Transcription
Is this a big problem? One in five women and 1 in 10 men have low thyroid function. Heck yeah, it's a big problem.
Now, do you feel fatigued, lethargic, sluggish, especially when you wake up in the morning? Do you have poor quality, cracked nails? Are you cold all the time? Do you have dry skin, coarse hair, hair loss? Maybe you're a little depressed or constipated? You have muscle pains and joint pains? Have you lost the outer third of your eyebrows? Maybe you have trouble losing weight, no matter what you do?
Well, if your answer is yes to any of these questions, you may be suffering from a condition that is super common, underdiagnosed, and potentially life-threatening called hypothyroidism. This occurs when the production, conversion, or action of your thyroid hormones in your body is not working or inhibited, resulting in too little active thyroid hormone in your blood.
Now, while the symptoms above might not sound like a major problem on the surface, a problem with your thyroid can actually have a catastrophic impact on your health and also on your weight. It's often a hidden factor in many diseases, including depression, heart disease, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, PMS or premenstrual syndrome, worse menopausal symptoms, muscle and joint pains, irritable bowel syndrome, constipation, autoimmune diseases, and obesity.
Now, when I see anybody with a chronic illness, I always think that thyroid may play a role. Now, is this a big problem? Well, heck yeah, it's a big problem. One in five women and one in 10 men have low thyroid function. 38 million Americans are suffering from this. Now, from 2009, this is interesting, from 2009 to 2019, the percent of our population with low thyroid function went from 4.6% in 2009 to 11.7%. So, what is going on with a more than doubling of the prevalence of thyroid problems?
Now, the other issue here is that 60% don't even know they have a problem because it's like, "Oh, I'm a little tired," or "I'm a little, you know, my hair's a little thin," or "You know, I'm constipated," or "My mood's a little low," "My sex drive is down," or "My cholesterol's a little high," and they don't connect the dots between what's going on and their thyroid. In a retrospective analysis in 2022 from the Journal of the Endocrine Society, they found that untreated hypothyroidism went up from 12 to 14.5%. And if it is untreated, it increases your risk of heart disease, heart attacks, cognitive decline, and even early death.
Now, what are the common symptoms of a poorly functioning or low thyroid condition? Well, you're fatigued, you're lethargic, sluggish, especially in the morning. You may have brittle or cracked nails. You might be cold a lot when other people are fine, you're cold. You might have dry skin, mouth, eyes, coarse hair. You might have hoarseness of your voice, hair loss, which is not uncommon, especially the outer third of your eyebrows. You might have depression, constipation, joint and muscle pain, hard time losing weight, cholesterol might be high, your blood pressure might be low, you might have irregular periods, weird menstrual cycles, severe PMS, menopausal symptoms, low libido and sex drive, maybe trouble with memory, focus, concentration.
Any of these can just seem kind of like normal things that happen as you get older, but they're not. They're often untreated thyroid issues. The other issue is that there's a lot of autoimmune thyroid condition going on. And 90% of the low thyroid conditions, not just low thyroid, it's an autoimmune disease, and it's the most prevalent autoimmune disease we have in America. It's called Hashimoto's thyroiditis, and essentially, it's your immune system making antibodies that attack your thyroid as if it was a foreign body. And it's, it's much more common in women. Like I said, you know, one in five women, one in 10 men have thyroid issues, but this is seven to 10 times more common in women. There may be some genetic or hormonal factors, and it affects men as well, though. So, it can cause erectile dysfunction, low sperm count, infertility, low libido, hair loss. So, it also affects men.
High thyroid function, or hyperthyroidism, is not as common, but it's when your thyroid makes too much thyroid hormone. It's overactive, and it's basically the opposite. You're on speed. Your blood pressure is high, you lose weight, you're hungry all the time, you can't sleep, you're anxious, irritable, you have diarrhea. It's sort of the opposite. And that, that common cause of this is Graves' disease. Four out of five cases of high thyroid in America is Graves' disease, another autoimmune disease. And this affects about one in 100 Americans, and it can cause quite severe problems and cause goiter and be causing eye issues and be quite an issue. It's quite a problem.
