Feeding Our Kids and Thyroid Health

Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to my weekly house call. Your chance to ask me your questions. Now we're mixing things up a bit so that we can cover even more topics and feature even more questions. In today's show, we're going to discuss what to eat while breastfeeding and also how to feed your kids because they're picky. We're going to talk about Hashimoto's disease, which is an autoimmune thyroid condition. And we're going to talk about how many doctors don't do the right thyroid tests and which ones to do. All right, so let's take a look at our first question, which is a video submission. Now this question is from Robin.

Hi, I have a question for the Home Call series. My question is maybe two parts. One, for young children. I would like to instill good eating habits in my kids. Young, and they are young, they're one and a half and three and a half and just looking for some basic suggestions or recipes for easy kind of to go snacks or treats. That seems to be an area that I'm really struggling in. Pretty good eaters, adventurous eaters, but I just seem to be kind of coming to a standstill as to different snacks and things like that for them. And then the other question I had is just if there's any special considerations that would need to be taken into account during pregnancy or breastfeeding when following the Pegan diet. That's it. Thank you so much. Bye bye.

All right. The question basically is what snacks do you recommend for young kids and what, what modifications to my diet do I make when breastfeeding or following the Pegan diet? Well, that's a great question. It reminds me of a story when I was doing a 10 day detox at a high school or junior high school, I think, and the teacher said, well, do we need to get a consent for kids to eat this way to eat the food that I was recommending? And I said, well, maybe we should get a consent for kids to eat Coca Cola and Doritos and processed foods because we know those are deadly. But do we really need to consent for kids to eat vegetables and chicken and fish and nuts and seeds and eggs? I mean, it was just the funniest thing I ever heard. Now the thing about kids is that they learn to eat whatever you feed them. Kids in Japan eat raw fish, right? Kids in Indonesia eat Indonesian food, right? Kids in, I don't know, Siberia eat seal and whale. So I think that we have to realize that our kids Learn from us and what's in the house. And once they get triggered with sugar, it's a bad thing. So I encourage people to feed their kids real, whole, fresh foods from the beginning. They should be eating what you're eating now. Maybe they don't like spicy food, but actually there are kids who eat a lot of spicy foods. Kids live in Korea, eat kimchi, you know. So I encourage you to try to feed your kids real food from the beginning. But the key thing is, you know, you need kid friendly foods and there's a lot of kid friendly snacks, kid friendly meals. I encourage you to check on the link below. Now, in terms of recommendations for breastfeeding and the pegan diet and for while you're pregnant, it's just sort of amazing to me that we should be asking, well, is it okay to eat whole real food while you're pregnant? It's not okay to eat processed food. It's not okay to eat junk. It's not okay to eat a ton of carbs and sugar because you get gestational diabetes. And it's important to eat omega 3 fats to eat good fats because the baby's brain is made up of fat, you know, so we need to actually feed our kids for whole food and we need to feed the mother's whole food. So there really are no modifications. In fact, that's what you want to be eating if you're pregnant. So thank you so much for that question. And I think most people listening will realize that it's just common sense. Now the next question is from Mimi, from a Twitter account. Okay, so Mimi says, what is the root cause of Hashimoto's and how can we address the underlying issues? Now that's a great question because most regular docs will just give you the label, say, okay, you have antibodies, an autoimmune disease against your thyroid. Take thyroid, end of story. But the truth is, in functional medicine, we ask, why not just what's the name of your disease, but why do you have the disease in the first place? And Hashimoto's is an autoimmune disease. In fact, it's the most common autoimmune disease. And it causes low thyroid function, which can cause a lot of low grade symptoms, fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, depression, low sex drive, dry skin, hair loss, cracked nails, constipation. I mean, all these things are people think of as normal. They're really not. They're often resulting from autoimmune disease from the thyroid. Now what I suggest is to look for causes. And one of the most common is gluten. Also low grade viral infections. Also toxins in the environment like heavy metals. Also gut issues like leaky gut and yeast issues, all can cause Hashimoto's, even nutritional deficiencies. So when I'm working with a patient, I look at all those factors and deal with those. Gluten free probably is one of the biggest. I've actually written a lot about this. In fact, I've written an e book called the Ultra Thyroid Solution where I go through this whole story of what happens and how to fix it and what nutrients to eat and what to not eat and what supplements to take. It's really comprehensive. Even what thyroid medication you might need. And I've also written a lot of blogs. One is called when this master metabolism basically fails you, you can use that and I encourage you to check it out and learn about how you can actually fix your thyroid. Even if you need medications, what are the right ones to take? What are the wrong ones? And you can solve this problem and get healthy and feel good. So the next question is from Sweetness. Now, she tweeted a question. She says, doctor needs to test my thyroid correctly. How can I ask my doctor for the right thyroid test without offending them? Well, first of all, your job should not be to worry about about offending your doctor. They're there to help you and learn with you and answer your questions. So I would never worry about offending your doctor. And if your doctor gets offended, I would probably find a new doctor because your doctor needs to be your partner, not an adversary you're afraid of. So here's the deal. When you're doing thyroid testing, you need to get the right tests for thyroid health. Now, most doctors just check something called tsh, which means thyroid stimulating hormone that comes from your brain. It tells your thyroid to work better. But that is only telling us part of the story. They don't check the actual thyroid hormones like T4 or T3, and they don't check antibodies. Now, on my patients, I check TSH like everybody else. I check free T3, which is the active hormone, and I check free T4, which is the hormone that gets made by your thyroid that then gets converted to T3. But I also often check thyroid antibodies, and I can't tell you how many times I found people with a normal tsh, but abnormal antibodies, meaning the body's getting attacked and the thyroid's getting attacked by these antibodies that are maybe reacting to gluten or viruses or metals or something else. So I make sure that I do all those tests if I'm evaluating the thyroid. If you don't get a doctor who's willing to do that, I would encourage you to find another doctor. So TSH free T4, free T3, and thyroid antibodies, and that will help you figure out what to do with your thyroid? Well, that's all the time we have today for questions. If you like this video, be sure to share with your friends and family on Facebook or Twitter. You can even call them and tell them in person. Imagine that. Now, if you have any questions, you can tweet them to me or send your video submissions to drhyman.com and maybe next week I'll make a house call to you. Thanks for watching.