A Different Way to Think about Hashimoto’s and Low Thyroid Function

The information provided in this podcast is educational and not intended to diagnose or treat medical conditions. Dr. Donnie Wilson struggled for decades to solve her numerous health issues and heal her body. But with focused determination, she healed herself. And in doing so, she discovered the Dr. Donnie stress recovery Protocol. On this show, you're going to hear from doctors, nutritionists and Experts along with Dr. Donnie, who will give practical advice and wisdom to help heal your body. This is how humans heal.

Hey guys.

This episode is from one of Dr. Donnie's live Facebook streams where she answered listeners questions live on Facebook.

So Hashimoto's is an autoimmune condition that affects the thyroid gland. And your doctor may or may not actually tell you the name Hashimoto's. Sometimes they might just say to you that you need to take thyroid medication or thyroid hormone replacement.

Because that's the main treatment for this type of autoimmunity to the thyroid. It's just most people taking Synthroid. But here's the thing, is that sometimes some people may have low thyroid function and not have Hashimoto's may not have any autoimmunity because there's many other causes for low thyroid function which we can talk about today.

But Hashimoto's is if, if you've done blood work that shows you have the thyroid antibodies and there's two main antibodies we usually look at when it comes to Hashimoto's. There's one that's called the antithyroglobulin. So essentially it's an antibody from your immune system that's working against your thyroid. It's trying to attack your thyroglobulin. And then there's also something called thyroid peroxidase. Does some of you have your, I'm curious if you have your blood work or if you can pull up your blood work and see, you know, do you have, has that been tested? Is the first question. Is your, is your thyroid being tested in your blood work? I really feel like all of us should have our thyroid tested every year because it's so important to have a healthy thyroid function and it's not always included in the annual blood work. So the first thing you want to look for in your blood work is what's called a tsh, a thyroid stimulating hormone. TSH is actually not even from the thyroid gland. It's from the hypothalamus. It's from the brain. So TSH is essentially what your brain thinks your thyroid function. And so when you see a tsh, you want it to be. I'm really looking for the TSH to be between about 1 and 2. Sometimes it'll be as low as 0.5, and that's okay. Sometimes it's as high as 2.5, and that might be okay for your body, but somewhere right around 1 or 2 on the TSH, it tells you that your brain thinks your thyroid is doing a pretty good job if that is. And it's kind of an opposite. So this is sometimes a little confusing at first. Hi, Melanie, thanks for joining. And please, anyone, if you have questions about the thyroid, please pop them in for me, and I'll start answering your questions.

When.

The TSH is higher than 2.5, so say it's a 3 or a 5 or higher than that. It means that the brain has turned up the volume and it's trying to get your thyroid gland to work better. So a higher TSH indicates a lower thyroid function. And when the TSH is lower than 0.5, let's say it's like 0.1. You know, that would be like a really low TSH. That means your thyroid's working too well. Hi, Nancy. Thanks for joining me. Thanks for the little smiley heart emoji. I love it.

So if the TSH is really low, it means your thyroid function is too high. So it's kind of this opposite thing. But that's really just a beginning of understanding thyroid function based on what your brain thinks of your thyroid function. And from there, we really want to measure the thyroid hormone levels. And when it comes to thyroid hormones, they were named just with numbers. You know, the first thyroid hormone that the main thyroid hormone that the thyroid gland makes is T4. There are T1, 2, 3, 4. But the main one that we're starting with here is T4.

And T4 is made by the thyroid gland, but it's not active at that point. It's just T4 made by the thyroid. It goes out into the bloodstream, and then in the body, like in our liver and our muscles and our digestion, that T4 is converted to T3. Inside the cells, in the mitochondria of our cells, it's converted to T3. And T3 is considered to be the active thyroid hormone. So when you're thinking about your thyroid or you're wondering about your thyroid, really what you're wondering about is, how's my T3? Do I have good active thyroid hormone? And you don't just test T3 in the blood. We test what's called the free T3, like F R E E, free T3, and free T4. And what that means is that those hormones are free to be active in your bloodstream. So you want the T4 and T3. You want to know the level that's potentially able to work for you, right? And that's what we call the free level. And that's what can be measured in the blood. But it's not always the test the doctors run. Like you would think. If the doctor runs a thyroid panel, that's what it would include and it would include a TSH. But it doesn't include the free T3 and free T4. It includes other ways of trying to identify thyroid function like the T3 uptake and so on. But I find that over time of helping people understand their thyroid function, the T3 uptake and some of these other measures like total T3 and so on, they just don't give us that great of information. If we really want to understand your thyroid function, like just cut to the point, right? You're like, just give me the direct answer instead of there's a bunch of different ways we can try to understand thyroid function. I just want to know the free T3 and free T4 along with the TSH because it gives me the closest, quickest look at what's going on in your body related to your thyroid gland. Now, we also need to look at your symptoms in your body. We can talk about some of the common symptoms of low thyroid and it varies from person to person. Like, each one of you may have completely different symptoms of low thyroid function, but we need to look at your body, we need to look at your blood work. And the other thing we can test in the blood work are these thyroid antibodies. So we can test for antithyroglobulin and thyroid peroxidase. They have nicknames, by the way, so you don't have to say those big long names. There's ATA is the antithyroglobulin and TPO is the thyroid peroxidase. Or you could just ask the doctor or the lab to run the thyroid antibodies and they should know what that means. It's also important to keep in mind that there's such a thing as having too high of thyroid function. And there's a different autoimmune condition called graves disease. And the interesting thing is when grave disease happens, it's also thyroid antibodies. But when those antibodies attack the thyroid, it increases thyroid function and so you end up with a low tsh. So it's just a different antibody, usually called thyroid stimulating antibody. But it can also happen with some of These other antibodies too, but it's just the way the cells respond. They end up speeding up the thyroid instead of slowing it down. But today I want to focus on low thyroid function and Hashimoto's, which is the main autoimmunity associated with low thyroid function. Because what happens is as these antibodies.

