Transcription
Hey everyone, welcome to the Dr. Josh Axe show, where each and every week, I help you grow Body, Mind, and Spirit by covering principles and the science behind how to take your life to the next level.
On today's episode, I'll be covering the top five causes of autoimmune thyroid conditions, including Hashimoto's thyroiditis. And there are five unexpected triggers behind your thyroid autoimmunity that you have to know about if you're going to heal your thyroid and help it function at the highest level possible.
I want to start off with a couple of examples of patients and a family member that I helped overcome their thyroid issues. The first was a patient, Janet, and she had come into to me, and she had been to 15 other doctors. She had been to conventional doctors, she had been to uh natural practitioners, including functional medicine doctors, and she still was struggling with major autoimmune issues, major thyroid issues, and had been diagnosed with Hashimoto's thyroiditis.
Well, after a short time in my office, one of the things I came to discover is that basically, what everybody was trying to do is treat it with just a few pills. She went into her conventional doctor, and they said, "You've got to be on this immunosuppressant, and you need to be on this thyroid drug," and that's all they put on her. They never told her to change her diet, improve her lifestyle, or anything. And very similar thing, even with the functional medicine doctor. Now, they said, "You should go gluten and dairy-free." They recommended her take a few vitamins and supplements, but that was really it as well.
And the thing you need to have know about Hashimoto's thyroiditis or autoimmune thyroid conditions is that if you are going to heal them, you've got to help heal the body and and the thyroid at the cellular level. And so, we need to really think about how do we reverse aging of the thyroid? How do we get it functioning at the highest level possible? And I'll get into this more at the end of the video, but it's really important that you improve cellular energy, you reduce toxicity, and that you give it the right building blocks so it can start to repair and regenerate itself. I call it thyroid regeneration, and that's what we need to be able to do in order to reverse thyroid autoimmune disease. And this is what we did with Janet. So, we took care of all those three areas. We did specific herbs and supplements, we worked on her sleep, we worked on her stress.
Imagine your body as a battery, right? Like imagine the battery on your phone, and let's say you have five bars of battery. Well, what if you only have two bars, or 40%? Well, now your your cells can't communicate, they can't function properly. It affects something called your mitochondria in your cell, to where your cells start becoming diseased and weak. They're not strong enough to heal and transform. And so, that's the issue with a lot of people with Hashimoto's thyroiditis is that your body does not have enough energy or battery to heal those cells. The mitochondria are too weak, they're not enough healthy mitochondria, so you're not able to heal.
That's one cause. The other issue is related to toxicity. It could be an issue around your exposure to aluminum or mercury. Could be environmental pollutants. It could be Roundup. It could be a chemical in the food supply that affects it, along with negative emotions. And then the last thing is your thyroid needs the right building blocks. It needs to have certain B vitamins and minerals and peptides in order to heal.
Another person who I helped, he along with Janet, was my own brother. In fact, my own brother then went to become a doctor of functional medicine himself. He was diagnosed with Hashimoto's thyroiditis, and after going through an entire protocol that was very similar to what I talked about, a regenerative medicine, a regenerative thyroid protocol, he was able to reverse his Hashimoto's thyroiditis, and now he's helping people do something similar.
But I want to go through some mind-blowing research here before I go into the five things that are probably going to surprise most people that are causing autoimmune thyroid conditions. The first is, approximately 13.3% of the US population will develop a thyroid condition in their lifetime. Now, that number is much higher for women, about 25% of women will develop a thyroid condition. So, think about that, every one in four women have or going to have a thyroid condition, whether that be hypothyroidism, Hashimoto's thyroiditis, Graves' disease, or another similar thyroid condition. One in every four women. That's an incredibly high number.
An estimated at least 20 million Americans have some form of thyroid disease. And let me say, those numbers might, after, might actually be higher. A lot of people that you know, looking at their their baseline numbers, they might be on the border, so they're not in that 20 million. But like, for instance, that 25% of women, there might be another 20% of women that have a thyroid condition. And here's the crazy stat, the the one that's the most surprising: up to 60% of those people with thyroid disease are unaware they have the condition, according to the latest medical research. Isn't that crazy? So, more than half of people that have a thyroid issue, they they don't realize they have the issue.
