Is Iodine Good or Bad?

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Iodine Is It Good or Bad? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert, and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Jason from Facebook asks, is iodine good or bad?

Hmm.

Oh, I've got the perfect person to answer this question. He is deconstructing iodine and showing how it impacts your thyroid in his new book, the Thyroid Reset Diet. Yes, I've got Dr. Alan Christensen and known as Dr. C with me to answer this question. He's a board certified naturopathic endocrinologist and New York Times bestselling author. And he's from Minnesota. You might see it and hear it in his accent here. 24 years ago, he fell in love with his awesome wife Kieran at first sight and they decide to get married on their first date. It's just so sweet. We'll be right back with the answer. Stay with us.

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This is a really good question. The simple answer is, yes, it is good or bad. So, no. We need iodine for thyroid function. It is an essential nutrient and it's not a common outcome anymore. But it is possible that one could get too little. And if one had too little iodine, the thyroid would be unable to make thyroid hormone. It's been thought that iodine may have other jobs in the body as well, that it might play other roles, but so far, none have been detected. It seems that's the only one essential role that it plays. And that's pretty weird. If you were to name any other nutrient you could think of, there are dozens and in many cases, hundreds of important roles that they play within the body. But nope, not for iodine. It plays just one. Now, the paradox is that it can also be harmful. Now, this is also true of other nutrients, but not in ways that really are as relevant. So vitamin C, for example, you can take too much and you can get diarrhea. There may be a possible tiny risk of kidney stones at high doses, but these are really not big problems. They don't lead to lasting issues, and they don't really affect that many people. And similar things could be said of the bad side of most other nutrients. But with thyroid disease, it's really different. So what happens with iodine is that because it just has one role to play in the body, and because the amounts of it are so infinitesimal, it's concentrated. So. So every speck that gets in your blood is highly concentrated within your thyroid. Well, that's great, but the pitfall here is that when it concentrates, if you get a lot in your body, you can concentrate too much in your thyroid. And so to prevent that, a high amount of iodine makes your thyroid shut off. You actually quit doing things with your thyroid. And if you keep getting too much, it can cause the gland to get down, damaged. So the bizarre thing is that too little iodine is one of the more common causes of thyroid disease, but the most common cause is too much iodine. So what happens is that every single person, there's a point at where if you kept lowering and lowering and lowering their iodine, they would be deficient and they would get thyroid disease. And for every single person, if you kept raising and raising and raising their iodine, there'd be a point at which it would be too much. And the first signs of harm would be impairments to thyroid function. If you kept raising it, it would damage the kidneys and the liver. It's actually fatal at overdose amounts. But the first signs of harm are abnormal thyroid function. So everyone has a range, but for some people, that range is narrower. And it turns out that the genes making people susceptible to thyroid disease do so by making them more susceptible to a narrower range of iodine, meaning that they can easily get too much, more so than someone else could. And it turns out that we have different ancestry backgrounds, and some of us, the bulk of our ancestors were in coastal areas where iodine was abundant and our body got used to dealing with the occasional excess. Others were not like that. When a lot of our ancestors were in areas that weren't coastal, they were more inland, more mountainous, more by lakes. And the genes that did well, there were genes that could run well on the tiniest little speck of iodine, but that variation was vulnerable to high amounts because it just didn't happen. They weren't really calibrated for it. So when someone that has the genes to do well in a low iodine environment is exposed to higher amounts, they get thyroid disease. And it turns out that those high amounts are not very high. They're amounts that are pretty common that people can reach even in the modern world. So, yeah, this individuality makes it to where slight variations can be an issue and even fluctuations. So even if you're staying inside that healthy window, but your levels fluctuate a lot, that can also be a trigger for thyroid disease. You know, we saw this in Denmark. So in the year 2000, Denmark was the last major industrial nation to fortify their salt with iodine. And they did it perfectly. They went from a low amount up by an average of 50 micrograms to an appropriate amount. Yet for 16 years that they tracked it, they saw an average annual increase of thyroid disease by about 50%. So that's the paradox of iodine is that too little is harmful, too much is harmful, and big fluctuations are harmful. So that's why I say that, yes, it is good or bad. The amounts are exacting.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetojay.com.

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