What Happens When People Lower Iodine?

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From Facebook asks what happens when people lower iodine? Hey, it's JJ and today I've got my longtime friend Dr. Alan Christensen, aka Dr. C with me to answer this question. He's the perfect guy to answer it because he has been deep diving into iodine and its relationship to thyroid in his latest book the Thyroid Reset Diet. He's a board certified naturopathic endocrinologist, New York Times best selling author and big time athlete, including the popular sport of mountain unicycling. Yes, really. We'll be right back with the answer. Stay with us.

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I've treated thyroid disease for 25 years, give or take a bit, and these last several years, it's been more exciting than ever. And as far as the new possibilities that have shown up, researchers started really digging in deep starting around 2007, and their work has just now been emerging. The perspectives we have about what causes thyroid disease, what can help it, it's all change, but it has yet to really reach the common understandings and common practices. It turns out that thyroid disease is much more reversible than we thought. So some of this got going by observing people who were on low iodine diets. Iodine diets like that are done because people get scans done, and also they get treatments that need their thyroid to suck up a lot of iodine. They need their thyroid to be hungry for iodine, for the treatments and the scans to work well. And in preparation, they were put on diets of several weeks in which their iodine intake was restricted as much as possible. It was noticed that many saw big improvements to thyroid function during that dietary process, that their symptoms would get better, their blood levels would improve. And this prompted researchers to do some well organized clinical trials. So we've now had three big studies done on hypothyroidism, Hashimoto's thyroiditis, and subclinical hypothyroidism. And with these studies, the general format has been people have been taken with that type of thyroid disease and then randomized into two groups. One group is just observed and given no treatment and no special instructions. The other group is put on a low iodine diet. The targets vary. They're generally under 100 micrograms per day. Between 80 and 100 is often the upper limit. And they are then monitored. So what's happened is that in these settings, people see their thyroid function improve and come back to normal a really big percent of the time. In one of the representative studies that looked at Hashimoto's, people who were in the study had had thyroid disease for an average of four years, and they all had extremely low levels. So in terms of details for that, their TSH scores, which are backwards indicators of thyroid status, were averaging 14.1. Now, to put perspective on that, the normal range is 0.4 to 4.5. So they were more than threefold above the normal range. Remember, TSH is backwards, so it means they were Badly low, you know, three times above normal. They were way outside of range. And yeah, they'd had thyroid disease about four years. They were not on treatment for it. They were not on thyroid medication. And over the course of three months, 78.3% of the participants had normal thyroid function, again by just the diet in three months. And nothing like that happened in the control group. This wasn't some kind of a fluke where it happened to all these people. It was just those on the diet. Now, some things that we do know is that not everyone responds like that. You know, not everyone did in those studies. Of those that didn't respond, however, most fell into one of two categories. So one category is that they did respond, but they didn't yet get normal. So what do I mean by that? Well, many people, even though the average TSH was 14, which is already high enough, many people had TSH scores that were much higher than that. Some were 50, some were 100. That was not uncommon. So those that were that high, almost all of them had their TSH scores drop by half or more. But within the three month timeframe, they were not yet back to normal. And it doesn't mean they weren't getting better. And the researchers themselves said that given more time, we would likely see more people achieve normal levels. But the worst of the worst didn't get there yet. Now, the other big category of non responders were looked at to see their iodine excretion levels. And the idea there was just to gauge, you know, how well they were avoiding iodine. And it turned out that almost all the non responders who weren't in that category of really high scores that were improving, they were not at the therapeutic target for iodine, meaning that they weren't following instructions, or perhaps the instructions weren't thorough enough for them. But there was still a lot of iodine they were being exposed to. But nearly everyone else, they got better, they responded. Now, we do know things are different for those who are on thyroid medication. And we do know that nothing works perfectly for everyone. But a very high percent of people with thyroid disease can see their thyroid function improve from this approach. Now, this is my main focus in the Thyroid Reset Diet. I put this out into a system that anyone can follow. The important point I always like to stress is that if you're on thyroid medication, please do that with the guidance of your doctor, because if your thyroid gets better, you'll need a change to your medication. Without that, you can get too much. But this is a great opportunity for thyroid function to get better by itself, and many can see their symptoms get better, and some can also see them no longer need medication.

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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