Yet. Oh, thank you for your question. Be able to explain the antibodies. Let's talk about that. These antibodies are made by our immune system. It's the same antibodies that we want our immune system to make to help fend off viruses and, you know, protect us in general. Right. Most of our immune system is actually developed in our. It starts in the thymus gland, which is in the neck, and then the antibodies are throughout our body. The white blood cells are throughout our white. Our blood and throughout our body. But a lot of our immune system exists in our digestion. And that's why sometimes certain foods will trigger an immune response in the digestion. And we, especially with something called leaky gut. And we get these immune responses going on where the antibodies can be normally again protecting us from anything foreign. In our environment, including when we have leaky gut, our immune system tries to protect us from our food. With autoimmunity, the immune system gets confused and starts attacking our own tissue, our own body. And that's why they call it auto auto, meaning self like autoimmunity, meaning we started having immunity against ourself. And it's. I think of it like a confused immune system. It's really also could be considered an overprotective or overreactive immune system. What the studies are showing is this happens when the immune system is bombarded by triggers. Often that can be the case with leaky gut again. And some of you who've been listening to me are familiar with leaky gut. Leaky gut is when the intestinal cells, which should be all lined up nicely next to each other, the intestinal cells are supposed to be making sure that only nutrients get through the intestinal wall and into our bodies. But with leaky gut, which is caused by stress and toxins and gluten and other factors, these intestinal cells are not as healthy as they could be. And they are allowing food to get through the intestinal lining without being digested first. And then the immune system tries to protect us from our food because it sees, let's say, banana instead of glucose, which would be the digested nutrient. Right? And so our immune system is constantly right there, wait, watching and observing, trying to protect us. But with autoimmunity, what's happening is the immune system can get bombarded. Let's say. Let's take gluten, for example, because gluten is very relevant to Hashimoto's. What they found in the research is that gluten can trigger Hashimoto's, and avoiding gluten in your diet can decrease Hashimoto's. So let's talk about why that is. Why is it that gluten becomes such an issue for these antibodies? So gluten is, of course, the protein in multiple different grains, right? So it's in wheat, barley, rye, spelt, and gluten. Wheat is kind of a really big particle. Gluten is smaller, and then there's something even smaller, smaller than gluten, called gliadin. So these are just really teeny, tiny little proteins that make up the whole piece of gluten. Anyway, when we consume gluten, then it has the potential to cause leaky gut. So it opens up the spaces between the cells and it can leak through, and then it can start triggering an immune response. So now this is called gluten sensitivity, which is one in four people have an immune response to gluten. It could lead to celiac disease, which is a different kind of autoimmunity. What happens with celiac disease is the immune system starts to try to protect us from our own tissue surrounding the gluten. And so now we're attacking ourselves again and the gluten, which is called celiac disease, which is about 1 in 130 people. And.

What can also happen is once the immune system starts to trigger and protect from gluten, it can trigger these antibodies in the thyroid gland. And they're actually showing that they think that's because the tissue in the thyroid gland looks like gluten. So it's like you can imagine if the immune system sees something that looks like gluten and it's trying to protect you from gluten, it's going to attack that other thing. So it might start attacking your thyroid gland. Thyroid's here in the neck. The immune system might start attacking your thyroid gland because it thinks it's trying to protect you from gluten, and it mistakenly starts attacking your thyroid gland. And once it starts attacking the thyroid gland, right, as if it was a virus, it's going to. It could damage the cells in the thyroid gland. So when we're counting on your thyroid gland to make this T4 thyroid hormone. So if the cells are getting damaged now, they can't do as good of a job making your thyroid hormone and that's why Hashimoto's antibodies can cause low thyroid function. Now, a lot of times I see people have the thyroid antibodies, like, it might test positive on the blood work, but maybe your thyroid function is still fine, maybe your TSH is fine, your free T3 is fine. And we go, okay, good, there's thyroid antibodies, but at least they haven't damaged your thyroid gland to the extent that your thyroid function has decreased. So now what we want to do is we want to work on stopping those thyroid antibodies. Now, in conventional medicine, that's not even a consideration. You know, usually in conventional medicine, they think of it as, you know, once the thyroid antibodies have started, the only. The one way that they usually would try to stop the thyroid antibodies would be to decrease your thyroid gland function by taking over with swallowing thyroid hormone. So when you swallow thyroid hormone, say as a Synthroid, is a classic thyroid hormone medication, right? In a pill form. When you swallow thyroid hormone, your thyroid gland is going to. Your brain's going to pick up on that, and your thyroid gland is not going to have to do as much work. And what they found is if your thyroid gland is not having to work as hard, it tends to the thyroid antibodies calm down. Like the thyroid antibodies are really only protecting us from active thyroid tissue. But at the same time, you figure, does it really make sense to turn off my thyroid gland in order to turn off the thyroid antibodies? Or for a lot of people, you start thinking, hey, maybe there's something else I can do. Maybe I can actually still have my thyroid gland helping me out and giving me thyroid hormone and just find a different way to turn off these thyroid antibodies. So we're going to talk about that. Let's talk about how we can. Ways we can turn off the thyroid antibodies. But I want to make sure first that.

I covered your questions about just understanding it to begin with. Is that making more sense? There's other things that can trigger Hashimoto's, by the way. So again, before we dive into what can we do about it, let's talk about a little more, about understanding what kind of sets you up for it and what are the underlying causes, so to speak.

