Lots of thyroid problems
WELL, WELL, WELL
Connie Howard / health@vueweekly.com
Are you getting enough ...iodine?
This week I learned that the most common kind of liver disease isn’t alcohol-related cirrhosis (yay!), but fatty liver disease (which sounds equally unappealing).
And while alcohol-related liver disease is on the decline, fatty liver disease is on the rise—half of us are overweight and at risk. I also learned that our bodies can show serious distress in as little as two weeks of abuse—a good reason to pass on the fries and baked goodies in the cafeteria and get out for a walk today.
Not that obsession with thin is good either—weight categories and fat indexes are a little arbitrary and can be misleading and very disheartening (I once saw the term “obese” on my chart in a doctor’s office, back when I was a still a size eight and might’ve had three pounds of excess weight—what was that about?) And being disheartened can lead to giving up—or, on the other end of the spectrum, to the more-common-than-you-think and devastating problem of anorexia.
Health is the goal, not a particular size or number on the scale. And since I left you paranoid about the effects of soybean oil on our thyroids last week, and since our thyroids play a major role in metabolism and weight, here’s a little more (and hopefully more positive) on that.
An off-balance thyroid can usually be easily corrected with iodine supplementation. Now before you go nuts and remind me that it’s dangerous to ingest too much iodine, and that we in North America get plenty in our diets and that we can’t be deficient because we use iodized salt, hear me out.
Many of us, despite iodized salt, are either suffering with an off-balance thyroid (hypo- or hyper-), or are being treated for one—one in 10 women by age 50 and one in five by age 60, according to estimates by experts at Harvard. And in my teensy world, it’s just about everyone I know. Seriously.
Average blood levels of iodine are apparently down over the past 30 years, and thyroid cancer rates are up. I’m thinking that our modern world has (once again) thrown a few little wrenches into the thyroid health picture.
There are wrenches like iodine-depleted soil, and bromine in our bread, which replaced iodine as a dough conditioner in the 1980s (a slice of bread apparently used to contain 140 mcg of iodine, almost the current recommended daily intake). Then there’s fluoride in our water and chloride in our salt (all in the same family of chemicals as iodine, chemicals that compete with iodine absorption). Or how about mercury and radiation and pesticides and endocrine-disrupting chemicals of all kinds?
Soy, by the way, does increase iodine requirements, particularly if you’re using soy as a major protein source and eating a lot of commercially prepared soybean oil based salad dressings. The health benefits seen in Asian diets that include soy is what got us onto soy in the first place, but we’ve overlooked the fact that the high iodine content of their diets counter what they take in. And then we, in true North American style, went totally overboard with soy products, often using much more than they ever have in Asia (and in harder to digest forms), not to implicate Big Soy or anything.
So since it is impossible (and not even desirable) to avoid all iodine-disrupting substances (cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, flax, sweet potatoes, beans and corn are also iodine-inhibiting, but too nutritious to pass on), increasing iodine intake is an option. And while too much of a good thing (as always) truly can be bad, levels much higher than our typical intake (and much higher than the Health Canada recommended daily allowance of 150 mcg) can work wonders in alleviating both hypo- and hyperthyroidism.
Thyroid disorders and low iodine intakes are also associated with higher incidence of breast cancer. Japanese women, who consume very high doses of iodine by Western standards (something like 12.5 mg/day rather than our roughly 125 mcg/day), tend not to get breast cancer. And incidence of breast cancer in American women 30 years ago, when iodine consumption was twice as high as it is now, was much lower than it is today—rates have gone up as iodine consumption has gone down.
And besides fixing most cases of hyper- and hypothyroidism and reducing our risk of breast cancer, research has shown that iodine supplementation also alleviates fibrocystic breast disease, fibromyalgia, obesity, menopausal symptoms and high blood pressure. It lowers insulin requirements in diabetics, and improves heart, liver and brain function.
But I’ve opened a can of worms with that. Better close it, at least for now.