Now, what is your thyroid? Where is it located? Well, it's an endocrine organ producing hormones. It's a butterfly shape. It's right in front of your neck here, below the Adam's apple and above the collarbone. And it basically functions as a regulator, the control center of your body. It's like the master regulator of your metabolism. Think of like the governor on your car. Like if you have, you know, golf carts or those electric bikes only go to a certain speed, but because it's got a limiter on it, that's kind of what it is. It's kind of the governor. And the slower it is, the slower everything is. It slows your metabolism. It's really important.
So, what does your thyroid gland do? It regulates metabolism. If your thyroid is working properly, increases energy production, fat burning, mitochondrial function, makes your body temperature in the proper regulation. It can affect growth and development. It's really important for fetal brain development, nervous system development. In fact, the whole term cretinism, it's a horrible term, by the way, but that was used to describe low thyroid in babies when mothers were hypothyroid and they gave birth to babies, they would be quote "cretins" because of the effect of low thyroid during pregnancy on the fetus and their development. It also regulates your heart function, so heart rate, cardiac output, very important muscle function, bone health, brain function, mood, cognition, the making of new brain cells. It regulates your body's calcium and phosphate levels, and it promotes the storage of calcium in your bones. If you're hyperthyroid, you can actually lose bones pretty quickly. Also, as I mentioned, really important in reproductive health, fertility, hormone balance. You know, all the symptoms of PMS, weird periods, all common in people with low thyroid function. And it also is involved in sort of a crosstalk with your stress hormones, your sex hormones, your adrenal hormones. So, it's really, it's really important. It's not just isolated. You've got this hormonal soup of sex hormones, thyroid hormones, adrenal hormones, insulin. They're all connected.
Now, when a healthy thyroid works properly, what happens is that the brain, the pituitary, which is the command and control center, gets a message from the hypothalamus. It says, "Okay, it's time, you know, to release a little more thyroid. You need a little more." So, the hypothalamus releases something called thyrotropin-releasing hormone, or TRH. And that tells the pituitary to make thyroid-stimulating hormone, or TSH, which is the test that is usually done by most physicians. Now, this is inadequate in and of itself to properly diagnose thyroid problems. You need to look at the full spectrum of thyroid tests. You don't get that. You get instead of one test by your doctor, you get five. You get TSH, the free T3, free T4, and thyroid antibodies, two different ones. We'll go through those in a minute. But your TSH is really important because it stimulates your thyroid to produce a little more thyroid hormone. So, you produce mostly T4 and a little bit of T3.
Now, T4 is the inactive thyroid hormone. 90% of the thyroid hormone produced in the thyroid gland is T4. And then the T4 gets converted to T3 in the thyroid, the liver, the kidneys, via an enzyme called 5-prime deiodinase. You don't probably need to know that, but it's important because this enzyme can get screwed up by a lot of things. If you're low in selenium, which is the main enzyme that activates it, if you have heavy metals, if you have yeast, if you have environmental toxins, various factors will cause this enzyme to not work properly, which causes low T3.
Now, most doctors even don't properly check these. They check total T3 or total T4. You want to check the free form, which is the active form. That's what we do in functional health. The next thyroid hormone is T3, or triiodothyronine. Thyroxine is T4, and this is the active form of the hormone. This 10% is produced in the thyroid gland, but then the rest is converted in your periphery in your tissues from T4 to T3. And T3 is the actual actor in your body. It binds to the thyroid receptors on the nucleus of your cell. So, it really is a transcription factor for gene expression. So important that's why it regulates everything. And it forms a complex with this thyroid response element on your DNA and leads to protein synthesis. And it's really important because the binding of this requires vitamin D and vitamin A. And so, if you have low levels of these nutrients, which is common, your thyroid won't work properly. And T3 basically ensures every system in your body is working at the right speed: your metabolism, fat burning, energy production, your cholesterol, memory, your hair growth, bowel speed, your weight, everything. When it's too high, then, you know, the feedback loop comes to your brain and says, "Okay, lower TSH," and then it halts the TSH production. So, it's not telling your thyroid to make more. So, it's kind of a constant feedback loop of hormones.