One for sure is there are genetic predispositions. So it's well established that there's hereditary. So if someone else in your family, say your mother or your grandmother, has Hashimoto's, then it's higher likelihood you're gonna have it like my mom has Hashimoto's. So it's much higher likelihood that I would have Hashimoto's.

So we know there's some genetic predisposition. We know in general there's a genetic predisposition to autoimmunity. So you could even look at your genes and you're looking for what are called the HLA genes that tell us about predisposition to autoimmunity. And it just means that your immune system may be a little more likely to turn toward autoimmunity or turn on this attacking of yourself. And autoimmunity can exist a lot of different places in the body, right? Like you can see autoimmunity to the joints, to the scalp, to the, you know, to your intestines, to. There's so many different kinds, hundreds now that we know of different kinds of autoimmunity. And so there's this genetic piece of it. But just because you may have a genetic predisposition to autoimmunity does not mean that you should just give up and give in to it. I, for example, have a lot of tendency toward autoimmunity in my genetics, and I don't have any autoimmunity going on in my body. And I think it's because I I walk this talk, I do everything I'm always talking about with all of you. And so I've done a lot of prevention of autoimmunity in my lifetime, and I'm hoping that's why it hasn't turned on. But I know, you know, I want you to know that it's possible to not only prevent autoimmunity from starting, but it's also possible to turn it back off again. And you're not going to hear that in most, from most doctors because it's just not something they really tried because usually the way we turn off autoimmunity has to do with diet changes and lifestyle changes and herbs and nutrients and things. It's not done with a medication. Right. So if, you know, if the doctor is mostly their main thing in their toolbox is medications, they're not going to talk about how to turn off autoimmunity other than just suppressing your immune system altogether, which is the main treatment for. Right. From a rheumatologist with. When they treat autoimmunity, they give an immunosuppressive medication to turn off your immune system completely. But we don't want to do that. We want your thyroid working. We want your immune system working, and we just don't want that autoimmunity happening.

So let's see, there's also, in terms of predispositions to Hashimoto's. There's also a big one is stress exposure, right? So the more we're exposed to various different kinds of stress in our lives, you know, and of course we can't control stress. That stress is just part of life. But whether it's psycho emotional stress, physical stress, and I would even consider gluten a stress because we talked about how gluten can trigger Hashimoto's. So to me, that means it's a stress to your system, right? Chemicals, toxins in the environment, flame retardant in your mattress, pesticides on your vegetables, unless you eat organic. All of these can be triggers for Hashimoto's autoimmunity in general. And all of these can also be triggers for leaky gut. So you start to see the interconnections, right? We start to see, oh, there's a lot of overlap here. And so that's why when I start to see a lot of overlap, you know, then I'm like, I actually get excited because I feel like then we can focus on the main things that are going to make a big difference, big ripple effect. If we focus on helping understand your genetics and help address whatever your genetic tendencies are, and if we understand your stress exposure and help you with stress recovery, we have a lot of potential for preventing a lot of these things. And so stress exposure leads me to think about cortisol. We definitely know that when cortisol levels are not where we want them to be, if they're either too high or too low at certain times a day, it predisposes to turning on autoimmunity. And it also, when your cortisol is either too high or too low, it decreases your thyroid function even without autoimmunity. So if you've been under a lot of stress and you get your thyroid rechecked and you're like, what the heck? What just happened to my thyroid function? Well, were you under a lot of stress the past couple months? Because that cortisol is going to affect how your thyroid functions, and that could change your thyroid hormone levels even in a relatively short period of time. So we always want to be managing that stress and keeping our cortisol levels as balanced as possible so that our thyroid has the best chance of doing its job well for us. So stress is another really big factor in terms of thyroid function and Hashimoto's or autoimmunity. And so I think you guys got the idea. The one other one that I would mention that a lot of times you hear about is Epstein Barr virus. And there's other viruses too, of course. A lot of times you guys hear me talking about hpv, human papillomavirus. But Epstein Barr virus is a. Is the virus that causes what we know of as mono. And most all of us are exposed to mono at some point in our lives, usually even by age 20. Most all of us are exposed to monovirus. But what can happen is this Epstein Barr virus or monovirus can. It kind of hangs out in our body, and most of the time, our immune system manages it. It keeps it in check and prevents it from causing issues. But of course, when we're more stressed and depleted, our immune system can't do as good of a job of managing this Epstein Barr virus. And the Epstein Barr virus can start to cause issues again. And when that happens, when Epstein Barr virus starts to flare up, it can not only make you feel tired and like, you might almost like mono symptoms, but it can also trigger autoimmunity, including Hashimoto's. So it's something to consider for some of you. A lot of times, though, people end up kind of putting all the blame on the Epstein Barr virus. And I want to be careful about that. I mean, I think it's important to be aware of Epstein Barr virus and help your immune system manage the virus, just like all viruses. But it's not to put all the blame on the Epstein Barr virus. Really. The issue is in helping your body recover from stress so that your immune system can get back to managing the virus better again for you. And at the same time, when the immune system is doing a better job of managing viruses, it can also do a better job of not going into autoimmunity. So it's a lot of this balancing of the immune system, getting your immune system to protect you from the right things and not from yourself. We don't need to protect you from yourself, unless it's just that you're being hard on yourself, which definitely stop. Be gentle on yourselves. But that's a different thing. Okay, so let's see. Let me know if you guys have any questions or Am I missing anything.

