The ROOT Causes & Symptoms Of Thyroid Problems & How To TREAT IT | Dr. Mark Hyman

why are we seeing so many people with thyroid issues is this a genetic defect in human beings i don't think so thyroid disease affects one in five women and one in ten men have low functioning thyroid and half of those are not diagnosed and the ones who are diagnosed are not actually treated properly for the most part and they become often partially treated with drugs like synthroid but it really doesn't get to the whole root of the problem so when we have this undiagnosed epidemic of thyroid disease it worsens our health in many many ways increased risk of heart attacks strokes weight gain and just makes you feel crappy and uh and there's really a very comprehensive approach that we've developed in functional medicine to look at all the causes of thyroid dysfunction how do we optimize thyroid function and how do we how do we diagnose it properly because often the diagnosis is really missed so let's get right into it what is a thyroid function what is your thyroid gland it's this little gland in your throat and it's think of it as your overall metabolic regulator it really controls everything it's like your motor it's like the you know in terms of rpm on your engine so you know some some uh things like a golf cart or something have a governor and you can only go so fast it's little like that so if it's slow your whole system slows down if it's fast your whole system speeds up that's hyperthyroid not that common but it can be a problem for some people but low thyroid or hypothyroid function is really common and it and your thyroid gland produces hormones t4 which is the inactive thyroid hormone and your brain produces something called tsh which tells your thyroid to make more thyroid hormone if it's low or if you have too much thyroid hormone your tsh goes down so it's the way we sort of track things now the inactive hormone is t4 that has to get converted in your body to the active hormone which is t3 now t3 is only about seven percent of your hormone thyroid hormone but it's really important because it does all the work it actually binds to the nuclear receptors it then translates into gene expression into all these downstream metabolic effects and it sends these messages urinated your to your dna to turn up your metabolism there's not fat burning in your mitochondria to basically get all systems go and if if you have um a good t3 level your your cholesterol is in check your memory's good your metabolism is good you say thin it helps your hair grow and it helps your muscles prevents muscle aches constipation and even you know improves fertility so if you have your t3 working it's really great but in the inactive form often doesn't get converted uh and there's a lot of reasons for that into t3 and it can be environmental toxins it can be stress it can be lack of certain nutrients so we'll talk about that like selenium it can be overgrowth of yeast so there's a lot of things that affect this conversion and and often we'll see people with inadequate levels of t3 so the main role of thyroid is to stimulate metabolism and it really affects almost every single function of the body and it can cause so many weird vague symptoms that people don't even often identify because it's like oh i'm a little this little that and you don't really really get it so and the main reason it's not diagnosed is it is that the symptoms aren't specific you know you're a little achy you're a little tired you're getting a little weight your skin's a little dry you're losing a little bit of hair you're maybe sluggish you have trouble concentrating a little depressed you know you're you're maybe a little cold when uh you know everybody else is warm you get whole hands and feet you get you know low libido you might get a little flu retention your cholesterol is a little high these are really non-specific symptoms it can be caused by many many things but when you add it all together and you look at this list it's a feeling oh i have all that you know like that's really a clue that you might have thyroid issues so when we're taking a thyroid quiz which is really important we can link to in the show notes it gives you a pretty good sense of if you're having a likelihood of having low thyroid and then you need to do the right testing now you know the problem is that it it's often we'll call subclinical so it might not be full blown thyroid disease but you know when functional medicine we like to think about how do we get to optimal function not just what's normal if you look at the normal lab tests uh they're often misleading because they're based on a population that may not be healthy so you know the range of for example tsh which is what most doctors look at to check your thyroid is 0.525 that's a tenfold range of what's considered normal uh the american college of endocrinology has lowered the top number to 3.5 or three but what's optimum might be one or two or you know point five to one or so what's really optimal is very different than what's quote normal and that's why it's often missed and doctors will often miss it because they just check the tsh and not the whole panel of tests it gives you a really comprehensive view if you set tsh it could be normal but you could still be for example having an autoimmune thyroid condition or you could still have a low t3 and doctors will not check that they'll only check your other numbers if your tsh is abnormal which is really a bad way to go about it so i think it's really important to a comprehensive thyroid panel which includes tsh free t3 free t4 and thyroid antibodies thyroid peroxidase and antithyroglobulin antibodies now a lot of doctors will check the thyroid panel on a lab wreck and the old lab wrecks have very old