Now, what's happening when your thyroid is too low? When you have hypothyroidism, we have too little T3, or maybe not a conversion of T4 to T3, or you have low T4, too. I mean, not T4 to T2, although there is a T2. And so, what happens then? Well, your metabolism goes down, you gain weight, you have trouble losing weight, you get cold, you can't warm up, your cholesterol's high, your mood's low, your libido's low, you don't want to have sex. All the symptoms we talked about. And when you have this, it's usually often caused, like I said, nine times out of 10, by an autoimmune disease called Hashimoto's. So, we've got to check those thyroid antibodies. And it's amazing how many people have elevated antibodies. We found that 12% of our people that we tested, in over 20,000 people, had elevated thyroid antibodies, meaning they had an autoimmune thyroid condition that was mostly undiagnosed. And this was shocking because it does affect everything, and it affects people's well-being. And these are people who are doing functional or typically are health-forward people and generally healthy. So, it was very disturbing for me to see the prevalence of this autoimmunity in the population.
And what measures thyroid peroxidase antibody? Their TPO. And it basically adds an iodine to the thyroglobulin to make thyroid hormone. And when you have antibodies against this hormone, this enzyme, it basically inhibits the process of making thyroid. Your immune system is basically making these other antibodies too, called thyroglobulin antibodies, TGAs. And thyroid globulin is the precursor of thyroid hormone. So, it's like the building block. And then the thyroglobulin antibody attacks the thyroglobulin protein, and you can't make thyroid hormones. So, you end up with these two different antibodies through different mechanisms causing a slowdown of your thyroid. And what happens is you get into all these troubles that we mentioned. And it's really fixable. We have to get to the root cause. Now, we're going to talk about what that is and how to deal with this.
Just a little note on high thyroid. If you have too much T3 or T4 because of another autoimmune condition called Graves' disease, it causes the opposite phenomena. You get increased metabolism, weight loss, sweating, nervousness, heart racing, palpitations, trouble sleeping, your eyes bulge out, you're heat intolerant instead of cold intolerant, you're irritable, you have diarrhea, hair loss sometimes too, and maybe you lose your period. You'll be shaky and tremulous, and you might have a goiter. So, these are the common things you get with high thyroid. Now, again, that's very rare compared to Hashimoto's. One in 100 versus one in 10, although it seems like it's maybe more than one in 10 based on our data.
So, who's most at risk? Obviously women, as I mentioned. And it's really common in pregnancy. You see this a lot. You get postpartum thyroiditis. And pregnancy increases the demand for thyroid hormone. It can mess things up. Menopause, you'll see this often. Estrogen affects thyroid globulin. And also, so if estrogen's too high, you get all sorts of things like PCOS, fibroids, endometriosis. Basically, you get less T4, and you'll see also lower thyroglobulin. Menopause, where you'll have decreased thyroid hormone. So, there's various ways in which your sex hormones interact with thyroid hormone that kind of mess things up. But we also know that we see the autoimmune thyroid condition associated with other autoimmune conditions like celiac disease. And one of the biggest things, and I've seen this, I would say probably about 35% of the patients that I have have high levels of gluten antibodies or anti-gliadin antibodies, meaning they have some degree of gluten sensitivity or celiac that's causing the Hashimoto's. So, often getting off gluten will really help. Getting selenium will help. And a lot of things we'll talk about in terms of treatment also. You might have lupus or rheumatoid arthritis or Sjogren's, which is where you get dry eyes, mouth, and other things, type 1 diabetes, Addison's disease, which is an adrenal autoimmune disease, pernicious anemia, which is inability to absorb B12. So, you get all these different problems that are a result of some trigger or some factor that's causing the autoimmunity. So, the key in functional medicine is to get to the root cause, and we're going to talk about that now.