Okay, here. You said your TSH was like 4. Yeah, so? So when you have a TSH at like, let's say 3.5 or 4, a lot of times in the blood work, then the doctor might say, oh, that's fine. Because for whatever reason, I don't know, we all need to just say, get Quest and LabCorp and these lab companies to change their reference range. But for some reason, on the printed lab work, the reference Range says up to 4.5 is normal or it's in the reference range. But that doesn't mean that it's the healthiest tsh. You really want it again, you want it, like, less. You know, between 1 and 2.5, I'd say maybe even 1 and 2 is probably best. Depends on your body. This is the other thing, is that TSH can really vary based on the person. So you want to test it over time so you really get to see your body's patterns. Your TSH might like to stay about a 2 or 2.5, and you feel fine, but it's a matter of having to check it over time. So you really start to understand your body's patterns. But in general, if it's like above a 4 or she's saying even a 5.6, then that right away says to me, okay, your brain, right? The TSH is what your brain thinks of your thyroid function. Your brain is thinking, this thyroid's not working as good as possible. But it's also important to remind you that thyroid function is not just from the thyroid gland. Thyroid function is you have to have that T4 converting to T3, and that happens outside of your thyroid gland. So we really need to look at your whole body. We need to be looking at your nutrient levels, your cortisol levels, your mitochondrial function. Do you have antibodies? Do you have leaky gut? There's a lot we need to look into to really help you get the most out of your thyroid gland. And so looking at the TSH is just the tip of the iceberg, but it's still important. Okay, so she's saying she takes Synthroid and Cytomel. Yeah. So let's talk about what do we do about the Hashimoto's antibodies and what are the different options for treatment? Because here's the thing, is there's so many options for addressing the thyroid. It can seem sometimes like there's one thing, there's Synthroid, and that's the most common medication prescribed for both low thyroid function and Hashimoto's. And some people will be on Synthroid for decades or most of their lifetime. And what the studies are showing, however, is that many people taking Synthroid daily.

Still have low thyroid symptoms, still are still not feeling well. Okay, so let me see. What are low thyroid symptoms? Let's go cover that. So thyroid symptoms, the one we often think about is fatigue. So if you're feeling more tired than usual. But of course, there's so many causes for low thyroid. I mean, there's so many causes for fatigue. So fatigue could be from anemia, fatigue could be from.

Low cortisol, fatigue could be from, you know, many, many different things we need to evaluate. But if, considering everything else has been handled and you have fatigue, maybe it's from a low thyroid function. There's also hair loss, which I've been hearing a lot about lately, because stress can also cause hair loss on its own. You know, when we're exposed to a lot of stress, it just kind of shocks our hair development. And you can have hair loss even weeks after the stress is gone. So hair loss is a common low thyroid symptom, but it's also caused by other things. Interestingly, some of the same things like stress can cause hair loss. Low iron can cause hair loss, but low iron and stress can also cause low thyroid. You see? So there's, there's these interconnections again that we have to address. Everything We. If you have, if you're in your blood work, if you have low iron, we need to address that because low iron can cause fatigue and hair loss, but low iron also causes low thyroid. Do you see what I mean? So we need to address that iron as a core beginning place. And when you test iron in the blood, by the way.

What you want to ask the doctor to test is called a ferritin F, E, R, R, I, T, I N ferritin. Because if you just test the iron in the blood, it tells us how much iron is floating around. But what we really want to know is how much iron storage do you have? And so I encourage you to check a ferritin, and you want your ferritin to be at least 50. So if your ferritin is under 50, that could be creating fatigue, hair loss, and low thyroid. So we, let's start there, right? Like, before we go into a whole bunch of other stuff, let's at least get your iron levels up, because what if that solves a lot of it, then, then you can just be like, yay, it was just, just because of low iron.

So, okay, so there you go. So we want. There's low, there's low energy hair loss. What are their symptoms? There's dry skin, there's constipation, there's weight gain. Some people experience more weight gain when they have low thyroid function. And there's many more. It could be joint pains, increased likelihood of joint injuries.

Reflexes, your reflexes can slow down. You might have even loss of your eyebrows, eyebrow hair. You know, sometimes you might be noticing these things as like, little minor right you may be like, oh, yeah, I'm having. I am a little bit lower energy. Oh, I have been having a hard time losing this five pounds. Oh, my bowels are a little more constipated, or my skin's a little more dry and you start to go, oh, my gosh, this could be my thyroid. So another one would be memory. If you feel like your brain's working a little slower than usual, and headaches is a common one, when you have low thyroid function, you're more likely to get headaches or migraines and, yeah, muscle aches, you know, like all over your body, not just one single joint or area, but like, if you're like, oh, my gosh, I'm just achy tired all the time. Okay. And for some of you, like I was saying, maybe you're taking Synthroid and the doctor is saying, oh, everything's fine, you're taking Centroid, but you still don't feel well. Then to me, I think we got to dig deeper. We got to go. Wait a minute. Maybe it's not just about the centroid. Because here's the thing with Centroid is it's just T4. It's not. Your body still has to turn it into T3 so you can swallow T4, but you're still depending on and counting on your body and your cells to turn it into T3 effectively. And if sometimes you may not even be measuring your T3, maybe you don't even realize, you didn't even know that you need to pay attention to that. So I would encourage you, for all of you taking Synthroid, now, ask for free T3 and free T4 so you can really find out how well is that syndroid converting? And then like she's saying, she's also taking Cytomel. Cytomel is T3. So now you're taking actual T3 hormone. Now, again, when this comes to Hashimoto's, the idea is one, if the Hashimoto's antibodies have damaged your thyroid gland, then we're using this thyroid hormone replacement to fill in for your. Some of your thyroid function, let's say.