And if you're a person who has dealt with fatigue for more than a year, it's very likely you could have a thyroid issue. If your hair at some point just got thinner over the course of a few years, and your hair is not as thick as it used to be, that's a big warning sign. If if you get cold or hot and cold constantly back and forth, but if you get cold extremities, you notice your hands get cold, feet get cold, that's a warning sign of an issue like hypothyroidism. And then also for Hashimoto's, if you have any sort of gut or digestive issues, uh, that can be a warning sign. I mean, there are many, many more beyond that, but just general weakness or just not feeling a sense of energy, and you are fatigued, those those are really the biggest signs of a thyroid condition.
Now, I want to walk you through the the five causes that are typically unknown by most people of what's causing their autoimmune thyroid condition or Hashimoto's. And the first is viral infections, such as COVID, Epstein-Barr, CMV, or even Lyme disease or mold. But having an infection of some sort could be viral, could be other, but an infection that starts to affect the gut, the thymus, or the thyroid. All infections in any of those areas can actually cause Hashimoto's thyroiditis or thyroid disease.
And I want to go through a study here. And here's what the study starts off saying: It says, "For a long time, viruses have been shown to modify the clinical picture of several autoimmune diseases. In fact, viruses or infections are are one of the leading causes of people developing certain types of autoimmune diseases, including type 1 diabetes, uh, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Sjogren's disease, um, celiac disease, multiple sclerosis, and also, I believe here, included in this list is Hashimoto's thyroiditis." So, autoimmune diseases are often times triggered because there's an infection that's living in an area of the body, typically an organ, and it's it's causing these issues.
Now, here's the next study. This is a different study, and they said, "Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine have discovered that viral infections can set a destructive process in motion, culminating in autoimmunity long after the infection is sometimes even resolved or the symptoms go away." So, for instance, here's an example: You got COVID, or you got Epstein-Barr, or CMV, or HPV, some sort of virus, and and you you you dealt with it for a while, you overcame generally most of the symptoms, but afterwards, you you just, you're not the same. Your energy is not the same. You have some sort of issue. This happens constantly.
They also say in the study that the researchers showed that certain viruses infect the thymus gland. So, this is another gland in your body, along with a thyroid gland, and basically, what happens is it can uh damage the thymus or other organ and basically cause issues with organ communication and cellular communication. So, here's what's happening: Your body now, your cells, between your thymus and your thyroid, your thymus is really connected to your immune system, so your thymus and your gut. So, so your the the cells that are on your gut lining are two chief areas of your immune system. And what happens is these organs and cells in your thyroid, your thymus, and your gut, they they're not communicating properly after the virus. The virus starts uh blocking off the signal.
Imagine that you're trying to drive somewhere, and your cell healing cells, like stem cells, trying to get to an area for it to heal and function properly and communicate. Well, imagine all of the cell towers go down, and now all these cells are like on the phone, they're trying to communicate back and forth, but they can't hear each other. So, they just get lost or they stop doing what they're supposed to be doing because they can't communicate properly. This is what's happening in your body often times when you have a thyroid autoimmune disease. It's throwing off cellular communication in between these organ systems.
And one of the things you want to do in order often times to heal your thyroid condition is you want to start to eliminate these viruses and these different types of infections that can lead that that that can cause this issue in your body. By the way, there there is a a group of superfoods or foods that are very, very effective at actually helping with cellular communication, and its medicinal mushrooms like reishi, cordyceps, turkey tail is probably the best for this, that can also target viral infections. But mushrooms can actually often times have doing higher doses of a lot of these mushrooms. Again, reishi, cordyceps, turkey tail, probably being the best. Shiitake can also be good, but these have really powerful antiviral infections, especially turkey tail. And then doing things to root out these viruses out of your body. So, that's cause number one that surprises most people what's causing Hashimoto's thyroiditis are chronic infections like viral infections. Um, and I've seen this with COVID a lot, even the past couple of years, more people getting these conditions because COVID is still in their bloodstream. COVID often times lives in the bloodstream, but can also affect the thymus gland, creating that cellular communication issue.