There's some genetics involved. There may be a family history of thyroid issues. It's common as we get older, you know, over 60. But the issue is, why are we seeing this increased prevalence? I mean, it's in the population, it's always been, but it seems to be increasing. So, why is that? One of the reasons I think is because of the type of gluten we have. We basically changed the gluten in our environment from being these heirloom wheats and grains to a dwarf wheat, which has much higher numbers of gliadin proteins, more inflammatory proteins, more starch and sugar, more likely to cause injury to the gut and leaky gut and this whole cascade of autoimmunity. And we see this link very clearly in the literature, scientific literature. And by the way, all of the things that I'm saying are referenced, and we're going to include all these scientific references in the show notes if you want to go ahead and have a look at those as well. So, celiac prevalence is like four times higher than those of autoimmune thyroiditis. So, it's a well-established fact.
Now, if you have non-celiac gluten sensitivity, not full-blown celiac, you know, it can cause again a lot of thyroid issues. There's something called molecular mimicry, where gluten resembles something called transglutaminase, which is in the thyroid gland, and it's also present in the gut. And then it attacks the thyroid gland at the same time it attacks gluten. So, you get this kind of cross-activity. So, you basically, the gluten creates this autoimmunity, is essentially what I'm saying.
The other big factor is, you know, thyroid is like the canary in the coal mine. It's very sensitive to environmental toxins. They used to put a canary in the coal mine, and when the air was bad, the canary would die, and the coal miners knew to get the heck out of the coal mine because they were going to die too if they stayed there. So, our thyroid is kind of like our canary. And I've written an article about this. I'll post it as well in the show notes. It's an article I wrote in a medical journal about thyroid. But endocrine-disrupting chemicals are common. They're everywhere. It's basically the petrochemical plastics. In a 2021 review in Nutrients, these endocrine-disrupting chemicals were found in food and food packaging, and our water, and our personal care products, things like BPA, phthalates, flame retardants, PCBs. And they basically interfere with our thyroid gland, and they interfere with thyroid hormone transport in the body.
Also, heavy metals are another big one: mercury, lead, arsenic. Another big factor. If you see higher levels of mercury, see lower levels of T3 hormone. So, I think it's really important for people to make sure that they assess these things. Also, air pollution. Not something we can do a lot about except have an air filter. But a 2020 review found that there were higher levels of autoimmune thyroid disease in people who lived in polluted areas, near petrochemical plants, where there was maybe cement plants, where they were contaminated with pesticides in their environment or PCBs. Also, mold, which is ubiquitous, can definitely cause thyroid issues.
Also, the thyroid gland and function depends on a lot of nutrients, and there's so much nutritional deficiency in this country across the board. This was based on national surveys and testing of the American population. This is not my opinion. You know, 90-plus percent of Americans are deficient in at least one nutrient at the minimum level of the RDA. You know, probably 80% are deficient in vitamin D, which is important for thyroid function. 45% are deficient in magnesium. Omega-3s, probably plus 90-plus percent. So, the thyroid needs a lot of co-factors and helpers. For example, selenium helps convert T4 to T3. Iodine, which comes from fish and seaweed, actually is needed to make the thyroid hormone. It's the very hormone is built. Thyroid hormone is built from iodine molecules. Also need zinc, which helps make thyrotropin-releasing hormone, TSH, thyroid hormone. Need vitamin A and D to synthesize thyroid hormone, to activate the receptor and gene expression. B12. So, these are really common problems. We see a lot of zinc deficiency, vitamin D deficiency, and so forth.
