the vitamin B2, the vitamin C, et cetera. Measuring those nutrients directly, again, so that you have an understanding of what a person’s missing. Those are the different labs that I would start with as a bear minimum, then I’d also measure to look to see whether a person had antibody production to their thyroid. There are a couple main tests that can be done to help to determine that. One is called TPO, thyroid peroxidase. The other is called antithyroid globulin antibodies or ATG antibodies. Those are two fundamental tests if you’re trying to rule in or out an autoimmune low thyroid process. That’s a great question. Those are some of the tests that I would start with.
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Depending on the patient as well, depending on whatever else that person presented with, maybe I suspected gluten sensitivity was an issue, so I would run a gluten sensitivity genetic test to determine whether or not gluten is wrong for them in their diet. That’s extremely important. Then food allergy testing is very important because some people are having a thyroid reaction because they have food reactivity. Another thing that we didn’t even talk about, wow we could really talk about thyroid for hours and hours, it’s one of my favorite topics, is yeast overgrowth. Now in particular it doesn’t have to be in the gut. A lot of people look for yeast overgrowth in the gut. Sometimes we’ll see yeast overgrowth in the sinus cavities, especially where I live outside of Houston where the mold and the moisture and the humidity levels are so high. It’s a lot easier for mold to basically proliferate, and then what it can do is it can get embedded into your sinuses and it can start to grow out of control.
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Yeast produce different kinds of toxins, byproduct toxins that the immune system will attack. Some of these toxins actually can look like your thyroid hormone. What happens initially is you get your immune system attacking these toxins and then over time it says, hey, the thyroid looks like these toxins we’re attacking, let’s attack the thyroid too, and then we end up with what’s called molecular mimicry induction of autoimmunity. That’s something else that if somebody’s coming in for a really thorough thyroid evaluation, we got to rule that piece out, among other infections because bacteria can do it too. It’s not just yeast, certain bacterial infections. For example, pseudomonas aeruginosa, some of the byproducts of that particular bacteria can look like your thyroid and it can create a molecular mimicry process. Hopefully that’s helpful for you.
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Let’s go to the next question then. Let’s see, thoughts on using typical iodine? It can work, it works great if you’ve got a cut or a scrape and you’re worried about an infection. Iodine is a great natural antibiotic. As far as using topical iodine, as the main form of iodine to get into your diet and nutritionally, no. I think you got to eat food and I think if the food’s not enough and you test it again and it didn’t bring your iodine levels up, I think you’ve got to supplement. Somebody mentioned Iodoral in the thread comment, and I would just warn I don’t know this to be true or not true, so I don’t want to misspeak but I know that I don’t use Iodoral. One of the ingredients in their tablets is called a pharmaceutical food glaze, which if I’m correct, I think it’s acorn derivative and one of the reasons why I wouldn’t use it. Again, I don’t know that with 100% certainty. I would just say if you’re using Iodoral, the brand, to call the company to find out whether or not that’s the case. That would be my advice.
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Lots of great comments on the thread here. Somebody’s asking about legumes, beans, peas and nuts. Are they good? Are they safe? In my experience, yes and no. Again, I like to test people versus guessing because we take out entire food groups, what can happen is a person can develop food phobia, and now they’ve got this whole psychological game going on in their head going on about being scared of eating. I like to look at it as test it. Sometimes what happens is, again, people with thyroid, there’s a co-condition with thyroid disease. A lot of people with thyroid disease have gut problems. It’s kind of a catch 22 because a low thyroid makes it harder for gut motility to work properly, so you can get constipated and backed up, and then when you’re constipated and backed up your food doesn’t digest properly and it starts to putrefy and rot in your gut. When that happens, all the chemical toxin byproduct of the putrification can alter your microbiome, which can lead to leaky gut, which can progressively accelerate low thyroid.
