Transcription
Hello people and welcome, welcome to this talk on thyroid. And I have a bunch of stuff to go over, and then we will have time for questions at the end. If you have questions, this is the beginning of our free series of health chats, symptoms and solutions, sorting out for you guys. And I want to keep it short. We want to look at all the really important stuff so you have a good understanding about why this is important and how this is important.
So from the biggest picture viewpoint, to start with, we want to think about mechanisms and you really, you know, embracing and understanding how your body works from a mechanistic standpoint. And I know that sounds a little, what is the word, reductionist, or it sounds a little like scientific and technical. But, you know, from a patient perspective, you want to know, not as much as your doctor, that would be inappropriate, but you want to know enough about your health that you can make sensible decisions about the kind of functional medicine practitioners that you want to work with. You know, being able to evaluate, you know, what kind of programs you're put on and what kind of supplements you're recommended to take. And I think the patient experience can be really challenging when you don't know anything about how your body works because you have to totally trust this other person. And you really, in a perfect world, want it to be a more collaborative relationship.
Now, I don't think it's productive to boss your doctor around or tell your doctor what to do. But you should be able to go, "Oh yeah, you know, that really makes sense that my tyrosine is low. I'm going to enthusiastically embrace taking tyrosine to get my thyroid better, right?" So you need to know enough about what your practitioner is recommending that you can understand why it's important, um, and have a collaborative relationship. Meaning that not questioning what you're being instructed to do, but sort of embracing it and understanding it. Because functional medicine is predicated on this idea of lifestyle change. And 80% of all the success in all the programs that we do is based on you changing your diet and exercise, you starting to meditate, he's trying to really explore your emotional and spiritual world, you're starting to have really loving relationships with the people around you, he's trying to just, you know, feel better and be a better person in every way that you can, sleeping more and working less. And, you know, just being a, you know, all the lifestyle things that really make us healthy. And that understanding the mechanisms helps people understand why the lifestyle changes are so important and why the labs are so important and how all this, you know, comes together and can work.
And so that's been my general experience. And that if you're, if the patient is totally checked out and it's just saying, you know, "Please just give me, um, you know, a prescription for something, and I'm going to eat bad food and take my private sect and hope my heartburn goes away, or I'm going to just take my thyroid medication and keep my fingers crossed so that's enough to solve everything." Then that's not a collaborative relationship, you know, it's really not.
And I think, um, well, I think a lot about cars because I really like cars. So this may seem a little strange, but when I want to relax at night or I've been, you know, stressed out because I just worked all day with a bunch of really sick people, I read about and look at cars. I've watched car documentaries and stuff. But anyways, they're the arguably the best car racer ever in the history of Formula One is this man named Senna. And he's, um, from South America. He's very, very spiritual, very spiritual guy. And he really understood how the Formula One cars worked. So he could take a test lab, go back to the mechanics and say, "Look, that tire needs to be one millimeter pointing in this direction, and the brakes need to be just a little bit like this." He understood in detail, better than any of his mechanics did, exactly how the car worked. So when he drove it, he could drive it incredibly fast, right at the limit before it would fail, right? And so I think that's the kind of thinking.
When you're learning about mechanisms, like we're about to get into, why do you need to know all this stuff? Because if you really understand the mechanisms and the dynamics of how your body works, then you'll be better at driving it, right? You'll be better at using it and getting through this life, this physical life, you know, hopefully relatively unscathed.
So let's jump in and look at thyroid and start to talk about some of this stuff. If you're new to Chaos Institute and Kalish Wellness, this is me. I've been doing, I've been in practice for 28 years, which is a ridiculous thing to say because it's just flown by. I've been doing telehealth, telemedicine for about 15, 16 years. So I work with patients all over the world. Um, I've also, in the last few years, attained the lead faculty position at the Institute for Functional Medicine. So I'm very involved in training of physicians right now. I've done research with the Mayo Clinic on the actual methods that I use in my patient practice. I'm now working, and we're going to talk a lot about him today, with Dr. Lord. Richard Lord is the scientist that developed many of the lab tests that are used in functional medicine. I'm working very closely with him for several years, and we're going to be coming out with a course in the fall together, uh, clinical nutrition and primary care. I'm really excited about that. I've been working on that for three years. So that's a little bit about me.
