You're Iodine Deficient [with Dr. David Brownstein] Iodine Benefits

if you lined up every single person around the world four out of every 10 would be deficient in iodine this is a huge deal there are many many doctors not to mention patients who have no idea how important iodine is this is a topic that I've been studying since at least 2005 when I read a book written by my guest today Dr David Brownstein Dr well welcome Hey thank you for having me Dr Ken uh it's a pleasure um tell everybody a little about yourself your qualifications and how long you've been at this well um I've been practicing medicine about 30 years and I um went to the University of Michigan for undergrad if you haven't heard we're the national champions defending national champions for the whole year yes University of Michigan um so I went to University of Michigan for undergrad and Wayne State University School of Medicine and then did a family practice residency in family practice and uh you know my my goal through my childhood was to um just sorry about that was to be a doctor and you know be a conventional doctor I didn't know anything about holistic medicine and I didn't grow up in holistic household we didn't we basically went to the doctor when we were sick we took whatever they told us to take and we never questioned anything and I never took a vitamin in my life um and so I began practicing conventional medicine and then um six months into it I had an epiphany and and I'll give you I'll give you the story what short or long version of the story medium medium all right I was practicing conventional medicine I wasn't interested in anything I used to tell my patients don't take vitamins they were a waste of time and um around six months into my practice of medicine for three nights in a row I had my first bouss with insomnia for unknown reason and I you know I started to get anxious at the end of that and I'm getting ready to go to work and I just blurred out to my wife for the first time I don't want to be a doctor anymore and she's known me since we were 18 years old you know we had $100,000 in student loans and that's all I talked about I you know before that I felt it was my calling I still feel like it's my call but um so she said what's wrong and I said I'm not helping anyone I'm just treating them with drugs that aren't treating the underlying cause of their problems and I'm having to treat them with more drugs to treat the problems from the first drugs and you know I told her unless I'm using an antibiotic to treat infection I didn't feel like I was treating the underlying cause of anything and she said to me well what are you going to do and I said I don't know but I can't do this for 30 years and she said why don't you do another residency and I said no that would one of those was enough so I I met this chiropractor and before then I used tell people don't go see chiropractors I never met one before I never knew what they did but you know you know how it was in met school we were taught don't refer to them and they're dangerous and um so I never referred to him and um I never knew what the Chiropractic philosophy was never anything about him so I had a patient who was helped by a chiropractor he was bothering me to meet him he was friends of mine he said it was more than just adjusting he was prescribing nutrition for him and in that lack of sleep I had seen him on that third day after not sleeping for three nights in a row or the fourth day and he said hey why don't you meet Dr radkey and I think in this anxiety lack of sleep I said fine and this was about the 10th time he'd asked me to meet him um so I called Dr radkey Robert radkey was in Birmingham Michigan you know few minutes from my house I set up a dinner meeting with him the following Tuesday and the following Tuesday comes around I tell my wife I'm not going to go after I worked all day that it would waste of my time she told me it would be rude you already said it go and be nice as I was walking out the door I met him he knew more functional biochemistry than I knew he was talking about nutrition and how it relates to biochemistry I didn't know any of that stuff he got me a book at the meeting by Jonathan Wright who's an allopathic physician and I took the book home read it till the middle of the night Dr red kagi became immediate friends he was a nice guy he was very smart and we maintained a really deep friendship until un un fortunately he died you know a period later um and um I called my dad the next day to come in the office and get some blood work my dad had a third he had a heart attack at age 40 another heart attack at 42 over the next 20 years Sten angop plasties I don't know if they did stance then they were doing balloons back then I think um but he had you know two bypass surgeries angioplasties and um 12 medications for diabetes hypertension heart disease he looked awful he was having continu angina for 20 years based on what I talked with Dr rkey based on what I read in that book based on just pulling a couple of Articles really quickly I drew two blood tests on my dad a a thyroid hormone panel instead of just drawing the TSH is what I was taught in med school and his testosterone levels his testostrone levels came back as less than detectable limits his thyroid levels in the lower part of the reference range I put them on both natural testosterone natural thyroid hormone a week later within seven days as 20- year history of angina melted away never to return within 30 days later his cholesterol fell below 200 never changing any of his bad dietary habits and he looked better reative B I no longer thought he was going to die and I saw the changes in my dad and I knew that's what I wanted to do in medicine and I went on a journey to do it and here I am 30 years later practicing good form of medicine I'm very happy I did that I love that story and it mirrrors my story in many ways I'll tell you a funny thing about me back in about 2005 I came across this book uh called iodine why we need it and I was I was alpath trained at up State University exact same story didn't know anything about real physiology uh almost nothing about nutrition and I I I had been reading a few articles about iy so I found your book got it and read it in probably one night just engulfed it I'm like holy crap and you know that's back before the internet was super fast so I'm like when I get to work tomorrow I gotta I gotta look these citations up I gotta look this stuff up if this is true then how does this dude in Michigan how does he know this and nobody else seems to know this why was I not taught this and so back in 2005 is when iy jumped up on my radar and you had you completely changed the way I practice medicine reading your book you're one of the the key guys that kind of slapped me around and said no doctor you don't know everything you were not taught almost anything really uh you need to keep digging Now's the Time to actually start learning now that you're in active practice should have been before that but hey what are you going to do and so down that rabbit hole I went and I'm still fascinated by iodine not only how important it is to all mammals not just humans but also how ignored it is like it's just literally not a thing it's not a thing doctors talk about and so I talk about it all the time inside of our private group and that's where we're live at right now I'll post this later on YouTube but I wanted our tribe members to have a chance to ask you questions directly if that's okay of course and so let's start out with just a general question why is medicine seemingly the practice of modern medicine why is it so blind and we all took physiology and we all took bi biochim and organic chemistry in undergrad how how do we not just understand intuitively this is very very important well the biochemistry that we took was taught very poorly and we had to pass the test to move on