Hmm, this is how I sort of think about it, you know. So Syndroid, a common dose of Synthroid is 75 micrograms. If your thyroid was doing 100% of the work, it would be equivalent to 300 micrograms of Syntroid. So you can figure when you're taking 75 micrograms of Synthroid, you're filling in not quite one third of the work. Your Thyroid is still doing at least two thirds of the work. And you're just filling in a little bit of this gap of what your thyroid's not doing. And that's the goal. That's the goal is we only want to fill in what your thyroid's not doing. We want to let your thyroid do as much work as it's done, still can. And so that's how we kind of think about the dosing. So again, when you're taking thyroid hormone, it's filling in for what your thyroid's not making. But it's also to some degree inhibiting the thyroid antibodies by signaling to your body, hey, you know, we're helping out here. And that the immune system doesn't have to be so activated around the thyroid gland. But here's the thing is still, you may have thyroid antibodies. So you want to measure your thyroid antibodies every so often and see, hey, if the thyroid antibodies are, I mean, if they're a little bit high, like say it's like a 30. That's not that high. But if your thyroid antibodies are over 100, you might be like, wow, I don't want those antibodies continually attacking my thyroid gland. Let me see, what else can I do? So one of you was asking about diet. What should you do with your diet related to helping with Hashimoto's? And since we're talking about gluten and how gluten can trigger these Hashimoto's antibodies, you guys are probably already guessing that I'm going to suggest you avoid gluten. That's a pretty to me after reading the research and I encourage you, if you like to read research, pull it up. Because once you read it, you're going to be like, okay, yeah, I'm going to avoid gluten. Because why eat a food that's very likely triggering these Hashimoto's antibodies that are going to damage your thyroid gland. It's like, okay, gluten is trouble, let's take the gluten out. Because then we're going to also be healing leaky gut. And all of that's going to help calm down your autoimmunity and so avoiding gluten. But I also suggest running a whole food panel. Do a whole. My favorite, as a lot of you know from listening to me, is an IgA and IgG antibody. See, these are antibodies too, IgA and IgG to your Foods 96 food panels. So we can see, are you reacting to dairy proteins like casein and whey? Are you reacting to egg whites? Are you reacting to different fruits and vegetables you might be eating. And the reason here is that when you're reacting to foods, it's inflammatory. So that's gonna trigger your immune system more toward autoimmunity. But also, if you're reacting to a lot of foods, that tells us the intestinal cells are leaky and we need to work on healing the leaky gut. So it's a test that tells you, oh, I need to work on healing leaky gut. Let me put that at the top of my to do list. And the supplements I'm going to take and the things I'm going to do on a daily basis to help let those intestinal cells catch up and heal the gaps between the cells so that you're not reacting to your foods. It's not about, to me, it's not about just avoiding all foods because then you just have a very restricted diet. It's about avoid the foods that are inflammatory while you heal leaky gut and then hopefully be able to reintroduce those foods into your diet in the long run. And definitely, if you want to hear more about leaky gut, be sure to look up one of my other.

Conversations like this, because we definitely, we covered that one a lot. And feel free to ask me questions because I'd be happy to cover it more.

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And let's see. So the other things you can do to help inhibit thyroid antibodies is to manage your cortisol. Right? So we need to measure the cortisol levels, which is either in saliva or urine, because this way you can do a urine sample or saliva sample the morning, the midday, the evening, the bedtime. So we really Know, where's your cortisol? Is it too high or too low at certain times of day? So then you'll. We can guide you exactly which nutrients and herbs to take to either raise your cortisol or lower your cortisol, depending on what kind of adjustment it needs. And as you address your cortisol, that's going to help with your thyroid function in general, but it's also going to help turn off the autoimmunity because the cortisol communicates with the immune system as well. And we want it to send a healthy signal to your immune system. We don't want it. We don't want the cortisol sending a stress signal that turns on autoimmunity.

Another nutrient that I feel like is important to mention related to Hashimoto's is selenium. Selenium is a really an antioxidant. Sometimes we almost kind of forget about it because we're paying attention to so many other nutrients. But selenium is often in a multivitamin. If you have a good multivitamin, it should have about 200 micrograms. And the research shows that between 200 and 400 micrograms of selenium per day can inhibit these thyroid antibodies or turn them off again, like great. Selenium doesn't have any side effects. It's very easy to take. You could get a separate selenium, like a selenium 200 or 400 microgram capsule to take daily. You could get it in combination. There's a lot of products that have basically all the nutrients and herbs that are good for the thyroid. Like iodine, for example, is used by the thyroid gland to make thyroid hormones. So it also uses tyrosine, something called tyrosine, which is a amino acid. And so when you look at a combination thyroid product, they'll often contain some iodine, some tyrosine and some selenium. And this is why, I mean, selenium is important for the conversion of the thyroid hormone, but it also helps inhibit these thyroid antibodies. And so that's, I feel like that's so, so amazing because you might decide, hey, okay, let me try avoiding gluten, let me try introducing selenium. And I'm going to go recheck my thyroid antibodies in a couple months and see how they're looking. Now, thyroid antibodies are a little bit variable, right, because there's so many things that affect them. But you can get a sense of like, is it generally on a downward trend? Then we know we're on the right track.

