How to Manage Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis – Top Triggers & Treatments | Podcast #430

Dr. Justin Marchegiani discusses common triggers and treatments for Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, emphasizing the importance of lowering antibodies and inflammation.

Highlights:

– Hashimoto’s affects 26 million Americans, making it the most common autoimmune condition.
– Women are five times more likely to have Hashimoto’s than men.
– Selenium is crucial for activating thyroid hormone and lowering antibodies.
– Iodine intake must be balanced to prevent exacerbating thyroid autoimmunity.
– Gut health plays a significant role in autoimmune conditions and should be addressed.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey guys, it's Dr. Justin Marchegiani. Welcome to the Beyond Wellness Radio podcast. Feel free and head over to justinhealth. com. We have all of our podcast transcriptions there, as well as video series on different health topics ranging from thyroid to hormones, ketogenic diets, and gluten. While you're there, you can also schedule a consult with myself, Dr.

J, and or our colleagues and staff to help dive into any pressing health issues you really want to get to the root cause on. Again, if you enjoy the podcast, feel free and share the information with friends or family. And enjoy the show. Hey guys, Dr. Justin Marchegiani here today. I'm gonna do a live podcast here with you, just myself.

We're gonna be talking about my top tips on what the common Hashimoto triggers and treatments are to lower antibodies and lower thyroid inflammation. I'm gonna be talking about some things I haven't really addressed before on YouTube. So, this will be exciting podcast on the topic. Before we do, smash the like button.

Love to see your comments down below. Make sure you subscribe and get access to This great information. All right guys, so let's dive in. So Hashimoto's, do you know 50 million people per year have autoimmune conditions? Or should I say 50 million people total in the United States have autoimmune condition?

This is kind of crazy because 26 out of that 50 are Hashimoto's. Like, Hashimoto's is the most common autoimmune condition. And 22 million people actually have heart disease. So, autoimmune conditions and even Hashimoto's right now, essentially, is bigger and, and broader. then heart disease, which is kind of crazy, right?

So this is a big deal in autoimmune conditions. Anytime you see any condition in conventional medicine, that's kind of like unsolvable, like it's this weird kind of case. Almost always there's an autoimmune component to it. My wife brought me she's like, Oh, have you ever heard of this issue? And it was like this weird thing where the skin started melting off someone.

I'm like, guarantee you, there's an autoimmune component. I think it was like Steven Jacobs syndrome. And then she looked it up and she's like, yep, autoimmune component. I'm like, what? Bingo. Almost all weird conditions or more neolithic conditions or diseases. There's some kind of an autoimmune inflammatory component.

It's important. It's important to be aware of this. And women are five times more likely to have this condition, this autoimmune issue than men. I'm actually one of those. guys that have Hashimoto's as well. And so, I've had to make it my life's mission to, to solve it, to be an expert in it. I actually have a book coming out on that topic.

It's in the last round of editing. Should be out in the next three months. So, I'm really excited for that. It's called The Thyroid Reboot. It's gonna go all into this stuff. So, it'll be pretty exciting. Good deep dive, kind of way to summarize everything in, in a applicable, actionable way that isn't too overwhelming and gives people some good starting points to get their thyroid inflammation and autoimmunity under control.

So, top triggers. Let's kind of go into it. We talked about how common autoimmune issues, about 50 million people in the year of autoimmunity, 26 million are Hashimoto's, and about 5 times more females to males. Again, autoimmune condition is a, Hashimoto's is autoimmune condition that specifically attacks the thyroid gland.

So you're gonna have a couple of different antibodies. You're gonna have TPO, thyroid peroxidase antibody, that attacks the enzyme that actually takes the iodine, and the tyrosine, and it bonds it together. So you have tyrosine to the protein backbone, and then the iodine is the, the number. When they say T4, it's cause there's four numbers, four molecules of iodine bound to that tyrosine protein.

So T4 means that thyroid protein, Tyrosine backbone. Four molecules of iodine. Then the conversion to activate your thyroid hormone, because about T4, it's about 300 400 percent less active than T3, so that activation process involves an enzyme called Deidenase. Deidenase is exactly how it sounds. You're, you're, you're, you pulling an iodine off of that thyroid protein.

So you have this tyrosine in the background, you have the four iodines right here, and then we're cleaving off one of the iodines, making a T3 that increases the metabolic activity three to four hundred percent. And that enzyme, that deiodinase enzyme is selenium driven. So selenium is very important, not only for activating thyroid hormone, but it's also important for lowering thyroid antibodies.