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That’s where it’s the catch 22. If your gut is in disarray and you’ve been diagnosed with a low thyroid and if you’re already having trouble with digestion and you’re eating foods that are notoriously hard to digest like the legume family, the legumes, beans and peas, those are all legumes, then it could prevent you from making a recovery. In my book, part of my advice in my book is to keep those out at least for a time, and when you reintroduce them, reintroduce them in a manner where you so can sprout them so that you wash away a lot of the difficult to digest lectins and other compounds within them and see how well you tolerate them. That’s the answer in a nutshell.
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What about drinking water kefir made of molasses, coconut sugar, other kind of organic raw sugar. I don’t like ferments made from sugar. If you feed a human sugar, a human’s going to be unhealthy. If you feed bacteria pure sugar without other food, the bacteria’s probably not going to be the healthiest either. I don’t like sugar based ferments. I like if we’re going to do fermented food, and I like fermented food, I recommend home brewing or home fermenting cabbage and cauliflower and carrots with a salt crock, meaning you salt ferment as opposed to sugar ferment and you can get great probiotic from those types of foods. A lot of these products, you buy them, like these kefir drinks and another one is the kombucha teas and things. Me, I see patients stay sick using those all the time.
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As a matter of fact, I just had a conversation with a patient last week about they were drinking these waters very consistently and they weren’t able to beat their yeast overgrowth. Part of the reason why is that they were drinking these drinks. I’ve seen this happen time and time again in the clinic is that in order to beat those types of problems, you can’t use sugar fermented foods or beverages. I just don’t recommend it. Some of you may have experiences that contradict what I’m saying, but again, the questions coming up, and this is my experience with it and I want to share that with you. Good question nonetheless.
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Yes, I did say that blue rings around the bathroom can mean too much fluoride in the water. If your water looks blue, you can get a home fluoride text kit. It’s a real easy thing to do. Test the fluoride in your water. If you find it’s coming back super high, consider filtering. Don’t consider filtering, do filter.
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Teresa is asking, “How do I treat Hashimoto’s?” Well Teresa, I’m not a medical doctor, I don’t treat Hashimoto’s. I treat the patient and address the patient. I don’t treat disease. I don’t cure disease. I don’t diagnose disease. I address the underlying origin of why it can exist and the body takes care of itself. I do that and if you want to read more about how I do that, you go to drpeterosborne.com and there’s a button at the top in gray, it says Origins Healthcare. That’s my clinic. Click on that and you’ll learn all about how I approach helping people get better.
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Let’s see here. Shower filters to remove chlorine. I love them. I think you should have one. If you don’t, get one. Chlorine and chloramines in the water, again, those are halides that can interfere with thyroid function. We are way overexposed to chlorines and bromines and fluorides in our life today. The fluoride is in the toothpaste, it’s in the dental chair, it’s in the mouth wash. You get bromine in flame retardant materials. Your curtains at home, your carpet at home, your cash is probably sprayed in a bromine material because it’s there. Your mattress, it’s there to prevent fires. It’s a flame retardant. You also find bromine in a lot of foods. Bromine is used basically as an antiseptic for water cleaning. You get exposure through water or through drinking. If you’re not filtering those things out, you’re getting exposure to them. That’s a big part of the problem.
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This is a very specific question from Vincent. If TSH T4, T3, reverse T3 and others are very good but the antithyroid peroxidase antibody is creeping up? Well the biggest concern is what are you eating or what are you being exposed to that’s triggering or allowing the perpetuation or an autoimmune response. Now it’s hard to answer that question Vincent because I don’t have a history on you, and I don’t know what was your past TPO level? If somebody’s been tracking that, for example if in the past it was 20 and now it’s 20, normal TPO they really want it at zero but under nine is accepted on most labs as normal. In your case, has somebody been tracking it? Is it creeping up? If so, are you feeling worse? Are you getting exposed to some things that are triggering autoimmune processes?
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That would be my concern. Going back to if you watch what I talked about last week, which was in part I talked about the four different fundamental causes of autoimmune disease. Looking at those four fundamental causes, vitamin deficiency, food allergy or food exposures, the wrong food exposures, infectious microorganism exposures, and then chemical exposures, those are the four biggest known triggering factors for autoimmune disease that you have the capacity to measure objectively and control. Then some would add a fifth to that list, which is emotional causation meaning being in a bad emotional or spiritual environment. Hard to answer that question without knowing more about you, but that’s where I would start.