We also have on my team, uh, Jennifer. And we have a test for you right now. This is an eye test. If you can read that link there, bit.ly. In a memory test. I'm kidding. This is not really a test. This is Jennifer. And if you want to work with Jennifer, you can talk to her for free and just see what our practice is all about. We'll send out that link. I'm sure it's on our website. Just look at free consultation. You can, you know, connect with Jennifer. And she's a lovely and very inspiring health coach, certified health coach, uh, who talks to potential patients that may want to work with us. Okay. And we'll be doing these Thursday health chats for a while. Um, unless I'm taking some time off or I have some other teaching commitments, we won't do them every week, but we're going to try to keep them going for a while.
So thyroid, we want to talk about the bigger picture. The technical term is called a hypometabolic pattern. That just, you could just call that an underactive metabolism, or a damaged metabolism would be another way of saying it. So you have your metabolism. What does it do? Your metabolism grabs stuff, protein, fat, carbohydrate that you eat, and it converts that stuff into energy. Where does that stuff come from? Well, the vegetables and plants and fruit that you eat, they're pretty much growing outside underneath the sun. And they take the ionizing radiation of the sun, they take sunlight through this process called photosynthesis, and they convert that sunlight into energy. And then they hold it, like the potato holds it in its little potato self, the eggplant holds it in its eggplant itself, right? And then when we eat this food, we release that energy that the plant stored, and we use that energy to run our bodies. It's kind of like solar, like we're solar powered in a way, right? Because the plant got the energy from the sun, and then we're eating the plant and getting that same energy released in our bodies. And so that's your metabolism, basically. Now, you may eat some meat also, it's a little different, but basically the animals that we eat are eating plants, or the, yeah, so it all ends up being coming from sunlight.
So the key here is that your mitochondria grab these different nutrients and turn them, they burn them up. It's like a fireplace. It's like they just, you know, break them down and turn them into fuel or energy. And that is how your metabolism runs. So we want to talk about, it's a very delicate system. It's kind of like if you have a fireplace in your house, you start a fire and it's burning, it could go out, right? You know, you blow on it, different things happen, you can throw water on it, different things happen. So your metabolism is not the most ruggedly designed thing. The mitochondria are kind of sensitive. And it's very easy for environmental toxins to damage these structures, these mitochondria that make energy. And that can be a really big problem.
We also want to talk specifically then, not only about cellular energy and how we make energy, but how the thyroid is directing and controlling our metabolism. So if you want to think about how your thyroid really works, what is, what's the role of thyroid? You look in any medical textbook, it'll say the thyroid controls, makes hormones, right? Thyroid hormones. Where the thyroid hormones do what's the mechanism? How do they act? The thyroid hormones don't just circulate around. The thyroid hormones control what's called your basal metabolic rate. They regulate your metabolism. That's their job. Okay? And then how do the thyroid and the mitochondria interact? Well, the thyroid are controlling your metabolism, but what's actually executing that is the mitochondria. They're the ones that are actually responsible for running your metabolism.
So when I look really in detail at what happens when this gets damaged, this hypometabolic pattern, what does that even mean? And how does that relate to your thyroid? So simply put, if you think about like, um, what's a good example? Like your, your, your cellular energy is kind of like the engine of a car, right? It's generating all this energy that goes to the wheels and propels you forward. The thyroid is kind of like the gas pedal, almost, or and the brake at the same time, you know? So the thyroid is kind of like saying, "Okay, more metabolism. Okay, less. Okay, more metabolism. Okay, less." And the problem is that environmental toxins, chemicals, and heavy metals damage both thyroid hormone production and the mitochondria. And if the mitochondria are damaged enough, even a perfectly healthy thyroid won't work very well. That's a big problem.