Also, stress. You know, we know there's a huge interaction between stress response, your adrenals, and your thyroid gland. They really work in tandem. So, too much cortisol can interfere with your thyroid hormone production. And we see this. People who have chronic stress will get hypothyroid symptoms, and they will sort of downregulate this. And we see this in chronic disease. It's kind of hypothyroidism of chronic illness. Also, even any kind of stress, inflammation. Anything kind of inflammation, by the way, we are all inflamed. Our bodies are inflamed for eating ultra-processed food, sugar, starch. And that messes up thyroid hormone production through interfering with TSH secretion. Also, a lot of people eat a lot of sugar and starch. You get imbalances in your gut microbiome. You get yeast overgrowth that can really drive it as well. And certain medications will interfere with it.
So, you know, conventional medicine is not terrible at this, but it's not great either. And I can say this is one of the most satisfying areas of functional medicine for me because we can diagnose what's going on. We are aggressive in diagnosing it based on any symptoms. We screen for these questions, and many of these things we call subclinical hypothyroidism. So, you know, it may not be overt, but it may not be fully expressed, but it may be a partial problem with your thyroid gland that's causing thyroid dysfunction. And you might not know, and it can often go undetected and undiagnosed. In fact, 50% of the time, it's undiagnosed.
Now, conventional medicine doctors do not run a full thyroid panel. Really important. They only usually do TSH. And also, it's important to know that doctors are kind of creatures of habit. We have these order forms, or these basically sheets that we check off with thyroid hormone testing. And there's panels on there that are, you know, decades old, before we had newer assays that could measure free T3, measure free T4. They do things like total T4 or free thyroxine index or T3 uptake. I mean, just stuff that's just so out of date. And it's just checked on the panel. I'm like, why are they doing this? It's just like, you know, it's like using a magnifying glass to look at the stars instead of a giant telescope. So, it's really important to do the right test.
When they do test, they usually only test TSH. And they often will not test anything else. Sometimes they'll test free T4, but they don't test the most important hormone, which is free T3. This is the one that does the work. And they also don't test thyroid antibodies like thyroid peroxidase antibodies or anti-thyroglobulin antibodies. These are the autoimmune antibodies that we're talking about. So, you know, the reference range is also important to understand. The reference range, you know, goes from 0.5 to 5. That's a tenfold range. Now, what's the optimal range? Probably like 1 to 2. And when you look at the American College of Endocrinology, they said the optimal range might be now, not 5, but maybe under 3.5. The National Academy of Clinical Biochemistry says anything over 2.5 is abnormal. So, the optimal range is probably like, you know, 0.5 to 2 at the most. And often the test will come back normal, the TSH, but it'll miss the fact that the T3 is low, that there's thyroid antibodies, it may be in the kind of upper range of normal. So, you have to look at the whole issue. And this is why they go undiagnosed and untreated. And they kind of wait till TSH is way out of range, and then it's often too late, or often you've already suffered for years.
So, the other problem is when doctors will prescribe hormone, they'll often prescribe the wrong one. They give you the inactive hormone, which is called levothyroxine or Synthroid. And the problem is, a lot of people can't convert T3 to T4 fully. There's a lot of reasons for it: the environmental toxins I mentioned, nutritional deficiencies, gut dysbiosis, stress, many things, cortisol. All these things interfere with this process. So, the patient may get a little better, but doesn't feel fully well. And so, it's important to make sure you treat them the right way. And I'll talk about that in a minute.
Now, from a functional medicine perspective, how does how do we look at the problem? The first is comprehensive lab testing. We have to look at the full thyroid panel: TSH, free T3, free T4, the thyroid antibodies, really, really important. We also need to look at the root cause because there may be other things. We want to look at gluten, for example. If the thyroid's off, we look at cortisol, we look at other hormones, other things that may matter, like inflammation, CRP, and white cell count. We look at the sex hormones to see what's going on there. We look at liver enzymes to see if there's toxicity. You know, for example, your liver enzymes are elevated in 75% of Graves' disease. We look at metabolic health, blood sugar, insulin, and heavy metals like mercury and lead and arsenic. We can test as well. Iodine, selenium. These are things you can add on to your test. If you're concerned, we also do the celiac panel, which looks at the full range of tissue transglutaminase, anti-gliadin antibodies, really important. Do the right test. Maybe it can also be some infections. Sometimes like Lyme disease is a big trigger of autoimmune disease. We might look at celiac genetics. So, we do a lot of different things. We look at food sensitivities because that can play a role, not just gluten, but many other food sensitivities. We might look at the stool test, look at the microbiome and leaky gut. So, we go for the root cause. And then we treat with a personalized treatment of lifestyle, diet, and supplements and medications if needed. So, we really look at the whole problem.