that's all we did there was no functionality to it you couldn't apply it to the patient in front of you when I had the dinner with Dr radkey I was shocked was actual functional biochemistry that could do and that's what spurred me on you know was his discussion of biochemistry and how these nutrients interact with the biochemistry so in regards to iodine the only thing I was taught in medical school was iodine deficiency was a was cured with iodite salt and that was it it was you got enough IOD food there's enough IOD salt nobody needs it so from my point in med school till till I started researching things I had no clue that there was any significance to it either my Turning Point the first 10 years of my practice I was using after treating my dad every person that came in got a whole hormonal nutritional evaluation so the things that I've really focused on were thyroid hormone and then other bioidentical hormones and then various nutritional items now the first 10 years there was no G testing available so I was putting every not everybody I had about three quarters of my practice on thyroid hormone the first 10 years of my practice it was growing I thought it was doing good patients were seeming to get better and telling me they're better I wrote a book you know uh hypo um um overcoming thyroid disorders and you know I thought I was doing the right thing and it was bothering me why I was putting so many people on thyroid hormone so I would go back to the the physiology and biochemistry of the thyroid GL and what it takes and what are the co-actors needed to make thyroid hormone and how they interact with one another I started using those co-actors such as selenium and magnesium and vitamin C B vitamins and iodine you can't make a thyroid hormone in fact you can't make any hormone on the body without iodine um so nothing worked as well as thyroid hormone nothing nothing worked as natural as well as natural thyroid hormone so I would try and I kept coming back to iodine I lived in Mich I live in Michigan grew up in Michigan practice in Michigan it's it's the uh besides being the national champions in college football it's it's uh soil is one of the lowest iodine areas of the world which is the Great Lakes Area Michigan and Indiana Illinois and that four-letter state to the south of us that I will not mention by name and if I do mention it by name it's a lower cast o not capitalized though um so um all these states have very low iine in their soils in fact one of the lowest iodine in the world so as I got more into holistic medicine I thought you I was reading these articles how low the soil is and the goer belt and the history of gerer in the United States was cured in Michigan and and Ohio when they IOD salt in those two areas because there was so much goer or swelling of the thyroid which is a known iodine deficiency problem yes so there was no I couldn't order a good iodine test so I would just try iodine low amounts medium amounts high amounts it didn't work I get frustrated and leave what turned me was 10 years into practicing holistic medicine one of my journals a letter to the era was written by Dr G Abraham from California he developed an iodine loading test I called him immediately when I saw but he became interested in me because of where I was located he knew the he knew about the goer belt and the soil being low and iodine and he offered to teach me how to do the laboratory work and the grunt work and the proper testing of iodine and he offered to help me test my patients for iodine levels and he developed a test called an iodine loading test which is a much more functional test of iodine levels so the first couple hundred patients that we tested together you know 97 Point some odd percent were extremely low on iodine they weren't even low they were like like who criteria severely defici and iodine and since then we've tested between me and my partners over 8,000 people we're cruising on 9,000 soon the same numbers hold true it's over 97% significantly low in iodine most severely low unless unless they've read my book or seen somebody else lecture about iodine they're taking iodine so when I started using iodine what I found was I didn't need three4 of my patients on thyroid hormone I needed a quarter of them on thyroid hormone I found I didn't need two grains of natural thyroid hormone I needed about a half a grain of natural fyid hormone and to get the same same results clinical results so I also found breast cancer thyroid cancer pancreatic ovarian uterine all the glandular problems doing much better on iodine and then I wrote my book as you had run into iodine um why you need it why you can't live without it and really out of out of everything that I've seen and do and done in 30 years and have learned if the government storms into my office which unfortunately they've done and if they tell me there's one thing you can do holistically the rest you got to go back to doing conventional medicine as being taught now I would demand to be able to use iodine and it's the biggest bang for the buck it's the neatest thing you know it's interesting when you said you know I became I was interested in iodine every seems interested in iodine nobody you know it's just when I start talking about iodine everyone's eyes light up a little bit and they they you know they always think it's a thing of the past and and and it's not a thing of the past you mentioned in your intro four of 10 people worldwide are deficient in iodine that's going by who criteria which are way too low I say those way higher iodine deficiency is probably I don't know if it's the sing it's not the single underlying cause but it is a major cause or probably the most important underlying cause of the the one in seven women suffering from breast cancer in our country one in three men having prostate cancer the epidemic increases of pancreatic ovarian uterine um the thyroid cancer is the fastest growing cancer in the United States all this sort of in in my mind in my research is being driven in large part by iodine deficiency that's affecting probably 97% of our country right now and you know we're in a mess our levels are lower than they lower now than they were from our predecessors you know Generations before and our exposure to the toxic halogens which makes the iodine deficiency worse is up higher I call it a double whammy of iodine deficiency and we're suffering from this and that's you know that's the epidemic oppress prostate ovarian uterine thyroid pancreatic cancer that we all know I'm old enough to tell you when I was a resident the people who got pancreatic cancer were alcoholics older people I never saw younger people with pancreatic cancer I got people in my practice with pancreatic cancer in their late 30s now I never saw women teenage girls getting diagnosed with breast cancer and having to go to a funeral like I did the other day from a 28y old patient dying of stage four breast cancer um you know I never this stuff is ridiculous what's happening right now and you know this should be our highest levels of our government should be studying this and you know getting information about this and they just it's just business as usual in our country you know yeah I totally agree but it seems like they're interested with other things that they deem to be more important although I would disagree with them uh you mentioned the Gorder belt and so that kind of brings me to my first point is that uh people even doctors people who should know better they think that iodine is somehow created in food and that if you're and if you look up stuff on the USDA food data central how much I does this have any it has a number but what people to understand especially doctors and dietitians they should absolutely know this that if there's no iodine in the soil that the ve the plant grew in or that the animal grazed on then by definition there can be no iodine in that food