The second biggest cause is unhealthy emotional stress. Three primary emotions: fear, grief, and worry. We know today, and by the way, I experienced this when I ran my functional medicine practice and worked with patients, that when somebody has uh a bout of fear, or a lot of worry, or emotional stress with a relationship, when I took care of patients with autoimmune disease, let's say inflammatory bowel disease, what would affect their body just as much as eating something they were sensitive to, like dairy uh or gluten, that would wreck their system. Well, I I noticed when they had a lot of worry or stress in their life, it affected their digestive system in the exact same way. And 80% of doctor visits today are due to stress or a stress-related component causing their disease. So, almost every disease and health problem you can imagine, there is an emotional stress component. And the three primary for the thyroid are fear, grief, and worry.
Now, fear could be fear of disappointing others. If you're a people-pleaser and you don't want to let people down all the time, and you feel really bad about it, that can cause thyroid issues. It will directly affect the adrenal glands, and then that will affect the thyroid because your body starts producing all of these stress hormones, which then affects the thyroid and and and T levels, T3 and T4.
The next one is grief. If you've had something traumatic happen to you in your life, could be physical abuse, could be emotional abuse, could be something in the past still bothers you today. If you're living in the past, somehow that is tied to autoimmune disease, and then that can affect the thyroid if you have grief, depression, worry from the past. So, you need to work on letting go of those things in the past. Unforgiveness is a big one as well.
And the other one is worry. Worry will also directly affect the thyroid. If you're assessing and overthinking about things constantly and worrying, that causes the thyroid to function poorly. And so, dealing with the emotional stress, the way you want to do this is you want to go back and look at when did it start? When did I when did I start having fear, like like like needing to please people all the time, or the fear of disappointing others, my spouse, other people? And then you need to go and overcome the limiting beliefs around that and then foster that a positive emotion in place of that. If you have a lot of fear, well, start building your faith and building hope, hope in the future. If you have a lot of grief, well, let go of those things in the past, forgive, and focus on a hopeful future. If you've got a lot of worry, realize these things are out of your control, give it to God. All of those things will help you overcome autoimmune disease and thyroid conditions.
The third thing that surprises some people when it comes to the root cause of their autoimmune illness of the thyroid is bacterial overgrowth, such as H. pylori, can Candida, which also caused leaky gut, and SIBO, known as small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. There was a clinical study on a large group of people that found that H. pylori, that type of overgrowth in the small intestine, is linked to autoimmune disease and Hashimoto's thyroiditis. And so, there's clinical studies proving if you've got too much bad bacteria in your gut and not enough good bacteria, that will cause autoimmune disease and hypothyroidism.
And so, what you want to be able to do in this case is you want to, it's a very specific type of diet you want to follow. You want to be able to eliminate the bad, you want to be able to get more protein, more vegetables, more of certain types of fats, like extra virgin olive oil. And then you want to make sure you're consuming a specific type of probiotic called soil-based organisms, and those act like a bulldozer to start to clear out H. pylori and Candida. And then what can happen is then your body can repopulate good bacteria. There's also a great group of um of beneficial compounds called postbiotics. And so, you really want to take something that has both those probiotics and postbiotics. One of the best postbiotics is Triphala. It's an herbal, it's a blend of berries used in Ayurvedic medicine that can really help start to improve that health of your gut microbiome and reverse autoimmune disease.
And I do want to say this: Remember, Hashimoto's thyroiditis can be reversed. Autoimmune disease of the thyroid can be reversed. And I know this because my own brother reversed his, my sister reversed hers, and I helped thousands of patients reverse thyroid issues, autoimmune disease, and other conditions over the years. And so, I've seen it, and I know it. And so, just remember that.
The next thing, number four, when it comes to surprising things causing thyroid issues, specifically autoimmune thyroid issues, is food sensitivities. Often times, you're eating food, food that, and and listen, a lot of these things contribute to H. pylori and Candida. A lot of these things contribute to creating the type of environment that infections such as viruses, bad bacteria, Lyme, fungal, fungus, mold like to live in. Very damp, moist environments, which certain foods create that type of environment of damp dampness where there's a lot of mucus in the area. Viruses like those environments. The foods that most do that are going to be dairy, gluten, bananas as a fruit tend to cause some of those issues. Could also be uh foods that are high in chemicals, like Roundup. If you know the Dirty Dozen, meat that's non-organic that has all of the GMO residue and antibiotics in it. And so, you got to be very careful though with with with certain grains that have gluten and dairy. Those are the biggest culprits. Peanuts tend to be very high on the list.