Now, what are the root causes of some of these abnormal biomarkers? Right, you mentioned gluten, which can cause these abnormal thyroid antibodies. And that can, you can even see abnormal antibodies but normal TSH or normal free T3 and T4, and people are still having issues. It still affects how they feel. And if they're symptomatic, I treat them. This is my personal view. Now, this is what I've seen after treating thousands of patients with this. Sometimes your biomarkers will be off in pregnancy, they'll be off with chronic stress, you'll have high cortisol, CRP, you're over-exercising, and you're a high-level athlete, that can affect you. Psychological stress, nutritional deficiency, we mentioned mainly selenium, iodine, vitamin D, vitamin A. Food sensitivities, particularly dairy, soy. We'll talk about gluten, gluten and soy and dairy. Environmental toxins, as we mentioned, endocrine disruptors, heavy metals. Imbalances in the gut and leaky gut. Various allergens, mold. Various infections, yeast overgrowth. Medications. Sometimes can affect it. Birth control use can definitely cause thyroid issues. And it seems that based on large data from the NHANES trials, which was published in BMJ Open, British Medical Journal, if you were having a history of birth control for over 10 years, you had four times the risk of having a low thyroid function. Sometimes iodine absorption could be affected by estrogen, progesterone issues. So, estrogen excess can also cause thyroid cell destruction. And why I'm saying this is because we often have a culture of high estrogen. We have lots of sugar and lots of starch that causes our body to put on more fat. Fat produces estrogen, not just your ovaries. Men can get high estrogen levels. So, it's really common. Also, sometimes you're on lithium for psychiatric disorders, that can cause thyroid dysfunction. It's important to check that. Chronic use of anti-inflammatories like Advil, Aleve, they interfere with the binding of T3 and T4. So, I think there's some issues there. If you're on chronic steroids like cortisol, like drugs like prednisone, that can cause suppression of TSH and various other drugs. So, it's important to understand that there may be conditions related to some of these biomarkers we talked about and how to kind of look at all those together and be paying attention to sort of the whole picture, not just one test.
So, how do you address poor thyroid function using a functional medicine approach? Using diet, lifestyle, getting the root cause? Well, the first is remove the bad stuff. Get rid of the inflammatory foods, ultra-processed foods, things that are in a box, package, can, artificial sweeteners, trans fats, sugar-sweetened beverages, alcohol. Gluten would be the first thing to go. Also, wheat, barley, rye, spelt, kamut, oats. Not oats are not a whole food, trust me, I've written about this, but they're not a whole food. A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis published in Frontiers in Endocrinology, and like I said, all these references are going to be in the show notes, they showed that a gluten-free diet for six months reduces the thyroid antibodies and reduces TSH, which is a good thing, and increases T4. So, this is just a simple gluten-free diet having a profound impact on autoimmune thyroid disease. So, the impact of this gluten-free diet on thyroid function, inflammation, patients with hypothyroidism is really important. Also, reduce your exposure to food sources of environmental toxins like mercury-containing fish: tuna, swordfish, shark, king mackerel, tilefish, Chilean sea bass, all the big fish. And there's lots of guides. We'll put a show note guide on how to use, for example, the NRDC guide on low-mercury fish. Also, plastics, packaging, produce packaging, packaged foods, pesticides, which are on our food. Use the Environmental Working Group guides for reducing your exposures. You can go to ewg.org, and it'll link to Skin Deep for healthy skincare products and healthy household cleaning products. What foods you should eat, what you shouldn't eat. Like, for example, certain vegetables and fruits are worse. Sometimes you might need to deal with food sensitivities like gluten and dairy, and even soy. And trying eliminating those. Coffee and caffeine may be an issue. Certain foods are called goitrogens. They can interfere with thyroid function, but it's usually raw foods. So, raw soybeans or raw peanuts or like a raw spinach, raw turnips, rutabaga, cabbage, broccoli, collards, mustard greens, kale. People