So if you're on the right amount of thyroid medication, and you've had your thyroid tested, and the thyroid hormone levels are really good, but you're not feeling that much better, it's usually because either the adrenal hormones or the mitochondria, the cellular energy, the metabolism isn't working, okay? And if you can do a test, figure out how to fix the cellular energy, then all of a sudden those thyroid hormones that you're on will start to kick in.
And why is this such a big problem? Because we have made a big mess of this planet. You know, we have invented tens of thousands, 82,000 last time I counted, synthetic chemicals that are in our bodies, in our environment. And we're exposed to them. When they measure the average newborn baby in the United States at the day of birth, the day of birth, has between 50 and 70 very dangerous toxins. The day they're born. Obviously, they got them from, you know, being in the uterus, being in their mom, right? So we're all super saturated with these from the day that we're born. This is a big, big problem. And just like we see all around us, things like global climate change, we see, you know, the earth is changing, which our bodies are changing too. And one of the major sort of features, one of the major ways that environmental toxins, heavy metals, chemicals damage our bodies is by causing something called oxidative stress.
So oxidation is an example. You cut an apple in half, it starts to turn brown. It's oxidizing. So that happens inside to our tissues. And when our mitochondria or our cellular energy production systems oxidize, they can't make energy, right? And they can't burn fat, and they can't burn carbohydrate. And we get tired and overweight, and our metabolism gets really sluggish and damaged. So the more physical damage there is to the mitochondria from oxidative stress, the more potential problems we're going to have with the thyroid hormones that we are making being non-responsive, not working well.
Now, unfortunately, this exact same oxidative stress hits the thyroid too. So here's just a little schematic on how all this works. Our bodies take fat, carbohydrate, and protein, and we run them through something called the citric acid cycle, citric acid cycle, or sometimes people call it the Krebs cycle. And then at the end of the day here, we make ATP or energy. I shouldn't say at the end of the day, every moment of your life, you're doing this gazillions of times in every cell, you're making this ATP. If you stopped making ATP for, you know, a few seconds, you would die. Everything would just stop. It'll be like, uh, if you had a light plugged in and you unplugged it, the light is out, right? You'd be lights out if this ATP production wasn't happening.
So what can't, what does happen frequently in patients is that because of environmental toxins, the system doesn't work very well. And so it becomes sluggish. And that's going to cause problems with both the thyroid and with your energy levels. And that crossover is really important. In other words, those two systems need to be corrected together. So obviously, if you're highly toxic, we want to check the detox pathways and get all the toxins out of the body. That is an essential element of all this and make sure that that, you know, system is working better.
And here's a schematic again that the toxins build up. And one of the things that they do as they cause oxidative stress or oxidation and inflammation is they damage the thyroid, they damage the adrenals. We're talking more about thyroid today because it's so important. And here's a little picture of a mitochondria. They're kind of cute in their own little way when you see them. Oh, there's a little thing on Jennifer again. So when we, we, there's really complicated lab tests. I'm not going to show right now, but I, you know, if you ever become a patient, you will see your own lab. And we look at every little step of your metabolism and every little thing that could be damaging your thyroid. And then we just start to fix stuff. But these are the general things that we use to fix problems depending on what's going on: freeform amino acids, CoQ10, this is a fancy thing called PQQ, which works really well to get mitochondria to work better, some very basic B vitamins, generalized mitochondrial support, carnitine, things like that. Magnesium is absolutely critical. And then there's this really important amino acid called tryptophan, which we use a lot to help correct these patterns.
So what are the effects? If your thyroid is not working well, the mitochondria or energy is not working well, you're going to be tired, obviously. You're going to become a little weird with sugar. Sugar is going to be kind of attractive to you, and it's going to make you gain weight. You could be, you know, at risk of cardiovascular disease, all kinds of things can happen. So if you have enough of these environmental toxins, you can also have what we call hypothyroidism, just like hypo mitochondrial, I mean, sorry, hypometabolism. Hypometabolic, right? So hypothyroid means that your thyroid is underactive. Hypometabolic means your metabolism, metabolism is underactive. So but hypometabolic specifically refers to cellular energy. And then hypothyroid refers specifically to the actual thyroid hormones themselves.