Because part of the iodination process when you bind that tyrosine and the four molecules of iodine, when you go through that thyroid process, you actually can spit off hydrogen peroxide. Hydrogen peroxide is an inflammatory byproduct of the iodination process. When you take in selenium, selenium actually helps take the hydrogen peroxide that comes from that metabolic processing.

And it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, Pulls off an oxygen making it H2O. So it does significantly help buffer the inflammation that comes from that process. Now, because autoimmunity is so important and so common, we have to look at some of the big mechanisms of autoimmunity. iodine or should say thyroid autoimmunity.

Now, one of the first ones is going to be iodine. Now, iodine is one of these things where you actually need iodine. You need it, right? You need at least a couple hundred micrograms. Some may say even go into the low milligrams, but there are some people you get too much iodine. There's data in the research showing there's data showing that too much iodine can actually increase Hashimoto's.

So there's too much on, on one side. There's studies on that. I referenced it all in my book, but there's also studies on the low side. You can develop a goiter because you actually need that couple hundred micrograms minimum per day to make that thyroid hormone because you need essentially you have a sodium iodine simporter.

Right? Sodium Iodine is kind of what, what allows Sodium Iodine Simporter, N A I S, is what allows that Iodine to get in to the thyroid gland. If we put too much in there, it actually shuts that thyroid, will shut down that Sodium Iodine Simporter. That's what gets Iodine into the gland. It'll shut it down.

And you'll actually go hypo for a period of time. And then you could also have the opposite effect. You can have what's called a Jod Base Diol effect, which is where you, actually overstimulate it with iodine. So you can have this Wolf Tchaikov effect, which is kind of the lower protective mechanism, and the Jod Bayes dial, it will actually stimulate hyperthyroid.

But either way, you need some iodine. It's just like, you have people on both sides of the camp because there's data out there saying both sides. saying both high and low iodine can definitely increase thyroid autoimmunity. So we know looking at the physiology and biochemistry that iodine is definitely needed, right?

It's there in the biochemistry, but the question is to what degree. So I tend to always lower, tend to recommend on the lower side, especially when a patient comes in initially, because part of the iodination process, when you add more iodine in to that process, and that sodium iodine simporter brings that iodine into that thyroid tissue, yeah, you can get more inflammation because that is a byproduct of that process.

And so, if someone is already inflamed, they already have elevated antibodies, with throwing more iodine into that person's system, be a concern. Yeah, definitely would be. It could definitely increase that autoimmunity, and we're worried about that you. antibody, destroying that thyroid tissue and decreasing the functional tissue that's available.

That's a big deal. So we talked about the, the antibody. You have TPO, that's the antibody that's, that's, that attacks the enzyme that actually makes thyroid hormone. Then we have thyroglobulin antibody, which is the antibody that attacks the thyroid tissue as well. Both are gonna have impacts and inflammation on the tissue.

Now, TPO is more common. You'll see that, you know, 70 plus percent of the time, compared to thyroglobulin. And you could alternate. I've seen myself be positive for TPO. And negative for TG are very low and then have it switch. So it's possible that can go up and down. Now I see patients that come in that are very elevated.

So my goal out of the gate is to get someone's antibodies cut in half at least. Now it depends. Some people come in to see me and they already have their diet and lifestyle and nutrients dialed in. So where their starting point for antibodies, we're not maybe getting a good look at that. Maybe they're already down 50%.

And so maybe I'm trying to lower it to the 20 or 30. So it just depends where I'm getting a snapshot of that person starting off in their health journey. Thank you. But in general, we're trying to get that person, you know, I'd say below 500 to 300, you know, if we can get the average person coming in around 500, 400, I want to get them into the hundreds at least.

I want to get that 50 to 80 percent reduction is a good goal, because that's gonna allow that antibodies to, to drop, and that's gonna help preserve their functional tissue that's available. Because you really only need fibroid hormone when the autoimmune attack has taken place. impaired your thyroid's ability to make hormone.

Some people can just have an inflamed thyroid, but they're still actually making good amounts of hormone. That's where I'm at. Like, my TSH is right around 1. My T4 was like 1. 3. My T3 was like 3. 8. I have no problem with hormone production at all, but that thyroid was slightly inflamed. And so, we can do things to bring that inflammation down.

And for me, it's about getting ahead of it and preserving your thyroid. So, when I'm, you know, age 10, 20 years from now. I'm not on thyroid medication because I'm in a hypostate because my functional tissue reserves are depleted. So some people come in just with mild inflammation like me. Some have destruction, where that T4 and T3 is now super low, that TSH as a byproduct will go high.