But this is where you may consider also sometimes getting testing, or just listening to your body. If after you eat, if your nose gets runny, you have a skin issue, or your joints hurt, if you have any reaction where you don't feel as well afterwards, then you know that that's doing something within your system that's creating inflammation, which will then make autoimmune autoimmune disease worse. There's a very close connection between autoimmunity and inflammation. When your body is having a strong autoimmune reaction, it's reacting with inflammation, and that inflammation causes inflammaging, greater aging of the organ. And this is why you want to reverse this condition and address it as soon as possible if you have autoimmune disease, because the more it goes along, the older it makes your organs in a way, because you're damaging those cells over and over again.
If you have Hashimoto's thyroiditis and you say, you know what, I'll do it tomorrow, or a few years, or I can live with this versus actually taking care of it, that thyroid keeps aging because it keeps being attacked and damaged over time. And so, you want to deal with these issues as quickly as possible. But again, food sensitivities, typically the safest foods are meat, vegetables, some fruit, some uh rice, sweet potato tend to be very easy to digest. But you could always get a food sensitivity test, but be aware and listen to your body. Your joints hurt? Does your nose run? Does it do anything to your skin? Do you have any sort of reaction to any food? If so, stop eating that food.
The fifth thing that may be surprising for some people when it comes to what's actually causing their autoimmune thyroid condition, it is nutritional deficiencies. Um, there are studies showing that deficiencies in methylated B vitamins, glutathione, zinc, vitamin D, and selenium may all contribute to thyroid conditions.
And I want to go through a few examples here in studies. The first one is on B vitamins. There is a 2014 study including three patients who were on thyroid hormone replacement treatment for Hashimoto's thyroiditis who suffered from fatigue. The patients all had free thiamine blood test, so if that's vitamin B1, we're looking at vitamin B1 right now, measured before and after receiving high doses of thiamine, that was about 600 milligrams daily orally or 1,000 milligrams in an IV. All of the patients experienced partial or complete regression of fatigue within a few hours or days of starting using vitamin B1. This led the researchers to conclude that giving large quantities of thiamine restores thiamine uh dependent processes and relieves fatigue. So, we see this. If somebody has a lot of fatigue due to hypothyroidism, then doing B vitamins, B1 is the clinical study I'm just going over, but there are other studies on vitamin B12 as well, along with other B vitamins. And the best sources for B vitamins are going to be organ meats like liver. You can actually take organ meats in a tablet form and get them that way so you don't have to taste them, or you can make liver, but that's the best way to get methylated vitamins. And the second best way is going to be take a a methylated B vitamin supplement, but that's definitely going to help with some of those symptoms and helping start to reverse uh some of those symptoms related to autoimmune diseases. Getting B vitamins, again, organ meats, the best. Red meat, like grass-fed beef, is great as well, along with taking the supplements.
The next one is vitamin D. Uh, vitamin D deficiency is incredibly common in the entire population, but it's even more so in Hashimoto's uh patients. So, if you have Hashimoto's or a thyroid issue, you you have an even greater chance of having a thyroid deficiency, according to the studies. You can easily do a test for a vitamin D deficiency. A lab test will do it. You definitely want to be over that 50 mark or so. If you're below 30, there's that's a major deficiency. When we were looking at vitamin D testing, once you find out if you are deficient, you can you can take a vitamin D3 supplement and rather quickly increase your vitamin D levels and get some relief and see some improvement. Vitamin D is really important as we're talking about autoimmune disease, and I would typically recommend 5,000 IUs twice daily when we're talking about supplementation. And again, vitamin D is very important because it really helps normalize the functioning of your entire immune system.