So what does that cause? Depression, weight gain, hair loss, sensitivity to cold, dry skin, all these kind of classic symptoms. Some people have a lot of chronic pain, okay? And what causes the thyroid to get messed up? Same things that cause the mitochondria to get messed up. That's why it's kind of confusing. Inflammation, stress, chronic infections, a really bad diet for a long time, insulin resistance, high cortisol because of stress, chronic digestive problems. Toxins are probably the biggest culprit here. And, um, all these things just sort of escalate. So if your body's inflamed, there's a, and there's a lot of oxidative stress, then you're going to have an interference with the body's ability to make these various thyroid hormones, okay? And if you're inflamed chronically, a whole bunch of really negative things happen.
So let's talk about this. And remember, inflammation, oxidative stress, these terms are very, they're not interchangeable, but they're, inflammation causes oxidative stress, and oxidative stress causes inflammation. They go together, okay? So when you're thinking about these problems, uh, sometimes we'll describe specific inflammatory pathways, sometimes we'll describe specific oxidative stress pathways, but they're almost always yoked together. So you know, but they're not interchangeable terms, but they're, they're paired together almost all the time.
So inflammation is going to suppress the HPT axis. That's the way your brain tells your thyroid what to do. They've even done experiments where a single injection of something that's inflammatory, these inflammatory cytokines, will reduce thyroid hormone production for five days. So what causes inflammation? Environmental toxins. What causes oxidation? Environmental toxins. What causes other things that cause inflammation? You know, would be chronic digestive problems. A lot of inflammation for people comes in their microbiome is not working very well. And then something you wouldn't think of is that stress can cause inflammation. And it doesn't have to be stress where you're pulling your hair out and running around screaming. It could be stress where you're just sitting there seething with unpleasant feelings because you're stuck in traffic, right? Stress is inflammatory. And again, if you inject somebody with inflammatory cytokines, their thyroid hormone level is going to get messed up for five days. That's pretty amazing.
Now, if you're eating a food that's inflammatory every day, you're going to have thyroid hormone imbalances all the time, right? Because you're going to be chronically inflamed. Inflammation also decreases thyroid receptors. That means they don't, that the thyroid hormones that you do make don't work that great because the receptors that they're supposed to latch on to don't really work very well. And then it, this is very, very important. Inflammation decreases the conversion of what's called T4, which is one kind of one kind of thyroid hormone, to the more active hormone called T3. And I'll show you some diagrams on that right now because this is super important. You should really know this. Um, yeah, and we'll do questions at the end, okay? I said Alicia asked a question, which is a great question. We'll cover that at the end.
So production of T3. If you're healthy and things are going well and you're not inflamed, you're going to take T4 and convert it into T3, and you're going to make a little bit, but not too much of this stuff called reverse T3, just a little bit, not too much. And this is a happy thyroid. T3 is the happy, good form of thyroid. It's the active form of thyroid. Keeps us slim, keeps us happy, keeps us metabolically in great shape, hormonally in great shape. If you're inflamed, then your body does this weird thing. It takes that T4 and converts it into reverse T3. It's a bad thing. No, it's a response to inflammation. Does it have negative health consequences? Yeah. So all these are compensatory mechanisms. The fact that when you're inflamed, your body makes reverse T3 is your body attempting to deal with the situation. I don't know, think about like, let's say your house was burning down and half of your house was on fire, and the fire department came out there and the fire people started spraying it with water, and then the fire went out. Would you be upset that they sprayed your house with water and damaged a lot of stuff? You'd be like, "Well, maybe a little bit, but it's, you know, they're trying to do the best they can, right? They're trying to use the water to make things better." So when we're inflamed, our body adapts. We try to deal with the inflammation, we try to put the flames out in a sense, but it causes some really negative health consequences, just like you'd have a water-damaged home if the fire department sprayed a bunch of water on it. Now you got mold in your house, that's an even bigger problem. So the lack of T3 from inflammation is a really big deal.