Now most doctors look at TSH as the be all or end all, but TSH is a late stage indicator responding to the hormone drop. And so when you look at TSH, it tends to lag behind by many years. And you could see someone like me with great T4, great T3, TSH is perfect right around 1. And guess what? You wouldn't even come back positive from your conventional endo as even being a risk.

They'd say, you know, you're fine. But even though my antibodies are elevated, someone like myself, a functional medicine doc would be like, Hey, no, you gotta be on top of this. We gotta make sure these nutrients are in your diet. We gotta make sure we pull gluten out and dairy out. We gotta make sure we're at least following a good paleo template.

80 to 90 percent of the time. Try to keep gluten out all the time if you can. We want to have the big foods that we know can drive autoimmunity out. We want to make sure we have good gut health because we know gut permeability and leaky gut is one of the biggest drivers of autoimmunity to begin with, right?

If you have gut permeability due to dysbiosis, maybe from antibiotics, maybe from a crummy diet in the past, maybe too much grains or gluten, maybe from glyphosate in your conventional food. chronic stress, low enzymes, low acid, low bio salts. This can then drive bacterial imbalances, maybe from plastics, maybe from chemicals in the environment, microplastics, all these things could be potential driving factors and increasing gut permeability, lipopolysaccharides for bacterial overgrowth.

And that's going to open up these tight junctions and allow different compounds to get through into the bloodstream, right? Because actually, inside your guts, actually outside your body, right? It's, it's, you take food in, it's still outside your body, technically, then it gets absorbed into the micro V line.

Now, it's in your bloodstream. Now, it's inside, right? Kind of a weird concept, but it's, if you think about it, it kind of makes sense. And so, if we have gut permeability from those five or six things I mentioned, that's going to allow our immune system, which Again, 80 percent of it's in that intestinal area.

It's in the galt, which is the gastric associated lymphoid tissue, it's in the malt, which is the mucosal associated lymphoid tissue in the small intestine, that's gonna allow these immune cells to be on overdrive, alright? And so, when people get tired, they're like, oh, my thyroid must be going hypo. Well, it's like, yeah, but if your immune system is overactive, it's gonna impair your mitochondria.

It's gonna cause your immune system to take away energy resources from your mitochondria, Alright. from your thyroid, from your adrenal, so you won't feel as energized because your immune system is a resource hog. It's kind of like, I don't know, if you get like 50 chrome browsers up on your computer, and they're all up, and you're trying to go type a word document, you may get a little bit of a lag, right?

Well, it's because you have Programs that are more energy hogs on in the background. So it's kind of the same thing if your immune system is overactivated, that's going to play a major role in your body, may decrease metabolism by what, by generating less atp to the mitochondria, maybe through making less thyroid hormone, maybe through.

less cortisol, maybe through less healthy fatty acid synthesis, right? So it could be many different ways that that could be manifesting. And so when you say, Oh, well, my energy issues is present. It must be thyroid. Yes, but your thyroid functions and dysfunctions with other systems. So you, when you look at things you want to look at holistically, you don't just want to look at it in isolation.

So let me just make sure we're hitting all the big things. So we talked about 50 million people with autoimmunity, 26 with Hashimoto's. That's mind blowing to me, right? Five to one. female to male. That's really important out of the gate. Now, the immune system produces antibodies. We talked about the antibodies, TPO and thyroglobulin.

Those are the big ones on the Graves disease or hyperthyroid side. We may see TSH receptor antibodies, TRAB for short, or we may also see a TSI thyroid stimulating immunoglobulin, and that's more of an autoimmune condition stimulating. the immune system or stimulating the thyroid to make more hormone.

Again, this, it can overlap because someone with Hashimoto's early in early days and early days could be years, could feel like they have graves or hyper because as their thyroid system, their gland gets attacked, they can actually spill out more thyroid hormone and that could make them feel hyper, that can make them feel jittery or anxious because you have this overload of thyroid.

in your, in your tissues being exposed to the, your bloodstream because your immune system attacking it. Imagine if you look at like a little berry, right? You look at a raspberry, it's got these little follicles within the berry. Imagine popping that and having that berry juice pop out, right? And stay in your clothes.

That's what's happening to your thyroid. It's like pop, pop, pop, and it's just sticking out and that hormone goes into your bloodstream and that's going to make you feel Hypo. And so, in early days, you could actually look a little bit higher, a little bit hyper, even though you have no Graves mechanism happening, even though there's no TSI, there's no T Rab, right?