source so the so the RDA the the recommended daily allowance of iodine was established in 1924 me I don't somewhere in the 1920s 20s for preventing goer in people it was not established as the optimum amount of iodine for the rest of the body so iodine every cell in the body needs and requires iodine it's an essential element we can't manufacture it we have to get it from our diet period um you know in the glandular tissue I I call this the iodine um the iodine um Continuum isn't the right word but there there's a progression of iodine deficiency so if I call this iodine sufficient that means there's enough iodine for all the iodine receptors in our thyroid or eyeballs our brain you know the OV uterus breast prostate pancreas and skin and everything else in the body since every cell needs and requires it and iodine deficiency the first thing that happens in the glandor tissue which is the I which is the thyroid over uterus breast prostate pancreas is you get Cy what what are we seeing 88% of us women have fiber cystic breast disease men got cysts on their prostate gland thyroid cysts occur all the time um so cysts are the first thing that happens if it goes on longer the cysts become hard and nodular same tissues same problems if it goes on longer they take a hyperplastic appearance if you have biopsy and and examine it under a microscope and the end of that Continuum um is cancer now this been this has been shown in animal test tube and human studies what's also been shown as iodine's been able to Halt and sometimes reverse this progression in animal test tube in human studies um so iine deficiency could explain you know probably the worst problems we're facing in our country right now and and nobody seems interested in it except for holistic actors and except for Lay people they seem interested in it absolutely but the conventional Market you know we have this big cancer medical industrial complex built up you know you get di they're great at diagnosing they're super good good at diagnosing they're super good at prescribing their therapies but they're they're no good at ition and no good at even asking the question why did one in seven women at breast cancer in United States why did I have to go to a funral from a 28-year old female dying of metastatic breast cancer when she ain't the only 20-y old patient of mine having breast cancer um you know why is thyroid cancer the fastest growing cancer in the United States why do we spend 20% of our GMP on all this stuff when the next country spends around 10% of their G&P and they have better health outcomes and they live longer but you know that that that's where we are these days and you know I'm lucky I like practicing medicine because most of my friends who practicing conventional medicine don't like it right and I'm sure you're seeing the same thing you know yeah burnout among Physicians I think is at an all-time high and that's because they're just pill Mills that's what they're doing they see something they write a prescription and that's it nothing nothing's ever cured so you mentioned earlier that uh you cannot create iodine in your body and indeed the broccoli if there was no IOD in the soil then there's no iodine in that broccoli if there's if there was no iodine in the grass the cow Graves then the cow's not going to have be a source of iodine and we see this in when people live within 20 miles of an ocean the Ocean Mist the Ocean Spray the the evaporation typically there's plenty of iodine in that soil but the further you move into the interior of a continent the less and less iodine typically and that's why Michigan Wisconsin the Gorder belt is so deficient it's so far from the ocean uh and you said also that it's more than just thyroid and I think that's super important for everybody to understand I when I was digging into this I found a study they had tested 84 different cells from the human body all over the human body every single cell that's ever been tested Dr Brownstein has something called a sodium iodide sorter every single one I don't think we found a single human cell line yet that doesn't have a sodium iodide sorter tell us what does that mean that that's on every sale so the sodium iine importer you can think about it like a taxi cab it's it's waiting for iodine to move come into one passenger seat or one uh the driver side seat in the back and then at the same time a sodium atom comes into the to the other side seat and that taxic cap can now move that iodine M atom over the cell membrane and deposited in the thyroid or the ovaries or the uls or the skin or the muscles or the fat or wherever the brain or wherever it's got to go and then iodine can do its appropriate job we were designed by our maker to have iodine receptors in every cell and to have these sodium iodine sorters moving in moving into a cell the problem is that um these taxi cabs can also when iodine sufficient the taxi cabs can also move toxic halites like bromide into the seats and then move those over to the cell and bromin the thyroid GL or the breasts or the ovaries or the uterus and um our exposure so so the halides are group 17 in the periodic table if everyone can remember from chemistry in high school or Beyond periodic table has all the elements of the universe and then they're all grouped together in similarities and group 17's on the right side of the periodic table it includes um fluoride chloride bromide and iodine now of those four four halides there's a fifth but that doesn't I don't think that we know of any human significance to that of those four halides two are toxic agents that have no known therapeutic value in the body and two are essential we can't live without either of the two the two we can't live without that are essential are iodine and chloride chloride is found in salt um sodium chloride and there's you know over a gram of chloride in the body if we had dry weight if we needed it if we need to you know measure it but two of those halides bromide and fluoride are toxic with no known therapeutic value in the body our exposure to fluoride and bromide are astronomically higher now compared to the we in our in our predecessors and what what I found with working with Dr Abraham and then doing my own testing was um bromite in particular is in the sickest patients and the ones with breast disease or prostate disease or glid disease they usually you know I did a study in my I think it's in my ey book comparing a group of breast cancer patients to non breast cancer patients I found bromide levels twofold higher in the breast cancer patients I levels twofold lower so you know um when you start you know if you start thinking about this our ient levels in our food supply has gone down over the last 50 years as shown by the national health and nutrition examination survey and our bromite exposure has gone up at the same time what do we expect is going to happen what you can expect is happen where iodine concentrates in the body there's going to be problems where does it concentrate in the body in the glands fastest growing cancer in the US thyroid cancer one in seven women breast cancer one in three men prostate cancer ovarian uterine pancreatic exploding at exponential rates and I think that um iodine deficiency certainly I don't think it's the sole cause of it but it it certainly could it's a big piece of that pie for all those things and yeah we recognize that until we treat it we're just going to keep running in circles diagnosing more and more PR breast cancer prostate cancer thyroid cancer and doing the same old thing and you know really seeing our quality of life go down and our our longevity go down which we're seeing I totally agree and and until we start to look at root causes we're just going to keep wondering I wonder why cancer rates are keep going up I don't get it um what about testing a so if somebody's watching this right now you I've se you know I I've