So typically then, people have both these problems going on at the same time. That looks complicated. Let's skip that for now. But you have basically the stress component, you have the thyroid involved, and you have the mitochondria involved, all at the same time.
So you can do lab testing for this. For the thyroid, there's blood workups. You can do just basic blood tests. Uh, most medical docs will do TSH only. That's sort of the typical standard analysis for the thyroid. However, as we just discovered, it's really important to also check your T3, T4, free T3, free T4, antibodies as well. Antibodies mean to see if you have an autoimmune version of thyroid. And depending on how complex you get with the lab testing, sometimes people check all these different things on the, on the board here: TSH, T4, T3, reverse T3, free T3, free T4. So the, the, the classic conventional medical workup is only TSH. TSH. But we want to look a little deeper and see, is there an inflammatory problem with your thyroid? Is there an antibody problem with your thyroid? In other words, is there an autoimmune response going on? Is there something going on with antibodies or is there something going on with inflammation or both?
So you want to, when you step back and you want to treat these problems and you want to say, you know, kind of come to some kind of conclusion about how you could actually start to feel better, right? You want to think through how this is going to work and look at a couple different things. So we're talking primarily about thyroid today and mitochondria today, but in the bigger picture, you also want to find the source of inflammation. Is it diet? Is it stress? Is it a gut infection, a microbiome problem? And fix it. Correct insulin resistance. That means getting the person to eat properly. Correct the adrenals if you need to. Fix the GI tract. Eliminate inflammatory foods. So all these things kind of come together in a way that you can get a more long-term solution.
And as we're trying to fix things, we want to think systems-wide. So we want to test and correct the mitochondria and look at cellular energy and get your metabolism working. And then test and correct the high thyroid hormones themselves and get your thyroid working. And if you can bring those two together and deal with the adrenals if you need to, you can get really long-term solutions. So it's adrenal and thyroid and cellular energy or mitochondrial issues arising together for the same kinds of problems, right? The triggers are identical. So you can't just fix the adrenals and expect this to work. In fact, if you have a major problem with your metabolism, an adrenal support program for adrenal exhaustion, adrenal fatigue, whatever you want to call it, it's not going to help you very much. So if you've tried adrenal programs and they haven't worked, it's probably because you have a mitochondrial issue. Similarly, if you've tried thyroid treatments and they helped a little bit but not a lot, you probably have a mitochondrial or cellular energy issue. So you need to look at this on a systems basis and have a very high view, 30,000-foot view of all these things going on.
And then as well, you really want to think about these thyroid problems typically mean that you want to look deeper, deeper into gut problems, environmental toxin exposure that affects the liver, and all these different things, right? And then be sure, and this is something that's missed oftentimes with patients that I work with, is that they've had an adrenal or thyroid treatment program and it helps a little bit but not a lot. So we want to really start to become more aware of cellular energy or mitochondrial problems, that hypometabolic state that can accompany that hypothyroid state. And the science behind that is relatively new. And so a lot of practitioners haven't been exposed to that yet.
Okay, so, um, just, I'm going to wrap it up now and go for questions here that you may have. Again, if you're interested in learning more about our clinic, everything we do is over the phone. You can schedule a free consult with our board-certified health coach, Jennifer. There's a link here. If you go to the Kalish Wellness website, you can click on that. I'm sure we'll also be sending out a link, uh, in the near future. And I'll just show you the website here. We're redoing the website, we're always redoing the website, but yeah, start here, that'll work. Or you can click on schedule your free consult, and that'll work too. And you can just chat with Jennifer and see what's happening. She's a really wonderful person. So that's for those of you that are interested in seeing if you'd be a good patient for us or not.