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Let’s see here. I love all the commentary and the way you guys are talking with each other and helping each other out. That’s one of the big reasons why I like doing this is that you can all meet each other and also help each other as well. Catfish caught in the Mississippi River, safe to eat? Depends on what area of the Mississippi River. I’ve not seen a chemical composition test on the water from the Mississippi River. However, for example, the Potomac River, I would not eat a fish that came out of the Potomac River because it has so much atrazine that we’re getting animal sex changes from the estrogenic compound atrazine which is a common herbicide used by farmers.
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Typically if I’m going to eat fish personally, this is me personally, I’m going to eat wild caught fish because the ocean’s a much bigger body of water and even if there is contamination in it, it’s much more filtered down and much more diluted than what you might find in a river or a lake.
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Now I’m going to get to some of these emailed questions. Let’s go through some of these before we wrap it up. Some people claim low carb diets can affect the thyroid negatively. I found my thyroid went hypo when I cut carbs and focused on protein and vegetables with some fat, but was also using some protein powders and protein bars. Look, I don’t know what the question is in that. It varied out. I would say this, if you cut carbs out of your diet and you felt more fatigued, it might not have had anything at all to do with your thyroid. It could have very well been that you were hitting low blood sugar. A quick and easy way to decipher that is to get a blood sugar monitor and check your fasting blood sugar, check your first early morning blood sugars when you wake up and check your two hour and four hour postprandial blood sugars for a few weeks and just see what’s happening with your blood sugar.
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If it’s dropping dramatically, if your sugars are dropping under 70, under 60, then it’s very possible that you’re just not getting enough carbohydrate in your diet to sustain your blood sugar levels and that’s a possibility. Also, you mentioned that you were on lower fat, and that is very common. Fat helps us to produce ATP in energy which can actually have a blood sugar stabilizing effect. It could have been that your fat was too low as well.
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I think I already answered that question. A lot of these questions I think I already answered, but I’m just double checking here. This is a great question. “I’ve been on [inaudible 01:02:27] thyroid for several years and non optimal thyroid values and my numbers have been a bit off lately. I have repeat antibodies testing pending negative three years ago, and a thyroid ultrasound scheduled. I want to understand how my diet may be affecting this and my hair. Can female pattern hair thinning and breakage, mostly around the front of the face and forehead be caused by gluten in the diet whether or not I have thyroid antibodies?” Absolutely, yes. Absolutely.
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One of the reasons why, gluten exposure, it’s going to stress the immune system. Your immune system, if it perceives gluten as the enemy, so in essence if you have gluten sensitive genes your immune system will perceive gluten as your enemy, not your friend. Instead of taking the proteins and taking them and being nourished by them, you’re actually going to create an immune response against them and that requires protein. Your body is using and burning through its protein stores to fuel the immune attack against the food that you’re eating that’s supposed to be nourishing you. Your hair is protein. Your hair is a form of collagen and protein, and it is an excretion material, meaning it is not a priority. Your body does not prioritize hair growth over immune system function.
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That’s why people with chronic immune diseases tend to start getting thinning of their hair. Their body is robbing their muscle storage to fuel the battle, and protein going toward hair growth becomes a non-priority by the body. The body redirects the protein towards the necessary resource of immune system function and away from the hair growth component. To answer your question, yeah, hair growth can definitely be affected by gluten in the diet if you’re gluten sensitive. It can also be affected by gluten in the diet if it has nothing to do with gluten. If you’re eating grain that’s loaded with pesticides or mold toxins or another of other compounds that are toxic in grain in general that have nothing to do with gluten. If you read No Grain No Pain, you really get the large synopsis of all of that, because the book is not another book about going gluten-free.