thyroid panels that use all kinds of antiquated tests which i still see unfortunately like t3 uptake and all these weird things that are not really accurate given how sensitive these current new tests are for free t3 free t4 and ultra sensitive th and also you know if you're really stuck and there's other things going on there's more advanced tests like thyroid releasing hormone that we can use by using a stimulation test so we won't get into that but the key is the basic test should be tsh free t3 free t4 thyroid antibodies tpo uh and any thyroid gland any thyroid globulin antibodies if you get that whole panel and you can see for example cases where there's high antibodies but normal thyroid testing those people still need to be treated or you'll see a low t3 but normal tsh so it's really really important to do a whole panel now let's talk about what causes thyroid problems because you know why are we seeing so many people with thyroid issues is this a genetic defect in human beings i don't think so it's really because um we are living in a toxic world in many ways one environmental toxins are really impactful on the thyroid function uh think of you your your thyroid as a yellow canary in your body uh the yellow canaries were put in coal mines and when the canaries died the coal miners knew the air was bad they had to get out of the coal mine so the thyroid is like the yellow canary of the body very sensitive to pesticides heavy metals environmental toxins of all sorts which are super abundant and it's 80 000 compounds in the environment only one percent have been tested for safety they're ubiquitous the average person is basically a walking toxic waste dump uh dioxin pcbs phthalates ddt all this stuff still in us even though it's been banned some of this stuff has been banned and most of us can handle it but it's really important to focus on identifying these toxins heavy metals are a huge factor particularly mercury uh and a big factor also stress you know there's a deep connection between your adrenals and your thyroid glands so people who are over stressed you know by psychological stress physical stresses lack of sleep those stresses register in the body directly in terms of adrenal function and when your adrenal function's low you often will see um kind of this thyroid function go low so your you for example if you put young soldiers on a forced march you'll see their thyroid function decrease just because of the stress of an overnight march with carrying a 15 50 pound pack and they'll look like they're hypothyroid even though they're really not so stresses are a big factor another one is gluten gluten is a huge factor in and about probably twenty thirty percent uh in my experiences i don't i've seen you know thousands of patients and testing them everybody's got low thyroid or antibodies to thyroid i checked their gluten antibodies two about 20 to 30 of people who have low thyroid function can be a result of uh gluten sensitivity either celiac disease or non-celiac gluten sensitivity and it's really important to track because if you keep eating gluten like you or you keep having mercury your thyroid's just not going to work and this can affect about 10 to 20 percent of the population so it's really common uh in terms of the inflammation in the thyroid also nutrient deficiencies you know thyroid function needs you know iodine to make the thyroid hormone you need selenium to convert t3 to four you need vitamin d and vitamin a to have it bind on the nucleus to work and do its thing you need the right omega-3 fats and many other nutrients to help optimize third function so uh what what do you do if you think you might have low thyroid what steps should you take well first do the symptoms check look at the questionnaire the link the things that i just mentioned you can kind of do a mental checklist or you can fill out the thyroid questionnaire we're going to link to in the show notes um that's the first thing and if there's some suspicion you need to get the right tests and there's a lot of ways to do that right now um you have to ask your doctor there are labs that are coming online like function health where you'll be able to do your own ordering of tests which is important but you want the full spectrum like i said tsh free t3 free t4 thyroid antibodies tpo and anti-thyroid antibodies you also want to check for a celiac with with or gluten sensitivity with deaminated glide antiglide and antibodies tissue transcontaminates antibodies we'll write all this up in the show notes and keep track of it we might also want to do a heavy metal test look for heavy metals with a dmsa challenge test to look for urine toxic metals after a six hour collection there are tests to look at pesticides and chemicals in your body through urine testing sometimes i'll do that but we can all we're all pretty exposed we just want to reduce our exposures and you can do that by going to ewg.org and learning about how to reduce your exposures across skin care products household products food products vitamin d plays a huge role if you're vitamin d deficient you want to see that for sure because by correcting that it'll help your thyroid work better you can check for selenium levels often there's selenium deficiencies iodine deficiencies we can measure that as well so we do a really close inventory of nutritional status so that's how i kind of evaluate it so what do i do to help fix thyroid function well first you deal with all the causes gluten stress on the microbiome we didn't really talk much about that but that can play a role in generating inflammation that causes problems uh and and obviously environmental toxins uh and then what what do you do to optimize your thyroid function well first thing is get eat the right foods that support your