have kale juice like crazy. I don't think that's a good idea because you're getting highly concentrated amounts. So, cook your kale, cook your vegetables. And cooking really reduces that. So, I highly encourage people to eat these cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, collard, kale, but cook them. Okay? And keep your serving of soy low, like less than half a cup per day. People are drinking like gallons of soy milk and so forth, soy lattes. I don't recommend that. Also, eat real whole food. Get an anti-inflammatory diet. Get rid of the processed food, the ultra-processed food. Get lots of good protein, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds. And whole grains can be fine if they're gluten-free. Sometimes paleo can be good for autoimmune disease with no grains or beans or dairy, but you can have fish, eggs, meat, fruits, and vegetables, root vegetables. The Autoimmune Paleo is a little more aggressive. That takes out nightshades like eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, takes out nuts and seeds, as well as grains and beans and dairy and coffee and alcohol. I don't recommend that often, only if someone's really stuck. Sometimes other things can be helpful in increasing the conversion of T4 to T3. You know, if you're doing keto, that actually might not be good for your thyroid. It might be good for blood sugar, but you need a little bit of insulin to convert T3 to T4. It's all the right balance. So, focus on balancing your blood sugar. And also, you need to add in the right nutrients, right? You need iodine. When that comes from, where? Fish, seaweed, like wakame, nori, kombu. Iodized salt. Selenium, which can be gotten from Brazil nuts, about two a day. Some of the fish, the small fish, herring, mackerel, sardines. Scallops are good at selenium. Omega-3 fats also really important. I call them the SMASH fish: small wild salmon, mackerel, and sardines and herring are my favorites. But I don't know if you like them. Tough for you, but I like them. Oysters, scallops, walnuts, flax seeds, pumpkin seeds, all are great sources of omega-3. Vitamin D. Hard. You need like a lot of herring or a lot of shiitake mushrooms. But basically, sunlight's great, but taking vitamin D, I think, is really important considering how we live. Also, B12, important for liver function. Vitamin A for the binding, I mentioned that. Comes from animal foods primarily. You're not going to get it from plant foods. You'll get beta-carotene, which has to be converted, but liver's the best source. Poultry also, chicken, turkey. Lots of fiber for your gut, nuts, seeds, all that's really helpful.
Now, supplements. Should you take supplements? Yeah, I think sometimes it's important. Now, if you have heavy metals or you have something like that, you need to be treated with proper metal detoxification. And I won't cover that in this podcast, but we will do a session on heavy metals. You can just take a basic multivitamin and mineral, omega-3, magnesium, vitamin D. So, it's really important to know what your numbers are and you're testing to see you're on the right dose. Sometimes if you're having chronic stress, sometimes the adaptogens can help, like rhodiola, ashwagandha, which are basically to help reduce stress and improve thyroid function. Lifestyle practices are also really important. So, meditation, yoga, journaling, walking, nature, breathwork, you know, whatever, whatever works for you. Ice steams and hot cold plunges also help me relax and de-stress. Making sure you prioritize sleep, seven, eight hours a night. Exercise. Make sure you do proper strength training and muscle building. That helps glucose control and makes sure your hormones are properly balanced. And get rid of the toxins, as I mentioned. You know, buy foods that are low in toxins. You can use the Dirty Dozen guide to avoid the most contaminated foods that you should not buy if they're not organic. And then you can look at the Clean Fifteen, which are maybe okay to buy if they're not organic. As I mentioned, the skincare product guide, the Skin Deep guide from the EWG, is important. I always filter water. You know, some of these chlorinated things and chlorinated water, fluoride in water, they can really interfere with thyroid function. They're like kind of like in the iodine family, so it can kind of screw up your thyroid function. So, also reduce your indoor air pollution, which is a big issue with an air filter. I encourage to use a lot of saunas, hot yoga, hot baths to remove toxins.