But you have this TPO and thyroglobulin, and you're like, I'm anxious, and it could be early days in Hashimoto's, and that could last for years, potentially. That's why we have to get to the root cause. Now when we get to the root underlying triggers, let's kind of talk about that, right? We talked about the gut permeability.

That's a big thing because that opens up the immune system. And when you expose things to, when you expose your immune system to things like gluten, gluten has a certain protein amino acid sequence that looks very similar to the thyroid tissue. And so imagine the police, right? They call out an APB, right?

All posted bulletin. Hey, I saw a black Honda Civic, you know, year 2010, you know, speeding on the highway, 100 miles per hour. Guess what? The police get that APB and they're like, okay, they're looking for any black Honda Civic to pull over in that vicinity. Well, guess what? That black Honda Civic looks similar to maybe your car who's not involved in the incident.

Well, same thing. These amino acid sequences on gluten or on dairy and casein have similar sequences to the tissues in your body. And so gluten seems to be one of that big one. Plus gluten has the biggest glyphosate load to it. So glyphosate also increases leaky gut. Gluten also aggravates and antagonizes the immune system.

It revs up antibodies like TPO and like thyroglobulin to go after and attack That thyroid tissue. So that's a big thing. Plus you're getting glyphosate which increases more gut permeability. Plus a lot of glyphosates in flours and grains which those foods tend to feed dysbiotic bacteria. If you're consuming lots of flours or grains, you know, acellular carbohydrates.

These are gonna feed a lot of the dysbiotic junk in your gut. What's the next biggest thing that's gonna drive gut permeability? Well, lipopolysaccharides, LPS, endotoxin. So this is gonna get into your bloodstream, and this is gonna create gut permeability. It's also gonna go to your brain and make your brain feel foggy as well.

So when we look at the big triggers for gut permeability, we have gluten, we have dairy. We have lipopolysaccharide from dysbiotic bacteria. We have fungus. How do you get fungus? Well, you can just eat too much carbs, eat too much processed food, but again, antibiotics can actually create what's called a rebound fungal overgrowth.

More conventional primary care doctors, they're actually getting wise up to that and they're giving like fluconazole or antifungals post antibiotic treatment. Now again, probably not the best thing, but they're at least thinking, Hey, we want to mitigate the fungal overgrowth. That's a common thing. And so you can get fungal overgrowth just from antibiotics.

That's a big one out of the gate. Now, nutritional deficiencies play a big role. There's a couple of things. Vitamin D plays a major role in supporting the immune system, right? We need vitamin D for healthy mitochondrial function. So the mitochondria interplates, we generate ATP to the mitochondria. Okay.

So we have essentially Protein, fats, and carbohydrates. They all funnel, carbohydrates goes to pyruvate and can go through glycolysis and generate a few ATP in glycolysis, pyruvate to lactate that can generate ATP. That's so carbs, glycolysis, pyruvate, lactate, ATP. We have protein, we have fats, and it all funnels down into acetyl CoA.

And acetyl CoA then jumps into the Krebs cycle. The Krebs cycle for every one molecule of acetyl CoA, it goes around twice. We're gonna generate three NADH per turn and one FADH2. Okay, so then. Per two turns, it's six and six N Adhs and two FA DH twos. Those are, they're gathering hydrogens. If you notice, the NAD goes to NADH, so we have an extra hydrogen.

The FADH goes to FADH two, so we're gathering hydrogens. That's called a reduction. Totally weird. Science is confusing. It's like, wait a minute. I got more hydrogens, but I had a reduction. What I know. Just, you gotta just know it, right? So we're gathering hydrogens. Those hydrogens now go into the electron transport chain and we're actually able to generate more a TP in the electron transport chain.

Go through the different phases. 1, 2, 3, 4. We use coq 10 here. We use glutathione, we use vitamin C. We generate a lot of lipid peroxides, and so we generate like about two a TP up top in glycolysis. We generate about, hmm, another two to four a TP as we go through the Krebs cycle. Right? And then we generate about 32 to 34 ATP in the electron transport chain.

Now, we have a couple little side pathways we can go through de novo fatty acid we can go through beta fatty acid oxidation where we generate energy from fatty acids. We can also spit off ketones over there. So, that's another kind of fuel pathway. So, if you're kind of lower carb or you're restricting carbs, that can, be a big thing.

Now, also, one of the big things in Hashimoto's is insulin resistance is a massive driver of Hashimoto's. Why people have insulin resistance? Why people have insulin resistance is because they're typically eating a lot of processed crappy food, too much carbs. And anytime you see carbs, you're almost always going to see processed flour, grains, sugar, acellular carbs.