And then there's also herbs that can inhibit thyroid antibodies like ashwagandha. A lot of times we hear about ashwagandha as an herb that helps with cortisol. So that would be a good thing, too, right? As we talked about, we want to manage the cortisol, but ashwagandha also directly helps with managing the thyroid antibodies. So. Hi there. Thanks for saying hi. So these are some things you can, you know, that you can do one at a time or in a combination. And I definitely encourage you to work with a practitioner who is familiar with this and has helped a lot of people with this, because each case I work with over 20 years, I learn so much, and I feel like then we have this collective information about what's going to make the biggest difference, because otherwise you feel like you're trying things and you're not sure if it's going to be effective or not. Now, the other thing, in terms of thyroid hormone replacement, I call it thyroid hormone replacement, by the way, because again, we're just filling in the gap of your thyroid hormone. So if your, if your thyroid function is low, you might start with some diet changes. You might start by adding some of these nutrients and herbs. Definitely if you have low iron, you want to address that. If you had a lot of toxin exposure, you're going to want to address that. Like if you had mold exposure or even chlorine. By the way, if your water in your home has chlorine in it, chlorine can block the iodine, then you're not getting your good iodine for your thyroid. So I definitely recommend getting at least a chlorine water filter. Really better to get a really good water filter, even like a reverse osmosis water filter is what I have to filter out all the rest of the metals and toxins that can come into our water. But related to this conversation, I especially want to emphasize chlorine, because if you're exposed to chlorine, even in your shower water, it's going to inhibit the iodine for your thyroid. And in terms of iodine, because iodine can be quite the conversation related to the thyroid gland. The thing is that so many of us are low in iodine. I regularly measure iodine levels in blood work, and so many people are low. And it's because we don't get it very much in our diet. And unless you're having iodized salt, then you're probably not getting very much of it. Sea salt has some iodine, but a lot of us are low in iodine. And so, but a lot of times you'll hear people taking a lot of iodine, like 12 milligrams or more. And there the issue and the thing to be aware of is very high dose iodine in past medical history was used to inhibit the thyroid. So iodine is one of these nutrients where if you have too little, your thyroid is not going to work well. But if you have too much, your thyroid is not going to work well either. So it's not about just getting tons of iodine. What you want is you want to get the right amount of iodine to optimize your thyroid function. So it's really this kind of like, I always think of like Goldilocks story, where, you know, Goldilocks is like trying to find exactly the right chair and exactly the right oatmeal. And iodine is kind of like that. You want, you can't, you don't want to have too little because obviously we need iodine for our thyroid gland to work and make thyroid hormone. But you don't want way too much either because it could potentially inhibit your thyroid gland. And the thing is, is I find that, you know, as long as you stay in a pretty, you know, narrow, you know, nice window of your thyroid, I mean, you can take between iodine, the dosage range I would say is between, you know, something like 100 micrograms. Like if you look at a product or in your multivitamin, it might say 50 or 100 micrograms of iodine. And that's a pretty small amount. I think you're pretty safe taking that. I've never seen anyone go too high on taking 5, 50 or 100 micrograms or even 200 micrograms a day. And then you'll see other products where the iodine dose might be 6.25 milligrams. Now when we switch to milligrams, that means like 6,000 micrograms, right? So between 100 micrograms and 6,000 micrograms, that's a big, that's a big difference. But you're still probably in the safe range there. If you're taking 6,000 micrograms of iodine, especially if your levels are low.

And then some people even go to taking 12 milligrams of iodine. There's a standard of 12 or 12.5 milligrams. And some people, that's what's needed. But again, I would work with a practitioner to help you and to recheck your levels so they're not going too high either. But That's a little short story on iodine. And it's more related to general thyroid function, not as specific to Hashimoto's. But the thing with Hashimoto's is that you're still trying to get the most out of your thyroid gland. And so you want to manage the thyroid antibodies but you also are trying to manage getting the most out of your thyroid function. And then we come to these different thyroid hormone replacements. So say you, you've done all the diet changes, you keep doing that, you've done the nutrients, herbs, you've got that mastered, you've got that optimized. Then if you still find you need help with your thyroid function, you're going to start thinking about getting some external source of thyroid hormone to fill in the gap. I call it fill in the gap. And that could be some over the counter thyroid hormone. Like you can find products that have. Usually it's an animal source, either a pig or cow source of thyroid gland that gives you some actual thyroid hormone. You can find some that are over the counter. The problem is that it's just not a very specific dose. But you could start with it and recheck your levels and see, hey, maybe that's all you need is a little bit. And to be non specific or if you find that you're like oh no, that's, I tried that, I'm just still not getting what I need, then you may have to switch to a prescription form of thyroid hormone which means you would need to get it from a practitioner. And you, those are going to be either an animal source which would be like armor, nature, throid, or it's going to be a synthetic source which is like the syndroid cytomel, which means it's like a man made chemical form of the same T3, T4.

Some people who have Hashimoto's, I don't know the exact percentage, I would say it's relatively low. I think my guess would be maybe like 5% of people with Hashimoto's.

Potentially could start having an immune response to the animal derived thyroid gland. So it's something to keep in mind if this is your first time taking an animal derived thyroid hormone. If you start to feel worse or your thyroid antibodies go up, it's possible that your immune system is now trying to protect you from the thyroid that you're swallowing. If it was from an animal source. Right. So just know that it's a possibility. But it's pretty low. I've only seen it a handful of times in 20 years, so it can't be that common. But if you feel worse, like I always say, if you ever feel worse with anything, then stop and evaluate. There's gotta be something that's going on that we need to pay attention to. You shouldn't feel worse. In fact, if you start supporting your thyroid with any of these things we're talking about, the way you would know if you supported it too much is you would feel overstimulated. Right. Like if you do too much thyroid hormone or too much, even too much tyrosine, it's gonna make you feel like you drank a pot of coffee. You're gonna be like, zoom, zoom, zoom, and probably anxious and maybe can't sleep and maybe diarrhea. So if you feel worse, then we know, okay, we got the dose wrong. We need to adjust it a bit until we get it just right. And it can take, you know, some adjustments. You may have to start and then recheck. Usually you would recheck within four to six weeks of making a change, usually by four to six weeks. The standard is six weeks. You should expect that in your blood work. It'll reflect what you've been doing over the past six weeks. So pick something, you know, go, okay, I'm gonna do this for the next six weeks and I'm gonna get my blood work done. You don't have to wait three months or six months. That's too long because now you might be not feeling well and you're waiting three months. Might as well check it at six weeks and go, okay, where am I now? Okay, now let me make a couple more adjustments in whatever doses you're taking, check it again in six weeks. So you can, you know, you can either ask your doctor to, or practitioner to order these panels for you, or you can. There's labs where you can order these tests yourself. If you're trying to help, do this on your own. But I really, again, encourage you to work with a practitioner who can help you because it's a lot of information to take in and a lot of figuring out. And it just helps to have someone guide you.