Connie Howard / health@vueweekly.com
Are you getting enough ...iodine?
This week I learned that the most common kind of liver disease isn’t alcohol-related cirrhosis (yay!), but fatty liver disease (which sounds equally unappealing).
And while alcohol-related liver disease is on the decline, fatty liver disease is on the rise—half of us are overweight and at risk. I also learned that our bodies can show serious distress in as little as two weeks of abuse—a good reason to pass on the fries and baked goodies in the cafeteria and get out for a walk today.
Not that obsession with thin is good either—weight categories and fat indexes are a little arbitrary and can be misleading and very disheartening (I once saw the term “obese” on my chart in a doctor’s office, back when I was a still a size eight and might’ve had three pounds of excess weight—what was that about?) And being disheartened can lead to giving up—or, on the other end of the spectrum, to the more-common-than-you-think and devastating problem of anorexia.
Health is the goal, not a particular size or number on the scale. And since I left you paranoid about the effects of soybean oil on our thyroids last week, and since our thyroids play a major role in metabolism and weight, here’s a little more (and hopefully more positive) on that.
An off-balance thyroid can usually be easily corrected with iodine supplementation. Now before you go nuts and remind me that it’s dangerous to ingest too much iodine, and that we in North America get plenty in our diets and that we can’t be deficient because we use iodized salt, hear me out.
Many of us, despite iodized salt, are either suffering with an off-balance thyroid (hypo- or hyper-), or are being treated for one—one in 10 women by age 50 and one in five by age 60, according to estimates by experts at Harvard. And in my teensy world, it’s just about everyone I know. Seriously.
Average blood levels of iodine are apparently down over the past 30 years, and thyroid cancer rates are up. I’m thinking that our modern world has (once again) thrown a few little wrenches into the thyroid health picture.
There are wrenches like iodine-depleted soil, and bromine in our bread, which replaced iodine as a dough conditioner in the 1980s (a slice of bread apparently used to contain 140 mcg of iodine, almost the current recommended daily intake). Then there’s fluoride in our water and chloride in our salt (all in the same family of chemicals as iodine, chemicals that compete with iodine absorption). Or how about mercury and radiation and pesticides and endocrine-disrupting chemicals of all kinds?
Soy, by the way, does increase iodine requirements, particularly if you’re using soy as a major protein source and eating a lot of commercially prepared soybean oil based salad dressings. The health benefits seen in Asian diets that include soy is what got us onto soy in the first place, but we’ve overlooked the fact that the high iodine content of their diets counter what they take in. And then we, in true North American style, went totally overboard with soy products, often using much more than they ever have in Asia (and in harder to digest forms), not to implicate Big Soy or anything.
So since it is impossible (and not even desirable) to avoid all iodine-disrupting substances (cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, flax, sweet potatoes, beans and corn are also iodine-inhibiting, but too nutritious to pass on), increasing iodine intake is an option. And while too much of a good thing (as always) truly can be bad, levels much higher than our typical intake (and much higher than the Health Canada recommended daily allowance of 150 mcg) can work wonders in alleviating both hypo- and hyperthyroidism.
Thyroid disorders and low iodine intakes are also associated with higher incidence of breast cancer. Japanese women, who consume very high doses of iodine by Western standards (something like 12.5 mg/day rather than our roughly 125 mcg/day), tend not to get breast cancer. And incidence of breast cancer in American women 30 years ago, when iodine consumption was twice as high as it is now, was much lower than it is today—rates have gone up as iodine consumption has gone down.
And besides fixing most cases of hyper- and hypothyroidism and reducing our risk of breast cancer, research has shown that iodine supplementation also alleviates fibrocystic breast disease, fibromyalgia, obesity, menopausal symptoms and high blood pressure. It lowers insulin requirements in diabetics, and improves heart, liver and brain function.
But I’ve opened a can of worms with that. Better close it, at least for now.
posted by Bill at
9:53 AM
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