Acellular carbs are like things that are going to be pulverized in that floury type of form, right? They're gonna have a high glycemic index, processed carbs, processed sugar, and they're gonna cause lots of surges of insulin, right? The faster and the more concentrated sugar hits you, whether it's from flour, whether it's from excess starch, whether it's from too much fruit or fruit juices, or anything that has sugar in it that has high fructose corn syrup, is gonna cause surges in blood sugar.

Your blood sugar meets that surge with insulin to bring it back down. And so the more we surge up insulin, the more it's gonna throw off our hormones, and it's stress in our mitochondria. Cause when we bring in that fuel, that fuel is dirty. What dirty fuel means is, you bring in a whole bunch of sugar, that has to get processed, but we don't get the nutrients with it.

Cause these flowers and processed foods are nutrient poor. It's a transaction fee to run that Krebs cycle. It's a transaction fee. It requires B vitamins. It requires some iron, it requires magnesium, it requires amino acids. And so, if we're running that Krebs cycle and the food that you brought in doesn't contain those nutrients, guess what?

You have an expensive transaction fee. And this is why utilizing Paleo, anti inflammatory, whole food, nutrient dense foods, and adjusting the carbohydrates to what you can handle is better because you're gonna get nutrient dense foods that are gonna have the nutrients there to run that transaction fee, right?

This is why it's so important. So, when we look at mitochondrial function. The mitochondria and the thyroid interplay, because we generate ATP, we get the nutrients in, but also the food that are the most expensive on the mitochondria, right? These acellular process, sugar grains, flours, those are the same ones that are gonna aggravate the immune system to then beat up the thyroid more.

So we talked about TPO and thyroglobulin and the big antibodies there. We talked about how Hashimoto's can feel like Graves. That's a really important topic. Let's go into, how does your doctor diagnose you with Hashimoto's? Well, most of the time they're just gonna see TSH being high and that's gonna be it.

They very rarely even wanna go look at TPO or thyroglobulin. Why? It does not change the diagnosis. They're not gonna prescribe you anything different because the drugs that are typically used for autoimmune condition, immunosuppressants, biologics. Prednisone, they have more side effects than the typical thyroid patient is even complaining about.

And so, you typically do not prescribe a drug that has more potential side effects than the actual condition. So, they tend to just ignore that and save those drugs for more severe autoimmune issues like Crohn's and ulcerative colitis and lupus and RA. People that are much more debilitated. Now, here's the deal.

You can still be very debilitated in the thyroid world. So I acknowledge that and honor it, especially if you're one of these people that have TSH that look okay. Then now you're never gonna get looked at. You may have antibodies to the roof. Your T4 may be okay to low, but your T3 could be in the tank.

So you could really be one of these people that just gets totally you know, put under the rug because you have the first one to two markers that get looked at. TSH is the primary one. T4 maybe, but let's say you're good on both or you're borderline low on T4, but borderline on TSH, you're screwed because you're not going to get picked up and you're going to be stuck with all these symptoms and no one's going to be able to acknowledge that something is happening physiologically.

So you're going to feel a little bit crazy in your skin, like what's going on? Like they said, I'm fine. I've been at four endocrinologist. What's happening? And it's like, yeah. They're just missing it, right? Because they're looking for that classic hallmark disease of a TSH or above. Maybe T4 is below 8. 8, right?

But most of the time, you're gonna get missed. So, we wanna look at TSH. We wanna below 2. 5 ideally, 0. 5 to 2. 5, a 1 is ideal. But we have to look at T4, T4. We have to look at T3. We can look at free and total of those. And it's good to look at antibodies. Cause you could be someone like me who has a great thyroid, but oop.

Hey, I'm seeing these antibodies. If we can get on top of this, maybe we can avoid having an auto immune issue 10 years from now. Right. And that's kind of where I was at my mid twenties when I caught it. And so it's good to be on top of it so you can spare yourself a lot of destruction over time. So we talked about blood sugar.

Blood sugar is a really important role. Insulin resistance is a big, big deal. Female hormones play a big role, right? Estrogen dominance can impact the CD8 CD4 ratio that can impact your auto immunity. So, if you're estrogen dominant, low progesterone or just higher estrogen or just lower progesterone but slightly higher estrogen from a ratio standpoint, that can throw things off.

And so, one of the big things that will drive hormone imbalances in women is just getting exposed to xenoestrogens from plastics and pesticides and, and and not Organic meat, so to speak, or insulin resistance can throw off the female cycle because that can increase prolactin and upregulate the 1720 lyase enzyme, which causes more androgens that can cause ovarian cysts to grow.