seen and I think it's been thoroughly discounted as a reliable way to measure but you've seen people rub povidone iodine on their skin and then if it absorbs over a certain length of time then you may be iodine deficient that probably help it gives some information but I don't think it's reliable enough how do you these days without doing the the iodine loading how do you test for iodine in your patients it's a great question so those first 10 years of my practice when I am you know looking at the co-factors for how to make thyroid work better so I don't have to put you know I couldn't figure out why did our you know I was asking myself the question why did our maker make us have to take design us so we needed I we need a thyroid hormone to feel good as we H middle Ag and Beyond and you know that didn't make sense to me we we we're designed pretty well if we Supply the body with its basic raw materials and needs um so you know um the test you asked me about testing so during the first 10 years of my practice the only test that was available to me that I knew of was that skin test so you would rub iodine in the oxidized form which is brownish on the skin anywhere and it turns the skin Brown it stains it brown where the iodine hits it and then you wait to see how long the brown color goes away so the theory is that as the iodine is absorbed in the skin brown color goes away the quicker it's absorbed the more deficient an iodine you are that would be fine if it worked but there was a study and I have a study in my iodine book that looked at this and they found 80% of the iodine rubbed down the skin sublimates off into a gaseous phase and doesn't go inside to the body goes this way into a gaseous phase so it's not a great test to do that that's why Dr Abraham designed the end loading test and the iine loading test was a functional test where you do 20 you take 50 milligrams of iodine at time zero and you collect 24 hours of urine so for a whole day 24 hours and you collect you know finish the urine collection 24 hours later and then you measure how much iodine comes out in the urine the reason you can do this is the kidneys clear about 98% of the iodine that you take orally so you know the amount coming in you know the amount coming out of your urine you can you can subtract the numbers and say well X percent x amount stayed in the body from 50 milligrams so what we found was that when somebody's iodine sufficient and their whole body is has enough iodine that they're you know every every receptor is saturated with it thyroids working you know everything's working appropriately with iodine that when you take 50 milligrams Orly 24 hours later you'll pee out 45 milligrams of that so 5 milligrams of iodine is an amount that you generally need on a daily basis to replenish and to to reestablish iodine levels into those sodium iodine supporters and into the tissues if someone's iodine deficient let's say they take in 50 milligrams maybe they'll pee out 25 milligrams 24 hours later that means they have 50% excretion not 5% which is 45 milligrams where they held on to 5 milligrams now they peed out 25 milligrams and they held to 25 milligram they're more more deficient if somebody peed out um you know um 10% of the iodine you know you know peed out five milligrams and held on to 45 milligrams they would be considered more deficient than the ones who are 50% than the ones who were 5% I mean so the more you hang on to the more your body's soaking it up and what we found was that um as people took 50 milligrams of iodine a day when redid their testing 30 days later 60 days later a year later and I have this Chronicle in my book that their the amount they retained let's let's just say someone started off with 50% excretion so they would retain 25 milligrams of that 50 milligram load 30 days later they'd retain 10 milligrams so now they'd exree 90% they got better but they still needed a little bit more work it might take them a few more months to get to that 5% but that that was a really cool test that you know Dr Abraham developed it I was there helping and fine-tuning it and learning how to actually work in a lab and measure it and um it it it was fun doing all that and that just kind of proved to me how deficient I I was and what we what we found was when we gave people 50 milligrams of iodine the amount of bromide that would come out in their urine was just enormous and what they were doing was competitive inhibition so in those haights with the group 14 which they're all listed you know down a row um if you give iodine and iodine binds to its receptor it's going to displace bromide the body's going to get rid of it so you're detoxifying from bromide um and hopefully fluoride and you know giving the body what we were designed for was you know iodine for the iodine receptors and not bromide and not fluoride and have you seen uh that fluoride is pushed off the receptor in the same manner as bromide is so fluoride is the smallest halide it's a very electronegative substance and in in the group of fluorides first on top and um being very electronegative it's really reactive in the body the body does not like fluoride floating around being really reactive of the body is not a good thing it poisons hundreds of enzymes in the body disables them um fluids are known neurotoxin um it's you know high levels are associated with cancer in boys um what what is it it's a bone cancer um I'm blocking on the name of it but teenage boys have higher bone cancer in floridated areas and non- areas non-fluoridated areas um so in our testing we tried to find what we found was bromide coming out in huge amounts when we gave iodine we couldn't document the fluoride coming out and there were there were two problems with that number one fluoride is so toxic the human body doesn't want it floating around so when you get fluoride in through drinking tap water that's been fluoridated or swallowing you know toothpaste that's been fluoridated um the body tries to bind it off right away and where does fluoride store up in the body mostly in the bone um and that's where you know that's there's fluoride Pro that's where the boys are getting bone cancer and and you're getting you know lots of bone problems from floridated areas like osteoporosis and things so a better measure of fluoride would be doing bone biopsies but we couldn't do that so we couldn't document fluide coming out I think fluoride's a problem but we certainly documented and wrote about the bromide coming out and I wrote about that in my book and I wrote about that ticles and a lot of people have fluoride or Florine on their radar they're they realize they need to try to minimize that so many people will use reverse osmosis or drink distill water but what they don't realize is that almost all uh prepared drinks that you would buy are fluoridated and this includes all the soft drinks uh most fruit juice is made with fluoridated water that you would buy and there's over 200 different prescription medicines that can contain fluoride and so many people are trying to minimize their exposure to fluoride but they're failing miserably because they don't know that it's literally in everything it's a terrible thing it's thrown in our water supply and so you can't choose not to have it because you gotta drink water and it costs you you have to get special filters to take fluoride out it's so small that you need these special filters which cost money so of course poor people middle class people you know can't afford to buy expensive water purifying systems and they're just being medicated or poisoned from the water supply with fluoride that shouldn't be in there there's only two countries left of fluoridate primarily floridated the water supply it's us in New Zealand Europe has all gotten rid of it Israel was the last Western Country to get rid of it because they realized the harm was greater than the benefit with it and