Let's see. So that's the gist on the thyroid hormone there. So again, there's the glandular derived. And the thing with these natural thyroids like Armour and Nature Throid.

You want to also look at the other ingredients. So when you look up Armour, for example, you're going to see it has a big, long list of ingredients. And when you look up other forms like nature throids, you're going to see it has, like, three or four ingredients, because some people react to the other ingredients. Certainly, like any medication, if you react to gluten, you want to make sure there's no gluten in your medication. I don't know if any of you do this normally. For other things you take, make sure they didn't put in some gluten or put in some sugar or put in some. Maybe you react to the coloring or the fillers or the other things in the pill. You see what I mean? So it's important to consider that because for some people, especially of autoimmunity and sensitivities in your body, you might actually react to something else in the pill. And that's one reason that sometimes people prefer. If you're really that sensitive, it may be better for you to get more of a synthetic form or say what a compounding pharmacy could make for you, where they put the T4 and T3 in a very hypoallergenic capsule with hypoallergenic other ingredients. Then you're gonna have the least likelihood of reacting to whatever's in there. And again, by that point, you're gonna be needing to work with a practitioner who can help you do that. But just know that there's, you know, there's not. It's not one size fits all. And there are so many ways to, you know, to tweak this to get it to match for you. And also know that your body can change. Like, believe me, I know we sometimes wish we could just, like, solve this once and for all and get on with our lives. But with thyroid and Hashimoto's and autoimmunity, it reminds us. It gives us the opportunity to remind us that we're living beings. We're responding to our environment, we're responding to our foods and our toxin exposure and so many other factors. And so autoimmunity is something you want to kind of be aware of and keep an eye on all the time. And same with your thyroid. It could, you know, something shifts in your life, and all of a sudden your thyroid dose might change. So just know that ahead of time and don't get frustrated. Don't feel hard on yourself or frustrated with your body. I would just say that's normal. It's very rare that a person would have one dose that stays that same exact dose for the rest of their life. That, to me, that would be, like, super rare. It just. It's something that shifts and you'll start to learn your body. Oh, I have some patients where a certain Time of the year, you know, every spring their dose changes for a couple months and then it changes back. So you just need to. Or maybe you go through a surgery recently. A patient I was talking to had a breast implant removal surgery explant they call it. And her thyroid did a little whole shakeup during that time period. But then after a couple months it came back to its original place. So it's important to just know that the thyroid is kind of responding to what else is going on in your body. Maybe some of you can relate to that. And let me see us get to some of your questions. You guys are getting a good bunch of questions here. I love it. Okay, so this question is, my son started out Hashimoto's with a TPO of 65 and went to gluten free and dairy free for a year and saw their integrative doctor figured out some other things. They figured out about low blood sugar and pots, which is like a low blood pressure situation. They did some more nutrition.

They figured out that peanut butter was a trigger for him.

And started Nature throid and his TPO came down to 10. Oh my gosh. So this is a great. She's giving us a really great testimonial for her son. I don't know how old he is or was at that point in time because this can happen at any age. By the way, Hashimoto's can happen to a teenager or when you're 40 or when you're 60. So it doesn't. It's not really age and it's more common in women. But it can also happen in men. As she's saying, this is her son. And a lot of times it gets missed in men. I have to say, practitioners just tend not to really think about thyroid with men because it's a little more common in women. But that means we're more likely to miss it in the men. So.

If you're a man who's listening, it's important for you too. And if you have a man in your life who you think this might be an issue for, then let them know, hey, let's check out your thyroid because I love this. Thank you for sharing. Your testimonial for your son was that they made these. They got to address the root causes, which is how I'm reading this. They really started to understand his food triggers, how to balance blood sugar and switch to the nature throid, which is the animal source form of T3 and T4. And his thyroid antibodies dropped down to 10, which is I think right at the cutoff. You know, basically that's a negative in my book.

I cannot lose weight. No matter what I do, I am sure I may have leaky gut. Yes, that's the thing is when you have leaky gut, it also makes it more likely you're going to have weight gain. And so addressing leaky gut, that's why I consider it such a central important thing for all of us to be aware of and address. Because by the time you address leaky gut, which by the way is caused by stress, so it's really, to me, it's a part of stress recovery. But when you address leaky gut, not only then do you absorb your nutrients better, you calm down your immune system, you're going to help inflammation drop and you're going to help the Hashimoto's decrease and then you're going to help with your good bacteria in your gut. So yes, addressing leaky gut is huge. What does an extremely high TPO indicate? So when the TPO is very high, like, you know, above a hundred, I mean, sometimes they could even be a couple hundred or five hundred. It just means that the immune system is making a lot of antibodies. You know, the immune system is really trying to protect you from the thyroid gland. And the thing that's interesting is that I can't say that there's a direct connection. Like you might think that the more antibodies, the more damage to the thyroid. But it's not necessarily like sometimes people can have just a little bit elevated thyroid antibodies and they still have a lot of damage to their thyroid. So don't think of it so much. You can't really say that the number of antibodies equates to the damage to your thyroid. I would just say that the number of antibodies tells us about how activated is your immune system around this. And all the more reason to try to do some things to help calm it back down again. Stress. Yes. She says, oh yes, I've been under a lot of stress lately. And absolutely, you know, it's a huge factor. And that's why I always feel like if we come back to that, you see, I tend to look for the things that if we address, like we were talking about with leaky gut, we address leaky gut, we can have a big ripple effect to benefit a lot of things if we address the stress. And again, not that we're going to try to eliminate stress, I mean, stress is part of life. But if we can help your.