And so that can throw off and create a whole bunch of hormonal problems in guys that can create. upregulation of the aromatase enzyme, and that can cause more estrogen, and that can cause estrogen dominance, start to throw off your immune system too, and create that same problem in guys as well. So, it's important to be aware of that.

And so, insulin is a hallmark in how it impacts your mitochondria, how it depletes B vitamins and nutrients and magnesium. We could throw in women, if you're cycling age, low iron is a big deal because we need oxygen Krebs cycle and mitochondria, and some of the enzymes that help work in that thyroid iodination process.

We talked about the deiodase enzyme. Iron is a, an important cofactor with selenium. to help make that enzyme work so we can bind up that iodine and activate our thyroid hormones. That's a really important component. So other nutrients, magnesium is also important, zinc is important, you know, copper is important, cocutane can be important.

These are all important nutrients. So if we're eating a lot of these processed acellular carbs and gluten, well, we're probably not going to get a lot of these nutrients because these nutrients aren't going to be found in those foods. And so kind of a healthy whole foods, More of a paleo templates going to be ideal.

Again, I hate talking about diet because diet is like a very political term. It's like, I'm vegan. I'm this. It's like, well, I like the word like of a paleo template because paleo template looks at foods that we've. evolved to eat, right? It's taking away a lot of the Neolithic processed foods. You could check off processed flours and grains, all right?

Because grains really have only been consumed for like the last 10, 000 years, and then you can go to like biblical grains, which are like einkorn wheat, and then the more processed flours and hybridized and genetically modified things in the last hundred, definitely cut that out, okay? Then we can go to our processed nut and seed based oil, our rancid fats, our hydrogenated oils are a big deal.

Anything with high fructose corn syrup in there? Any processed meats that have a lot of antibiotics and hormones, that's not how we've evolved. So if you stick to more Neolithic foods, you'll be okay. Again, if you're a vegan vegetarian, I mean, getting at least some kind of fish in there will be helpful.

If you can do some egg yolk, that'll be helpful. If you can be careful of the carbs, the problem with vegan vegetarian diets, almost any protein outside of a protein powder and soy, you get four to five times more carbs than protein. So that's just a recipe. for insulin resistance if you're a vegan vegetarian, right?

Most vegan vegetarians, I call them carbeterians. Now again, who does well on this diet? Because my thing is this, right? I don't have a dog in the fight. I want to go on my tool belt and recommend the right approach for my patient. Who does good on vegan vegetarian diets? Ectomorphs. People that are, these are your ballet dancers, these are your, your basketball players.

These are the people that are just more skinny. They eat carbs, they get energized, they want to go for a walk, they want to run, they want to bike all afternoon, right? People like me, I get too much carbs, I want to nap. right? Most people are on the insulin resistant non ectomorph camp, right? Ectomorphs are your, your ballet dancer.

It's your basketball player. Your mesomorphs, like the linebacker is the in between person. It's the in between person. They can get big if they lift and exercise, they can stay lean or fit, but they can also get big too. And then your endomorph, that's your typical like lineman in football, just naturally bigger kind of big boned, if you will.

Right. And so people that are more mesomorph and endomorph need to be more careful because they're more prone to be insulin resistant. Insulin plays a major role with autoimmunity and thyroid issues. The more we surge insulin, we can activate different interleukins 3 that can exacerbate our autoimmunity.

Plus, when we stimulate lots of insulin, lots of blood sugar fluctuations we can cause insulin surges on the high end, which in women are going to impact prolactin and cause ovarian cysts potentially, and increase androgens, and guys, it's estrogens. And on the low side, now we're surging cortisol and adrenaline to pick that blood sugar back up, right?

Insulin knocks it down, cortisol and adrenaline pick it up. And so, if we're surging like this all day long with our blood sugar, that can be a thing. And again, I did a video today, we'll link to it, but get a blood sugar meter, run a functional glucose tolerance, do a fasting one hour, two hour, maybe three after a meal, below a hundred fasting, 120 or below hour one, 100 below hour two, and definitely 100 below hour three is a good general recommendation to make sure you're not overly surging your insulin.

I think it gives you a pretty good indirect. Okay, let me, I'm kinda going through this here guys, so obviously gut issues, H. pylori can be a big one, Italian study, control group was given let's see, what was it? Control group, Hashimoto's patients placebo, the treatment group, Hashimoto's placebo.

we're given an antibiotic for H. pylori. Both groups that H. pylori, the group that had the H. pylori treated, had a significantly lower amount of thyroid antibodies. H. pylori can be a big deal for Hashimoto's. Same with Blasto. Same idea with Blasto. Treat the Blasto, you can lower antibodies. Same with Yersinia.