It was actually a study on red light therapy, believe it or not, that regenerated thyroid follicular cells. There were 43 patients, randomized controlled trial, who had autoimmune thyroid issues. And when they had 10 sessions of red light therapy, they were able to reduce their or eliminate their thyroid replacement over 30 days. After nine months, they needed a much lower dose, and their lower thyroid antibodies and their thyroid looked better on ultrasound. So, pretty impressive with red light therapy.
And then, if you need medication, and often you do, sometimes you can't, if you do all these things, it can normalize, but you have to know what you're doing. Maybe work with a functional medicine doctor. But you know, most doctors, as I mentioned, conventionally just use the T4, which is Synthroid, levothyroxine. And it really only leads to a partial improvement for most people. They don't check T3, and you need to take T3 as well. So, there are versions of T3 like Cytomel that are short-acting. There are sustained-release ones that are compounded. I particularly like the desiccated pig thyroid. It's called Armour Thyroid or Nature-Throid. There's a whole bunch of them out there. Traditional doctors don't like them. They have this belief that they're not safe, that they're unregulated, that they don't, the doses are variable, that they cause all these problems. But they really don't. The one thing you have to know is if you're taking one of these compounds that is a natural thyroid, basically, it's like mimicking our own thyroid, like bioidentical thyroid. It does suppress TSH. So, you have, because T3 feeds back to the brain to suppress TSH. So, if you're taking T3, you'll get a low TSH. And your doctor will think you're taking too much thyroid hormone. So, you have to go by the levels of free T3 and free T4. And you have to make sure you check in with your symptoms. How do you feel? If your heart's racing and you're anxious and you can't sleep well, you're taking too much. If you have, you also want to check your bone density because taking thyroid can sometimes cause, if it's too much, can cause low bone density. So, you want to make sure your bone is checked at baseline and then over time.
By the way, men and women both can have thyroid problems. So, if you have hyperthyroidism, there's some other things that can be used. This is mostly just for low thyroid. For hyperthyroidism, it's a little bit different. They'll use beta-blockers to slow your heart rate. They have anti-thyroid medication to slow the thyroid down. They use sometimes radioiodine therapy to basically nuke your thyroid, or, you know, it's kind of a little riskier, but then you need to be on thyroid your whole life after that, which isn't the worst thing because I think of this as a natural molecule that our bodies make. So, it's important to recheck regularly your levels, make sure you're balanced, to do all the other biomarkers we need to do. That's really why it's so important.
And the functional health panel, as part of your membership, you get the full panel of tests that helps you identify everything from heavy metals. And as I said, I was really shocked to see in the 20,000 people that have gone through so far that the prevalence of antibodies was 12%, which is a little bit high. And it means there's a lot of people walking around who don't even know they have this issue. It can be really hard to detect. So, and regular medicine kind of sucks at actually doing proper screening and testing. And functional medicine is much better at looking at the cause with comprehensive lab testing, a thyroid panel, hormone panels, toxin panels, sex hormones, inflammatory markers, cortisol, and getting the root cause. So, once you do that, you can treat it all with, you know, basic lifestyle things we talked about, supplements, and often you'll see improvement. We talked about red light therapy, selenium can lower it, getting rid of gluten can lower it. So, a lot of things will have an impact independent of taking medication.
If you love that last video, you're going to love the next one. Check it out here. These used lifestyle interventions for people with codine, optimizing risk factors, and they found significant improvement in cognitive function in predementia patients. This called predementia MCI, or mild cognitive impairment.