Okay, so let's open it up for questions. And let's see, Alicia's got the first question. Let me grab Alicia. Let me show you. There's gonna be a mute. You gotta hit, there's a little red button that you need to hit to unmute yourself. Let me click this a few times. If I get unmuted, do you see that? Okay, I can read this question out here, uh, from Alicia. Oh, so Lisa is a practitioner. I'm looking into taking your one-year practitioner program. I notice that you don't use blood spectrum, blood serum testing if you suspect that patient has hypothyroid. Yeah, yeah. So we do. Yeah. So for sure, we're expecting that people will do thyroid testing, uh, for sure. And that's something that, oh, you know, it's interesting to ask that question, Lisa, because, um, in the course that will be, this more advanced course that we're releasing in the fall with Richard Lord, we'll talk a lot about thyroid and thyroid labs and all the blood work that's going to be part of our clinical nutrition and primary care class. And I'm sorry, I couldn't mute you. I'm trying to try one more time if I can. Oh, there you are, Alicia. Oh, it worked now. It wouldn't work for me before. Oh, good. Yeah, so they have more questions about, yeah, um, oh, well, so, okay, so you do talk about blood serum testing then in the class? Yeah, we have a section on thyroid blood work. And then in the more advanced work that we're going to be releasing in the fall is a very exhaustive section on thyroid too. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm a licensed acupuncturist, though. So since I'm not in primary care, would you recommend that I do the regular class starting at the end of July? Yes, you would be better off if you're an acupuncturist in the mentorship. And there's plenty of information on thyroid in there. Yeah. Okay. All right, great. And do you talk about hyperthyroid in the mentorship program at all? I don't think there's a big section on that, but certainly something you just bring up in class when we're doing the live calls, you know. Okay. All right. Okay. Thank you. I think that's all my questions. Okay.
But, um, let's see. And Denise had a question, intracranial high pressure. I've never worked with anyone with intracranial high pressure. I'm not, let's see. Mila has a question, or Mila. I have the less common hyperthyroid, which isn't being helped by meds. Still getting symptoms. Do you think this could be a mitochondrial problem? So oftentimes the hyperthyroid, as with Hashimoto's, right, which is hypo, can be related to autoimmunity. And so for that, we do some really complicated testing. Could it be involving a mitochondria? Yeah, there could be a small, a small part of it, but there's usually a whole other host of problems going on. So you think about what does autoimmunity even mean? Autoimmunity means that your immune system has decided to attack your own tissues. And that's just a strange thing to do. You know, that's just strange. It's like when you hear about soldiers who go crazy and start shooting soldiers on their team, you're like, "That's a little weird. That's not supposed to happen." And so for the immune system to be disturbed enough to start to attack your own tissue and have either hyperthyroid as a result of that, or some of the versions of hypothyroid like Hashimoto's, there's this complex area of immune dysfunction. It always involves the gut and the microbiome because that is the bulk of the immune system in the human body. Like 60% of your immune system is in and around your gut. So there's always a microbiome or leaky gut component to these kinds of problems. And then there's often, but not always, an environmental toxin component. I didn't talk a lot about the gut part, but gut inflammation for most people that we work with is the driving force behind the damage that happens to mitochondria and to thyroid. And but the more insidious and less known damage to those systems comes from environmental toxins. So it's kind of both, I guess. But and usually what ends up happening on the treatment side of things is we'll fix the microbiome, test and correct the microbiome, and these really complicated labs that we do to see what's going on with your microbiome, make sure it's all balanced out and get that working. And then look at the detox pathways and start to make sure that you're able to get rid of chemicals and heavy metals in a really efficient way, right?
Um, all right, so I'm going to wrap up because we're trying to keep these to a half an hour. My staff is insistent on that. But we're going to do them all the time. So there's lots of opportunity for you to join us again. So I look forward to talking to you at the next one of these, which I think is next week. Talk to you then. Bye now.