Same with Lyme or different Lyme co infections, Bartonella, Babesia. Same with EBV potentially. and different types of bacterial overgrowth can exacerbate the autoimmune response. So, really important to keep an eye on that. The gut plays a big role. One, because that's where you absorb all the nutrients.

But two, that's where your immune system is. And if you're overstimulating that immune response, then you can activate more TPO and more thyroglobulin. Also, we absorb all the nutrients there. The B vitamins, the magnesium, all the important cofactors come through, through the gut. And yeah, if we have gotten bacterial imbalances, we can throw off our motility.

That makes it harder to absorb nutrients too, right? And then we can always talk about different toxins, lead, cadmium, arsenic, aluminum, mercury. Mold toxin, these are all big things that could be a driving factor. It's good to get tested for these things so you know if it's an issue. Again with glyphosate, you're gonna lessen it by just being organic and making sure your water is clean and you have a good, you know, RO filter, a good filter to get that out of your water and make sure it's not in your food, right?

Conventional grains are definitely gonna have it because they use that on all their grains, all the corn, etc. Let's see if I've hit everything, all the big stuff. I wanna make sure you guys get a lot out of this. So vitamin D plays a big role. Role, selenium, coq 10, magnesium. The bacterial, a lot of the infections play a big role as well.

Again, conventional treatments for Hashimoto's. Ready? Ready. Here it is. If your TSH is below four, four and a half, nothing. That's it. It looks like it's above four and a half, five. They may give you Synthroid to bring that TSH down somewhere in the twos. But guess what? There's a little bit of corn in Synthroid, so you may react to it.

So, worst case, you can always do Tyrosine. Tyrosine SOL, it will be a it'll be a synthetic T4, which is Lyo, or I should say it's a Tetraiodothyronine. Tetra means four. Iodothyronine is the iodine hormone molecule, but add, they add a sodium on it so they can patent it. At least the tyrosine SOL is going to have to be clean.

There's no fillers. It's a gel cap. So there's no fillers at all, no corn, no nothing. That's a better way if you're going to go conventional, at least beyond what we're a thyroid support that doesn't have the fillers. Now, I'm a bigger fan of a natural desiccated thyroid. Again, in my line, we have one called thyrobalance, but there's prescription ones like WP and armor and MP, nature throat that are going to have the actual thyroid tissue.

What's the benefit of that? You're going to get T4, you'll get T3. It'll be the natural form. Some of the better ones like WP and H3 will not have the fillers. And you'll also get some T2 in there, which is really important for your metabolism. You'll get some calcitonin, which helps with calcium. You'll get some protomorphogenic protein that helps with the autoimmunity.

Some data shows that glandulars can actually reduce thyroid antibodies, which is pretty cool. So I like the fact that you're getting all of the nutrients and we don't know all the benefits of T2 and PMG. So. I like the thyroid glandular tissue. If you can't tolerate that, then you can always do a tyrosine instead.

But, you know, the fillers can play a big role in most conventional MDs. Don't even acknowledge that as being an issue. And there's a large percent of people that can't convert T4 to T3. So, I don't love jumping on a T4 by itself because of the conversion aspect. There's a lot of nutrients and inflammation that can impact that conversion.

And 20 percent of it happens at the thyroid. 60 percent by the liver and then also in the gut. So, if your gut's impaired, liver's impaired, you're missing the selenium, you're missing the glutathione, you're missing the zinc, then you can definitely have some impaired conversion on all this. So, that's the general conventional medicine model.

Again, functional medicine wise, we're managing our diet, we're managing our blood sugar, we're We're getting our nutrients dialed in. We're going to do some micronutrient testing and see what micronutrients are missing. We're going to look deeply at the gut. We're going to see what's happening with the gut, with the immune system, with digestion, with inflammation.

We're going to make sure we support our cortisol rhythm because if we're overly stressed and cortisol is too high, which is a stress hormone, too high or too low, that can impact thyroid hormone conversion as well. So we're going to look at that. first sleeps off, that can play a big role. Other things that I'm playing around with is using low level laser therapy to significantly reduce thyroid antibodies and autoimmunity, and actually increasing internal hormone production, right?

Pretty cool. I mean, this is really cool. I'm gonna pull up a tab here on this just so you guys can see that I've written the receipts. This is a cool study here. Let's see here. This doctor, this is looking at photobiomodulation. It's a six month follow up on people that have Hashimoto's. Now, a couple things here, they're using an 820 nanometer.