I don't even know if there's any benefit with floridated water there there may be some benefit with topical fluoride application in toothpaste that just spit out but exactly you know the last time I checked the the US 66% of the water supply in the US yeah was floridated and individual water municipalities can they can vote with their city council to remove the FL fluoride from the water it's not a federal mandate and we actually did this in the Camden Tennessee water supply back in 2013 Council and got that got it taken out of the water supply here in Canada only about a third of the water supply is floridated and then like you said in the European Union only 3% and most of that's naturally occurring fluoride they they almost don't fluoridated all because they've uh I don't know read the research that it's really not a good drinking fluoridated water in no meaningful way protects your teeth and here in in the United States there's even you can buy water for pregnant women and newborn infants that you would make formula with or the the mom would drink that when she's pregnant it's floridated water water and there's never been any research documentation that that protects the the interrupted teeth and the baby that that in any way benefits the baby whatsoever it's it's just it's almost Madness how people have just taken it for granted that fluoride must be good because it's in the water it's when you look at the original fluoride studies done in Grand Rapids Michigan and mosan Michigan they were stopped early was it was really poorly very poor science there was no science there it was they had a agenda and they got the agenda done was to put you know for the agricultural big agricultural companies to get rid of their waste product of fluoride and dump it in our water supply and our government let him do it and our government still lets them do it there's a good case going on right now where a group of moms got it going and they're suing the federal government on this and the judges it was already presented we're waiting for the results of it and the judge you know I followed that case I think the judge is going to rule for us and when that comes out that'll be interesting because sort of like the co vaccine got everyone thinking about vaccines in general wait wait till this comes out and the government's got explain why they floridated our water supply for was after World War II so what is that 75 years or so and where was the science behind it there there was no terrible signs terrible signs it's a crime it is a crime yeah I totally agree now let's talk about dosage so uh I I I looked up the National Institutes of Health and they say that an adult needs 150 micrograms day uh you need more if you're pregnant or breastfeeding which I definitely agree with that but I think you need way more than they recommend I find it funny that they say that for uh newborns from zero to six months of age they need 110 micrograms almost as much as an adult but then an adult only needs 150 micrograms so what I recommend to to my people in the tribe here uh I actually formulated a daily mineral drop and it has 500 microgram so half a milligram a day and then I recommend they use Lugal 2% anywhere from one to three drops a day and then try to eat some iodine rich foods which is typically Seafood um am I am I recommending too much iodine to my people or is that not enough is that sufficient or is that inadequate well I would respectfully tell you you're you're underdosing your population and um you know we we we in in my book we we talk about that you know and when I lecture I talk about how did we come up with you know these milligram dosing of iodine um and there there's science behind it now there's a I get I get a lot of criticism for you know saying my my average patient's on 25 milligrams of iodine and adult and um if they have candid disease breast over uterus prostate pancreas thyroid any any form of gandroid disease I'll give them more um if they have fibrocystic breast disease or breast cancer thyroid you know whatever I give them more you know I've got story after Story of women with fibrocystic breast disease and thyroid nodules where you you you get enough iodine in in the system that it it re it causes that Continuum to reverse itself back to normal tissue the problem the problem we've got that Continuum one more time nicked had a question so here's iodine sufficiency normal architecture of the glandor tissue thyroid no no no nothing wrong with it look it was normal feels normal it acts normal it's working normally thyroid over his uterus breast prostate pancreas the first step that happens in iodine deficiency she starts to get cysts or abnormal growth in these tissues if it goes on longer the cysts become hard and nodular if it goes on longer they become hyperplastic on a on a uh on a um you know biopsy and the end the end of that stage is cancer it's a progression and iodine has been shown in studies to be able to Halt this progression I've seen it in my practice and then be able to reverse it so I say if they got glandular problems which you know 88% of women have fibrocystic breast disease you know one in three men prostate cancer one in seven women breast cancer they're going to need more um what I found is our exposure to bromide you know I'm probably sitting on bromite in this chair it's in it's in cush mattresses and cushions and carpet and curtains a fire it's in these that we all have um it's in it's in food and it's in drink as ve brominated vegetable oil um it's all over the place and then when you when you when you throw in floridated water and as you mentioned all the fluoride and the juices and drinks and everything else that's out there you know our iodine requirements have gone up over the years not gone down and I've tried lower doses of iodine and then done the testing on it it didn't work until I got up to around 25 milligrams for most people more know adult size and then you know smaller amounts for kids yeah um so so if we were living in the days before the ubiquity of fluoride everywhere before the ubiquity of bromide everywhere then what I'm recommending is plus or minus six milligrams a day then that would possibly be enough but when you add in the bromide and the the fluoride they're competing for the receptor so aggressively that we now need more than that six milligrams is that am I hear that's correct you know the RDA was not set for optimal levels it was set correct the the story of the RDA is really interesting it actually goes you know I I quickened it but what was happening in the 1920 well the 1900s as the US was was moving from west to east across as the people were moving west to east to to I'm sorry east to west to to colonize the country to you know give us what we got today um the goer epidemic skyrocketed throughout the entire United States but Prime the Great Lakes was the biggest area goer is a swollen thyroid um so the the it wasn't just the people that were suffering thyroid problems animals were having procreation problems and thyroid problems so the animals were not the farmed animals were not growing to the right size they were not procreating correctly and there was a worry that the human as a human population expanded from east to west across the United States that our food supply was going to be outstripped because we weren't going to be able to keep up with it and raising enough animals to feed the population so there was a doctor in Ohio um I'm sorry I'm blocking on his name but he had written a paper in iodine in med school and the government called upon him to do a study in farm animals to figure out the minimal amount of iodine needed to their to their food source to help them procreate better and to help better thyroid function so we put little amounts of iodine and varying amounts in feed found the minimal amount where the animals procreating correctly grow incorrectly and