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I promise you, the book is about why grain is not a healthy food beyond gluten. Many of you don’t understand that, and I highly, highly recommend that you learn about that because a lot of you, and I say a lot of you, this is not blaming any one particular person on this podcast or on this episode today, but probably a lot of you are still eating gluten-free products that are predominantly made of different flowers like sorghum or rice or corn. You’re still struggling. Look, I can’t tell you how many times I see people who are struggling. When they finally get that piece, when they finally make that connection, how their struggles start to dissipate and their health starts to turn around and make a turn. That’s why you want to understand that.
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Looks like I answered all the questions. Let’s see, I think I might have one more here. Can years of daily fasting due to me not liking to cook or eat anymore hurt my thyroid and prevent it from reversing my Hashimoto’s? Yeah, if you’re malnourished. You can overdo fasting. A lot of people do fasting. Look, no diet change is supposed to be … Well let me not say it that way. If you’re doing 14 to 16 hour fasting every day and you’ve been doing that for years, and in the window when you are doing your eating, that eight hour window where you’re eating, if you’re not getting enough calories, you’re still just as malnourished. Fasting has its benefits but if you’re not getting enough nutrition, you’re not getting enough nutrition. Just what we talked about earlier, your thyroid needs nutrition to work. Hopefully that answers your question.
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Can a paleo diet prevent reversal of Hashimoto’s? I wouldn’t say that a paleo diet prevents reversal or helps the reversal of Hashimoto’s if the diet isn’t right for you. There are different versions of the paleo diet. Some people go paleo, and all they do is eat meat and bacon and that’s not necessarily healthy. Some people go paleo and they eat a bunch of paleo treats, which isn’t really paleo. Some people define paleo incorrectly and some people follow what’s called a primal diet and they assume that it’s a paleo diet and it’s not. They’re different things. A true paleo diet is grain, dairy, sugar and legume free, no exceptions and that included chocolate, that includes coffee. Those are legumes. You see a lot of paleo recipes, chocolate this or coffee encrusted this. That’s not true paleo.
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Again, going back to the definition of what diet that you actually are following, some diets, they become bastardized. They become manipulated and warped when mainstream marketers get a hold of them and are trying to serve their own pocketbooks by delivering some type of product into the hands of other people that don’t really fit the core concept of what it’s supposed to fit. The paleo, look at all the different paleo cookbooks. My wife, she cooks all the time and orders tons of different books and a lot of them I don’t even talk about and the ones that are great I do. The ones that aren’t great, I don’t even talk about because I’ll order a paleo cookbook and I expect that the author of a paleo cookbook understand what the definition of paleo actually is, but what we find in probably 90% of the cases where we’re ordering a paleo cookbook, it isn’t paleo at all. They don’t even understand what paleo is.
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Again, part of that goes just back to the definition of how you’re defining it. If you really want to truly define paleo, you have to read the work of Dr. Loren Cordain because he’s the doctor, the PhD researcher who actually created the paleo diet and defined what it is. Again, that diet got popular and it spread into different peoples hands and it got warped and manipulated and construed, and most people don’t know that. Anyway, I know I got another tangent.
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I’m going to wrap it up because we’re over. We went late today. Remember this folks. If you want to get in on the competition on the contest to pick Dr. Osborne’s brain contest, which is we’re giving away $500 worth of stuff, make sure you share this video. Make sure that you share it, that you like, that you get in the front of other people and the fan groups and pages that you’re a part of on Facebook because we’re going to be giving away those big three prizes next week during the live cast, and the ones who shared and got the most likes and the most comments from their sharing are the ones who we’re going to pick as winners.
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Once you’ve done that, once you’ve shared, you’ve got a whole week to share and promote and get this thing out there and get it into as many peoples hands as you can to help other people, send us the screenshot of that interaction and we’re going to pick the winners based on who drove the most people to this valuable, valuable knowledgeable information to help their thyroids recover naturally.
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We will see you next week on Pick Dr. Osborne’s Brain. Hopefully you have a wonderful weekend. Take care, and we’ll see you next time.
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