thyroid function my favorite is seaweed seaweed is full iodine minerals it's great for your thyroid uh fish also great sardines wild salmon mackerel herring also fish contains a lot of iodine omega-3 fats which you also get from the same foods make sure you get vitamin d probably need a supplement you know herring mackerel are a great source of vitamin d mushrooms like porcini mushrooms but it's hard to get enough so sunlight and obviously checking your vitamin d and taking vitamin d also you can get your vitamin a which is important for thyroid fungus from dandelion greens mustard greens dark green leafy vegetables liver organ meats also if you like that i do also selenium is super important and that can come from herring scallops uh smelt which are tiny little fish brazil nuts probably are the best source you get 15 micrograms of per brazil nut so i would i would i would make sure you have plenty of those foods and the things you want to avoid if you're having thyroid function issues well i would get off a gluten dairy which are inflammatory for most people and processed soy if people are eating a lot of um processed soy it can affect thyroid potentially also kale and some of the cruciferous vegetables uh if you if you juice a lot of kale for example it can cause a problem i i once wrote a report of someone who who uh i thought of the broccoli family vegetables was good for them and they eat two pounds of bok choy raw every day now if it's raw it's worse so don't eat raw cruciferous vegetables that much and and she went into a hypothyroid coma so that's an extreme case but if you're juicing raw kale every day you can get into trouble um then what should you do in terms of supplements a good multivitamin that contains selenium iodine zinc vitamin a and then you might want to add in vitamin d and omega-3 fats if your adrenals are stressed out from chronic lung from stress you want to deal with that through regular circadian rhythm lifestyle management getting sunlight exposure in the morning for 20 minutes waking and sleeping at the same time every day having meditation practice yoga deep breathing all the lifestyle practices for resetting your adrenals and then you can use herbs like rhodiola siberian ginseng various adaptogenic mushrooms this is really a way to kind of boost your your adrenal function and then if you're stuck you know you kind of might need to work with a doctor to optimize what you need in terms of thyroid treatment and adrenal treatment um so if you let's say you need thyroid replacement and a lot of people do um sometimes you can get away without it but if you if you've done all the things that i just said and your thyroid is still not optimized then you need to know what should you take now the traditional approach is everybody should take synthroid which is label thyroxine or t4 and that works for some people but many people it doesn't and they'll be partially treated and if you check the t3 their t4 will be good because they're getting it but their t3 will be low and i think it's better to use a bioidentical form of thyroid which is actually how all the hormones were first developed uh and and it may sound kind of weird or gross but it comes from pig thyroid forcing thyroid and it's very similar or almost identical to ours and it contains t4 t3 something called t2 which is really unusual if you might not know about which actually helps metabolism and is very important and and so most doctors just just assume that the syn thread will get converted but it really doesn't because all the pesticides the environment the heavy metals the stress the food sensitivities gluten you know deficiencies of nutrients you know 100 of us have toxins in our body so it's better to just take a combination uh bioidentical thyroid replacement unknown usually it's armored thyroid in the old days it wasn't well manufactured and so the dose was variable but now it's really well controlled and a lot of doctors don't like it but i encourage you to think about trying it because it really can help you need to check your thyroid if you change your thyroid or put yourself on third or take thyroid you need to check it probably about six weeks after you uh take your your whatever dose you're on and then you can see how it's working and then adjust it um if you take too much you want to be careful because you can take too much that can cause bone loss it can make you you know hyper insomnia palpitations so you have to track it but your thyroid gland is important to understand and take care of to love and figure out uh and it's it and it often can be fixed i had thyroid issues when i was really sick with chronic fatigue but then it all corrected so really important uh to focus on this uh get your thyroid straight make sure you identify if you have thyroid problems get the right tests eat the right foods take the right supplements use the right thyroid hormone replacement if necessary if you loved that last video you're going to love the next one check it out here millions of americans suffer from these kinds of mystery conditions that are very debilitating so this is not um not a spurious experience by any means although although many doctors go well we don't we can't figure it out your tests are normal

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

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Keywords: Mark Hyman, Mark Hyman interview, Mark Hyman live longer, Mark Hyman diet, how to live longer, how to age in reverse, nutrition tips, healthy foods, health tips, health theory, fasting tips, how to never get sick again, prevent disease, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, inspiration, motivation

Id: U61gwvMOErQ

Length: 16min 47sec (1007 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 23 2022