The next nutrient that's really critical for autoimmune thyroid issues is zinc. Zinc plays a critical role in the thyroid and immune function together. And zinc is is the mineral responsible for repair. It's known as the immune system mineral. It's also known as the body's repair mineral. If your body is not healing and repairing well, it's not going to be healthy. This is where cellular regeneration comes in. You need zinc for the organ to heal. So, you might even remove the toxins from the diet, that's one of the three main root causes. You may have enough cellular energy, but if you don't have zinc, your body is missing a key component to regenerate. So, you can also test for zinc, but it's hard for that to be accurate. You're better just taking a zinc supplement, typically about 30 mg a day, in order to start getting those zinc levels back up. By the way, according to one clinical study, low zinc can impair immune function, as well as impair T3 uh T4 to T3 conversion. So, there are studies showing that zinc impairs immune function and can be related to autoimmune disease.
The next nutrient that's critical is selenium. Selenium plays an important role in reducing thyroid gland inflammation. In fact, low selenium may allow for the thyroid gland inflammation to occur, which sets your body up for developing thyroid autoimmunity in the first place. Some studies have shown that taking selenium by itself can even reduce thyroid antibodies. So, taking selenium is an easy way that I have every patient do to help in reversing and healing Hashimoto's thyroiditis.
And I want to mention here another key nutrient, glutathione. You know, glutathione is really an extension of selenium because your body cannot produce glutathione if your selenium levels are low. So, sometimes just using selenium will fix the glutathione issue. But glutathione can help reduce thyroid gland inflammation and be good in addition to that in a supplement.
And so, last few things I want to say. Those are the five main causes of thyroid autoimmunity. And and here's the thing I mentioned at the beginning: The secret to healing your thyroid and reversing autoimmune disease is found in cellular regeneration. This is the future of medicine. This is the cutting-edge work that I'm working on with patients and helping them heal and reverse conditions, even when they've been to other doctors and tried numerous things. This is what works. And the reason is, it addresses the three main causes of hypothyroid issues and Hashimoto's thyroiditis. It helps improve cellular energy. Remember, if the battery of your cells, if your mitochondria are not working at the highest level possible, then then you don't have enough energy to cleanse the cell and rebuild the cell in order for it to regenerate. So, we need to improve cellular energy via building mitochondria, and there are very, very specific ways to do that.
Um, another thing is, you, number step number two, is you need to clear out the bad. You need to get rid of the poison and the toxins out of the cell. Could be heavy metals, could be chemicals, it could be, remember, negative emotions even contribute in a way to this. But we need to start healing the cell by getting rid of the bad things that are toxic to it. And three, it needs the right building blocks. Many of those nutrients we just mentioned, there's a few more, but those are critical for regeneration and rebuilding of the cell. And when you can do those things, when you get cellular energy up, when you get cellular detoxification up, and cellular building blocks, well, now your cells can regenerate completely. We can start to reverse autoimmune disease, uh, as well.
You know, one of the things that I hear sometimes uh from people before I share all of this is sometimes people will say, um, you know what, this might be too good to be true, or or my doctor told me I'd have to live with this condition the rest of my life, or people have a lot of limiting beliefs, such as, "I'm going to have to be stuck with this genetic issue," and people believe it's genetic and they have to live with it the rest of their life. And the reality is, that's not true. That's a lie that many of us have started to believe. And I can tell you from working with thousands of patients, you can reverse this. You can see great improvements in your thyroid health as well.
I want to mention as well, often times the reason why people believe this is they go to a doctor, even a natural doctor, and maybe they get treated with something like detoxification, and maybe they see a 25% improvement, but never a complete improvement. That's because they're only doing one of those three critical steps in order to heal.
Hey everyone, thanks so much for listening to the Dr. Josh Axe show, where each and every week, I cover how to grow Body, Mind, and Spirit with the latest science and principles to take your life to the highest level possible. Hey, don't forget to subscribe, you know, and share this. You know, I've been on a mission to help people heal and transform their life. And so, if you believe that this podcast episode could help somebody, think, do you know somebody with a thyroid issue? There are so many people suffering, and they don't know it. Hey, be on mission with me. Share this with them. And don't forget to subscribe. Hey, thanks so much, and I can't wait to see you on the next episode.