So, this is in the infrared wavelength. The big studies you're going to see on Hashimoto's and different laser wavelengths will be in the infrared. In the mid eight hundreds, or they'll be in the mid six hundreds with red lights. There's some data on, you know, combining red and violet being very helpful because there can be some infectious debris in there.

And, and violet can be very helpful if any infections are in there too. So I like that violet light in that low 400 nanometer frequency. So the milliwatts around 200, one of the lasers I have is a milliwatt for infrared around 1200. So this is a little bit lower but yeah, so this is gonna heat, it's gonna go up to four centimeters in, infrared can go deeper.

And they're talking about here, the biochemical free T3, free T4, anti TPO, anti thyroglobulin were evaluated. And they talked about. Improving weight loss. Why? Because thyroid hormone is going up. So we're having better metabolism. We're having improved weight circumference. And it's talking about results demonstrated a lower fluence with supplements and restoring thyroid function.

Let me go to the bottom. That doesn't give me a good conclusion there. The bottom conclusion I felt like was more thorough. Hit that with you guys. Yeah, here it is. Our results for the first time show that PMB, that's photobiomodulation therapy, is effective not only improving thyroid gland function, but also reducing levels of antibodies that are responsible for damaging the thyroid as well as reducing the need for, this is T4 replacement, and also helping improve weight loss.

So, this is pretty cool, right? And just, you thyroid are people that have, you know, thyroid symptoms, but they their thyroid looks normal, right? And so people that their thyroid looks good, it even helped people that had normal thyroid levels, but had symptoms, which is important to see that, right? Our encouraging results demonstrate the efficacy of photobiomodulation when it's delivered at a lower fluence in conjunction with supplements in the treatment of hypothyroid Hashimoto.

So that's pretty cool. Another good study here, low level laser therapy, chronic autoimmune, again, this is looking at infrared as well. This is at 50 milliwatts. Remember, this study over here was at 830 nanometer. Pretty cool. Noted that all patients reduced LT4 dosage, including 47 percent did not require any LT4 through the 9 month follow up.

Pretty cool. Now, maybe they were on 25 mics, maybe it was a low dose, but that's pretty encouraging, right? Decrease in TPO antibodies and thyroglobulin. TG antibodies were not reduced though but again, the TPO were, and again, the most common antibody is TPO. So the preliminary results indicate that LTT promotes the improvement of thyroid function as patients experience decreased need for LT4, a reduction in TPO, and an increase in parenchymal echogenicity.

I think that just means less swelling, less inflammation, that echogenicity is usually because of inflammation and swelling. So it's decreasing thyroid inflammation. Pretty cool, right? Because a lot of times. People don't have options. I mean, so we have nutrients. We talked about diet and lifestyle modification.

You know, I'm looking at different laser. I'm talking to different laser companies and which lasers I can procure to help my patients adding in different red light or infrared frequencies to help lower thyroid inflammation. So pretty cool. There's a lot of cool things in conventional medicine. I mean, they won't even write your script for a biologic or prednisone because of the side effects are too hard, right?

Right? Do no harm. And so, people in this thyroid Hashimoto's camp, they don't have a lot of options. So, in functional medicine world, people like me, we have a lot of options. We're using nutrients, diet, lifestyle, blood sugar, sleep, we're looking at toxicities, we're looking at nutrient density, we're getting digestion better, we're knocking out infections, we may be even adding in some of this lower level laser therapy to help inflammation as well.

And even potentially reduce the need for thyroid meds. What does that study say here? It said 47. It was only, it's a small study, right? It was only seven people, but 47 percent is a large percentage. So pretty cool. There's a lot of studies on there. There's dozens of studies on LLT low level laser therapy, LLT and Hashimoto.

So it's cool. A lot of stuff out there. A lot of things you can do. I hope you guys enjoyed today's podcast. If you did, please let me know. Love to hear it. It gives me encouragement, motivation. Love to see your comments down below. If you enjoy it, share with family and friends. If you want to dive in, if you need more support on your thyroid and you want to evaluate all your options to get on a treatment plan that actually gets to the root cause, there'll be a link down below where you guys can reach out.

Schedule. Happy to help you out. See patients worldwide. My team does. We'll worldwide on the functional medicine side. If you need that support, we're here to make sure you guys are supported, get a plan that's comprehensive, that really gets to the underlying root issues. All right, guys, if you enjoyed, please let me know.

You guys have a phenomenal day. Take care. Bye y'all.