Body get your cortisol back on track even though you still have stress, it's going to help. It's going to help your immune system. It's going to help your thyroid weight gain. Yes, we talked about that. And fibromyalgia. Yeah. A lot of times people.

You may be diagnosed with or be told that you have fibromyalgia, when really it could be that your thyroid function is not optimized.

Does low estrogen effect and contribute to Hashimoto's? Definitely there can be.

Through menopause, when estrogen levels shift, there can be definitely changes in thyroid function. There is a communication that happens with estrogen and the thyroid gland. And so it's an important time to be aware of it and to go, okay, let's also make sure that the estrogen progesterone is managed. And also during menopause, it may be a time where we have to reevaluate and readjust your doses to really address it. You know, kind of match up. So any change in your body, I love that you're bringing up estrogen. Anytime there's a change, even if it's an estrogen change, is another good, important time to reassess and make sure you're doing everything you can.

She's saying she had a total hysterectomy and wasn't sure how the effects contribute to Hashimoto's. Yeah, I would definitely say any kind of surgery, recheck your levels because your body could definitely. You know, so much of the time we were taught to think of our body in these separate parts, but our body is not a bunch of separate parts. It's all communicating. So if one thing changes, even if, say, your insulin changes or your estrogen changes or, you know, something else happens in your life, you move across the country, it could potentially shift your thyroid function and the Hashimoto. So definitely. I love that you guys are starting to think this way and wonderful. Your doctor checks yours every six months. Yeah. Once you are stable, once you kind of feel like, okay, I have a good sense and I feel good, then you can recheck your levels every six months to a year. There was someone on Instagram asking me about thyroid nodules, and I think that's a really good question because a lot of people who have Hashimoto's also have what are called thyroid nodules. Nodules are like little cysts basically in the thyroid gland. And they could be tiny. They could be anywhere from like a millimeter to a couple centimeters. And they're most often benign.

Oh, thank you for. Yeah, yeah, find me on Instagram for sure.

The. These thyroid nodules are benign, but they, you know, if you have any thyroid nodules, and usually the doctor might find them by doing an ultrasound of the thyroid, and they might say, oh, you have these little nodules, they call them. And then they may want to do a biopsy, especially if the nodules are growing, because thyroid cancer. The way we kind of really start to worry about thyroid cancer is if there's any growth that's growing actively, then we go, oh, gosh, we got to do a biopsy and make sure if this is thyroid cancer, if it is thyroid cancer, then they would remove that thyroid, usually the whole thyroid gland. In which case, if the thyroid gland is removed or even partially removed, like some people will have a thyroid nodule and have part of their thyroid removed, then there's definitely some low thyroid function that we fill in with these different approaches we've been talking about. But in general, like, for thyroid nodules, it's very common to have thyroid nodules that are not cancer. And they might just be hanging out there in your thyroid your whole life. They don't necessarily cause a problem unless they're really big. And then they might just be taking up space or pushing on areas. But not everybody with Hashimoto's has nodules. But sometimes, sometimes they're there. And it's important to just know that and have an ultrasound and check in every so often and make sure they're not changing. And actually, these same treatments, like when we talk about iodine, iodine can help to decrease thyroid nodules, and so can some of these other things we're talking about, like diet changes. And, you know, helping protect your thyroid can help prevent nodules in the first place and help prevent the nodules from growing. Okay, so I'm glad you brought up the nodules piece of this. Can you have a hidden thyroid problem if your T3 and T4 is normal? Yeah. So even when you look at. When you test a free T3 and free T4, there'll be a range. And you want to be, I would say, more like the middle to the high end of the range. If your free T3 and free T4 are way at the low end of the range, then there still may be an issue and we may need to address it, especially because we can address it using diet and nutrients and herbs. And so if it's just a slight shift, then might as well, I would say start with diet, nutrients, and herbs and look at your other factors. Is it related to nutrients like iron? Is it related to adrenals and cortisol? So, you know, if you have just a very slight thyroid abnormality, there's so many ways we can help it get back on track, hopefully without having to replace any thyroid hormone. But yeah, be careful because sometimes the blood tests say normal, but it may still be a factor. You want to take everything into account. Another approach that I'm really excited about for helping with the thyroid function and thyroid antibodies is peptide therapy from Dr. Cavinson in Russia. The Cavinson peptides he researched and developed over the past 50 years, there's peptides for all different parts of the body because they're specific to the tissue and what they do is a reset at a genetic level to help that tissue go back to what I call like a factory settings. It goes back to optimal functioning of that tissue. So I'm really excited about the thyroid peptides because if they can help our thyroid go back to optimal functioning even when we've been exposed to stress and even when we've been exposed to thyroid antibodies, that's pretty amazing. And I'm already seeing results where patients had their blood work done before starting the Cabenzin peptide for thyroid and then taking it for six weeks, eight weeks, rechecking the levels. And we've seen improvement in the TSH, the free T3, and a decrease in the thyroid antibodies even within that short period of time of using the thyroid peptide, which is called thyrogen. So that's a very exciting new addition to helping with low thyroid function and Hashimoto's and it can be used side by side with the other nutrients and approaches that we've been discussing. Thank you so much for joining me and I look forward to seeing you again next time.

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