estimated from that the amount humans would need that's how the RDA was set so the RDA was not set for optimal levels and and saturation of the breasts and the ovaries and the uterus and the thyroid basically just enough for G G that's that's what that was fine back then it was hey it was one of the first public Miracles there was no question it it was really a fabulous here he added a natural substance to Salt people took it and this National problem that we were having just magically disappeared but the national problem may have been fine back then but when we started fluoridating the water and we started brominating and getting exposed to more and more of these toxins our iodine requirements went up they didn't go down and the RDA never changed and that's where the that's where the problem became exact exactly and so you mentioned earlier about the skin test that iodine can do something that many uh many things can't do which is sublimate so let's talk about iodi salt because many people think well I eat iodi salt so I'm getting enough iodine what's the problem there well I've written a book salt your way to health and I had you know I I quickly found when I was using you know I I quickly started when I started looking at bioch istry and Physiology with patients and looking at what they need to run these biochemical Pathways optimally you know sodium was needed to run thousands of different chemical reactions in the body um I was taught in med school Salt's bad right any amount of salt is going to cause hypertension and you need to lower no salts is the best salt in the diet well I can tell you when I started studying physiology and checking chemistries on everybody and really looking at things I realized you can't live with a no salt I mean it's incompatible with life um and we weren't getting in enough salt and think about what I said with those sodium iodine importers you need iodine on one side of the taxic cab and you need sodium on the other side to move that iodine across the cell membrane so I started using unrefined salt in my practice and then immediately I saw a benefit with it there were two major benefits number one most people were deficient in salt and I can tell you that today I still see it and um salt helps you detoxify from toxic halides bromide maybe fluoride so in in medicine there's a lot of drugs that are brominated and still today some drugs are brominated some asthma drugs and there's some other drugs that bromine as part of their atent atrient Spa dextorin uh and then relistor and there's several others but those are antidepressants too that have fluoride and bromite as part of their their genetic or their chemical makeup so um where was I headed with that um um so so so our exposure to these things has has just dramatically increased we're getting it from our drugs and I I you know we need iodine to to help us detoxify from that we shouldn't be taking drugs certainly with bromide in it I totally agree and then the the list of drugs with fluoride in it it's over 200 drugs the most common ones basically any SSRI like proac um um Zoloft all those guys have fluoride Lipitor does zidia does Zia for cholesterol previsit does c does flas does cypro many of the of the the CYO family of antibiotics are just laced with fluoride and many people don't realize that it's terrible it's a it's a uh you know I don't know what to say if our Regulators were looking out for us this wouldn't have happened I totally agree I totally agree they don't look out for us and if that wasn't proven during Co nothing was proven but you know they they don't care they just they're they're an exension of big Pharma and they're there they're there to do big farmers bidding and to you know keep that medical industrial Pharma complex going and they do a pretty good job of that so where I got my recommendations from was because you know in med school in residency I was scared to death of iodine um you know the a couple of iodine preparations have a skull and crossbone on them so I'm like oh my God too much must be bad and so then I thought okay the the the RDI is 150 mics a day that's just enough to prevent a Gorder okay got that and then I doing my research I found out that the average person in Japan eats ton of seafood and they usually ingest about 16 milligrams give or take uh which would be 16,000 micrograms a day and they don't have thyroid cancer they don't have hyperthyroidism at any greater rate they don't have hoshimoto at any greater rate than we do here in the United States you know what they you know what they have Ken they have less breast cancer and less prostate cancer and less Bank you know than we do yep and so I thought okay in between 150 micrograms and 16,000 micrograms somewhere in there is probably a spot where it's not going to be you can't even pretend like it's dangerous and if you do take too much you're just going to urinate it out but I guarantee you 150 mics is not enough especially when I found out about the sodium iodide sorter that's on every single cell in the human body 150 mics just ain't going to do it it's got to be more than that and that's where I came up with the five six s milligrams uh and and so but that you think that's probably still not enough in modern society where we're just basic basically bathed in bromide and fluoride I can tell you from doing testing on I don't know if we got over a thousand patients but you know multiple hundreds of patients it wasn't enough I tried varying amounts and 25 milligrams was enough for most people 12 wasn't enough in our world um 50 was enough and then beyond you know and if people had like I said if they have gandroid disease already then I would use you know I would use more than 25 but I I found that um I I tried six milligrams it it just wasn't enough particular particularly I think not enough to treat breast disease or thyroid disease or something like that but I don't think it's enough to prevent it either not not just not in the world we Liv in today it's just we're we're in a toxic mess right now gotcha Lyn says uh two drops of Lugal 2% I'm assuming I'm not doing her math here is is 3333 per more than the recommended amount sometimes she has a metallic taste in her mouth is she taking too much iodine well you you know you need to my suggest question is to work with an iodine literate physician who can test you and two drops of Lugal if we're talking 5% iodine is about 6.25 milligram per drop it's 12 milligrams in my practice that's you know I would put somebody sensitive who's you know a little more sensitive to things on that dose most people I start at 25 milligrams so you too low when you're talking about compared to the RDA the RDA is not optimal levels the RDA is to prevent goer that's what was set up for 100 years ago it was never designed for optimal levels never designed to prevent breast disease or thyroid disease was designed to prevent I mean thyroid disease thyroid cancer never designed to prevent it was designed to prevent goer in the vast majority of us back then when our exposure to bromide and fluoride was not what it is today um so those were different time frames and you know you can you know as as we're talking you can see it's it's not going to be enough you know five six milligrams I I can just tell you from my personal experience I tried that it wasn't enough gotcha question from nickolette can you talk about your success with iodine mitigating viral infections do you ever nebulize iodine hello nicholet um she's a patient of mine so um I you know as I was reading about iodine going back to the old literature um this was 20 25 years ago you know doctors used to have people nebulized with iodine when they were sick with lung infections or colds or you know um pneumonia or something like that so we you know I began using it have people nebulized with iodine you know two decades ago or a little bit more than that and then when covid