Thyroid Hormone Production Contributors

So this chart is really cool because it will show you over on the left. All these things are what prevent you from making your T4 or converting it to reverse T3. The number one thing, Cortisol. So cortisol directly tells the thyroid. Oh, put on the brakes. And then infections, trauma, radiation, medications, fluoride, any halide. So if you ever took chemistry class, you remember the halogen column on the periodic table had iodine, fluoride, chlorine, bromine. They are all chemically very similar. And so, like, for me, I swam a ton when I was a teenager, and so I had excess chlorine exposure all of the time that was pushing iodine out and preventing me from making my thyroid hormone properly. I used to get fluoride swishes in school as a young child, and that was also competing with my iodine. Many of you, if you're over the age of 65, you came from the lead generation. There was lead in everything. It was just rampant. It was in all the paint, all the gasoline, all the house supplies. It seeped into the water systems, and all that lead got stored in your bones. And so something I see is when women go into menopause, all of a sudden they don't have the estrogen protecting their bones. Their bones start turning over and breaking down more, and that lead gets released that had been stored there for 50 years. And so all of a sudden, these women are getting thyroid dysfunction. And their doctor's like, I don't know, your thyroid is just failing you. You just need thyroid medication. That is absolutely not what's going on. They're being exposed to this heavy metal lead. So somebody mentioned bromine. Yes, it's in hot tubs. And. And what's even worse, you guys roaming is in our food. They add it to things, all our processed foods. It's like really high in Mountain Dew as a preservative because they remove the good stuff and they add in this bromine to preserve the chemical structure of it. And so again, the diet is affecting it. Bromine's really high in boxed grains, like cereal, crackers, pastas, thing like that. So that's all the stuff I lived on. Like, just check the box. I was destroying my thyroid every which way I turned when I was young. So low calorie diet. That's a huge reason we as women make too much reverse T3. That is why the biggest loser, once they lost all the weight, they gained it all back because their thyroid said, oh, my gosh, she's starving us to death. We. We better just make reverse T3 from now on and put the foot on the brake. So it's really important to make sure you get those feast days in. You cannot just eat low calorie all the time. And over on the right, you're going to see that you actually need multiple vitamins. You need tyrosine, which is an amino acid from protein. You need iodine and iron and zinc and selenium to even make thyroid hormone. So. So sometimes people develop hypothyroidism just because they don't have enough vitamins and nutrition in their diets, or they don't convert it to T3 because they don't have enough zinc or selenium. It's really common to get zinc deficient if you don't have enough stomach acid to absorb your foods, or the cell, like I said, cannot hear the hormone signals. And vitamin A deficiency is a really common reason for that. So if you. You aren't producing enough bile, you're not absorbing your fats, you're not getting enough vitamin A absorption that could be affecting your thyroid as well. I wanted to share a story of a patient, Stacy. She was 42. She had gained 80 pounds with her last baby at the age of 40, and she couldn't get it off. So her OB had diagnosed her with hypothyroidism, put her on Synthroid, and she continued to feel terrible. She just was exhausted and couldn't lose the weight. So she found a naturopath. They switched her to Armor Thyroid, which has a little bit of T3 medication in it. They kept increasing her doses, but nothing was shifting. Nothing was really helping. So sometimes these are the answers and sometimes they're not. But Stacy heard me on a podcast talking about thyroid, and so she got an appointment to see me. We did a complete thyroid panel and some stool testing and realized that she had Hashimoto's. Her thyroid gland was actually being attacked by her own immune system. And until you stop that attack, the thyroid can't work. The cells can't stop being inflamed to use the hormones that you're taking. And so a lot of times we chase these doses of thyroid hormone, and we think we just haven't found the right dose yet. That's not the answer. So for her, she needed to remove gluten out of her diet. 100% gluten has a protein in it that looks like a thyroid protein. So you get something called molecular mimicry. Every time you eat gluten, your immune system says, oh, there we go again. Let's Attack. And it also attacks your thyroid because it's confused. So we have to stop the attack. We have to remove the trigger that is causing your immune system to be angry and confused. And that is when you can actually shift how your thyroid is functioning. So if you don't get this full picture, you can really get a skewed sense of what's going on. You need to know, are you making enough? Are you converting it? Are you making Too much reverse T3? And is your thyroid being attacked? If you don't have all those answers, then you're not going to make any headway. And then, like I pointed out, you have to replace these vitamins and minerals or these processes cannot happen. Okay, I have a product, Thyro Lift. It's to, like, target those specifically. You have to heal that cell membrane inflammation, which is usually coming from your gut. And oftentimes we have to change your prescription medication. We need to add in some T3 to block that reverse T3 from doing what it's doing or. Or change things up. So say you're on Synthroid, which is a T4 only medication, and you wonder why you don't feel any better. Your doctor checks TSH and free T4. All that tells me is that, in fact, you took your medicine. So we measured your T4 level, which is the amount of medicine in your system, and that the medicine told the brain that you took your medicine. It literally tells me nothing about what your body's doing with that thyroid hormone. It's not helpful whatsoever to get a TSH and a free T4, especially on hormone replacement. It's a false sense of security that everything's fine. So when. That's why women say, I don't feel fine, and their doctor says they're crazy because they're not understanding this piece of it.