came around nebulized iodine and pride was sort of a Mainstay that I I instituted with my patients and out of the whole natural therapies that I did during covid you know we we didn't close during Co we stayed open we saw patients we treated them you know we did what the oath I I follow the oath that I took in med school and um out of all the things I did the nebul iodine nebulize peroxide was the best thing that I did and it is simply the best thing that that people can do when they're sick with an upper respiratory or lung problem and I'm talking about fibrosis of the lungs COPD of the lungs lung cancer nebulize peroxide and iodine is just a fabulous therapy much less for covid or for flu or you know any of the cold stuff that you cause you to hack and cough and you know wee and things like that excellent uh displaced who your when TSH is out of range 20 years ago asked for Synthroid to lose weight put on 75 mics IL Leal thyroxin generic Synthroid uh still on the same dose diagnosed with hypothyroidism no weight loss am I really hypothy my TSH was 2.2 last week while taking the 75 mics what do you make that um first 10 years of my practice that's what I was doing was putting people on thyroid hormone and you know they were better I didn't think I was doing anything wrong you know now I look back and I'm like and what was I doing but the next 20 years up to now I put people on that look if they have a thyroid problem I put them on iodine first recheck their thyroid levels a few weeks later see if it normalizes and then i' put them on thyroid hormone and now the combination of iodine and thyroid together I'm able to use much lower thyroid levels so I would find find an i and literate physician to work with they can help you with that if somebody has hyper thyroidism do they still need a daily supply of iine so the treatment the treatment this is the biggest thing I get criticized for is autoimmune thyroid disease and hyperthyroid that iodine is going to put fuel on the fire and if you if you if you Google me for that quote you'll see that quote I did make that somewhere in the first five years of my holistic practice because I was scared about iodine like you were right I thought it would fuel up Graves disease or Hashimoto's disease and I I I was scared of using it too um so so for grave disease grave disease is um a hyperthyroid condition um where the thyroid gland gets over stimulated with uh these immunoglobulins and it's like a fire burns in the thyroid and it releases a lot of thyroid hormone and it can make people hyper and nervous and jittery and these are the people with buggy eyes coming out of their head that you know sometimes you'll see um it's a it's a pretty miserable disease for people that have it the treatment for Graves disease um 100 years ago was iodine and they use iodine in large amounts it was usually hundreds of milligrams of iodine and it would cool off graes disease there's case history after case history in the literature back then if someone had to have surgery to have Graves disease thyroid removed because they just couldn't get it controlled what they would do is put them on a couple hundred milligrams of iodine to cool off the thyroid and then take the thyroid out it would shrink less invasive I use iodine for Graves very successfully um the treatment right now for Graves disease in our country is radioactive iodine treatment and it's a dangerous treatment this radio the theory is radioactive iodine is taken up in the thyroid and and kills the thyroid well radioactive iodine is also taken up at the same time in your breasts your ovaries your uterus your pancreas your thyroid taken up in your feet because there's been a there's been a study which showed the scan of the body after taking radioactive iodine it's all over and um radioactive iodine is associated with increased rates of cancer years years later down the road of of course that's one of the big threats with a nuclear blast you gota you gotta saturate your thyroid with as much iodine as possible to to protect yourself from the radioactive iodine I can tell you after 30 years of practicing holistic medicine I have never sent a patient for radioactive iodine and over the years I've sent people for thyroidectomies for grave dis disas I just couldn't get it the thyroid was so infected inflamed that you just couldn't get it back to normal and um I had them do thyroidectomies um but it's a couple of patients over 30 years um the vast majority of patients I've treated them with iodine it's part of a holistic treatment regimen I describe it in my iodine book you know how to how to uh how I did that and I still do it today my partners do it today we we like treating grav disease it's it's because it's an interesting thing Hashimoto's disease is another autoimmune thyroid disease that's increased at epidemic rates over the last 30 years when I was young and in practice you would see Hashimoto a little bit but you know not like now man you're seeing kids with Hashimoto yep my two girls who are both Physicians working in my practice now were diagnosed by my wife because I couldn't see it back then when we were at dinner one night when they were about 10 and nine years old and asked me do you think they got a thyroid problem because they're complaining of being headache and headachy and tired and I remember I had like a soup spoon near my mouth when she said do you think they have a thyroid problem and I like I look at her and I just put my other hand in my head and I drop the soup spoon I'm like yeah they probably do you I'm treating all these people but not treating my kids yep my kids at a young age diagnosed with Hashimoto disease titers in the hundreds you know I immediately put them on iodine um and cleaned up their diet they had a good diet took them off gluten though they weren't off gluten before then and then corrected some they were already getting nutritional support back then but the idyn started bringing their titers down uh my daughter Haley's 29 Jesse's 28 Haley has no signs of Hashimoto Jesse very very low tighters below 10 I would call her Nat Hashimoto but you know I'm nitpicking a little bit and um you know some of the my conven my holistic colleagues you know many natural paaths really kind of jab in me that if you have Hashimoto you shouldn't take iodine Hashimoto causes or ID causes Hashimoto disase well I have one comment that I would like uh like them to to discuss with me over the last 30 over the last 40 50 years have ID levels gone up or down across the United States according to the an Hayes data they've gone down 50% over that same time period as Hashi models gone up or down across the United States they've gone up exponentially at the same time iodine levels have gone down that's called a negative association this negative association disproves iodine is causing Hashimoto's disease perod that's the end of the story with it there's something else it and I think what's causing it is you know just the whole glyphosate on our on our grain Supply and the toxicity issues and and coupled with iodine deficiency so I can tell you I have an NF two in my family who took iodine and have virtually no signs of Hashimoto's disease so all she need is an N of one for any hypothesis to blow it out of the water because a hypothesis has to withstand all criticism so I I talk about that in my I book I have a whole chapter on that I can tell you from treating patients for 30 years that's nonsense yes I totally agree are you a fan of desicated thyroid replacement for people who need thyroid hormone or are you a Synthroid fan so my first 10 years of my practice I I would have told you I'd use I recommend natural desiccated thyroid hormone and in my thyroid book I talk about that um and you know it's got the glandular part of the thyroid gland with selenium and some B vitamins some other things and some other you know we don't even know everything that's in there but all that has an effect on you know helping someone who's having a glandula problem so first 10 years that's primarily what I use I can tell you I still primarily use that today but I'm not as I'm not as hardcore because what I found is once I have enough iodine It generally doesn't matter which thyroid they're on whether it be T4 only like Synthroid or or or desicated thyroid hormone they seem to do well on both of them so I I don't I don't I'm not as militant as I was about that back in the day gotcha n again please talk about iodine used to condition dough in the past and how it was replaced with bromide I think in recent times this has also been discontinued so as we mentioned earlier um thanks Nicollet as we mentioned earlier um iDine was was in in um flour to make Bakery products and it's used as a conditioner to to make it fluffy and and for some reason the early 1970s iodine was substituted for bromide and it's not clear why that was the case but that's what happened and um so the it wasn't a mandate by the government but it was kind of just everybody just did it all at once I'm guessing it was cheaper is what I'm guessing I don't know maybe it's cheaper the other the other thing that may have happened was it was around the same time that radioactive iodine became in use for treating um hyperthyroid problems so radioactive iodine works better people are iodine deficient because it's got all the receptors looking for iodine so when you give them a dose of radioactive iodine it gets soaked up by the thyroid doesn't work so well if they have enough iodine so I'm not sure what the true answer to that was but the the the substitution of iodine for bromide was just a a disaster in our food supply and I believe that's what's led to this epidemic of gandroid disease breast over uterus pancreas thyroid you know prostate yes uh Cass says can you take too much if so what are the signs and symptoms that you've taken too much iodine you can take too much of anything you can drink too much water you can you know you can uh take too much of anything but if you have good kidney function you should be able to take a lot of iodine and excrete the excess um there is the the guy who won the Nobel Prize for discovery of vitamin C St Georgie took over a gram of iodine you know a thousand milligrams um I'm talking 25 50 milligrams and then you know a few hundred milligrams sometimes in people with you know stage four prostate breast thyroid you know some kind of cancer um but you know my partner has has prescribed you know hundreds and hundreds of milligrams for people if you have normal kidney function you know it shouldn't be a problem now you the one thing when you take thyroid because you start to mobilize bromide or or loosen bromide and probably fluoride to get out of the body you can get these detox reactions and not feel so good that's we taking salt with it goes hand in hand you know I mean I've written 16 books I write about all this stuff because I see what works in my practice I have a book on salt I have a book on iodine I have a book on thyroid and um you know it's it's it's it's cool when you when you meld sort of the biochemistry physiology and clinical part of medicine together and see the results happen I agree here's a question this keeps me up at night on many topics what about kids what about our kids in school kids in wherever they they don't you know they're supposed to eat low salt therefore less iodine you know they're not feeding them iodine rich foods how do we get iodine in our kids without uh giving them aii form or Lugal is there any way the vast majority of people are salt deficient I can tell you from checking tens of thousands of chemistries and my patients know I'm all I saw patients today I was bugging them you know I look at their chemistries sodium should be 141 M equivalents per liter or higher chloride should be 105 m m equivalents per liter or higher and most people aren't unless they're they're taking it in and our toxic world we need more salt and we need more iodine so um kids need iodine especially kids need iodine they're growing you know their body's changing so fast you know in the book I talk about dosing kids I dose them lower for their size um my kids took iodine growing up um and um you know I made them once I diagnosed with Hashimoto's disease they got a lot more iodine and you know I bumped them I bumped them up as kids to 50 milligrams right away and then their tighter started to come right down so I've got a um two-year-old she takes a one drop of Lugal every three days and then plus whatever Seafood she's a good eater so she gets some seafood in and then my four-year-old son he gets uh two drops twice a week uh I'm not overdosing my kids right no not even close sounds like reasonable doses yeah now let's let's I think I think it's I think I have my book you can't quote me on this because the book's sitting here but I I I think it's 8 milligrams per kilog but I'm not sure what what that does is but I think it's milligrams per kilogram now you know as well as I do that if a if a woman is growing a baby in her body and she is deficient in iodine that can be disastrous there's multiple research studies showing up to 15 IQ points are lost if the mom is doesn't have enough iodine and then when the newborn is is breastfeeding or or God forbid drinking formula if there's not enough that child can actually grow up with 15 fewer IQ points that's just an average from the studies I've seen how how important is it for a woman who's considering becoming pregnant is pregnant or is breastfeeding and then for her her infant how like it's this is not just like oh we recommend you use a little iine when you're pregnant this is a big damn deal ladies please listen up and if you know anybody who's pregnant you got to share this video with them because it literally could make that your grandchild your nephew whatever they could have been an Einstein well no not now it's all true that was one of the worries of the government a 100 years ago was that uh it was known that iine deficiency leads to cretinism which is you know short stature you know very low IQ and you know and other health problems um so you're right there's been studies showing significantly lower IQ scores in women who who you know I I have all those studies I've lectured on them in women pregnant women are are deficient in iodine so I've always said um it it should be a priority for women of childbearing age to to have their ID levels measured and to take ID before they become pregnant and um you know again if our Public Health people were working for us and not for you know the the Pharma cartel you know and in the big business cartel you know we we'd have this rectified but that's not what we see yep I totally agree Dr Brown string it's been a great pleasure and an honor to speak with you a guy who I've been learning from since at least 2005 if not before thank you so much for doing this I'm going to have a link to the book this is the what fifth edition now uh and so it's updated I was reading a 2003 or four Edition back when I first started this journey thank you for all your information over my Decades of practice and I know you've helped many other doctors as well thank you so much for joining me thank you for having me on

Channel: KenDBerryMD

Views: 243,285

Keywords: iodine, iodine deficiency, iodine test, low iodine symptoms, low iodine, low iodine test, iodine supplement, iodine supplement for weight loss, iodine supplement side effects, iodine supplement benefits, iodine supplement dosage, dr brownstein hashimotos, dr brownstein iodine, iodine deficiency disorder, iodine deficiency treatment, iodine deficiency goiter, low thyroid levels, low thyroid function, dr berry dr brownstein, dr. david brownstein

Id: Oix26uuBfZg

Length: 65min 30sec (3930 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 27 2024