Thyroid dysfunction

Thyroid dysfunction is practically epidemic in modern society with an estimated 27 million people suffering from low thyroid function.  But that doesn’t tell the whole story.  When you consider how many people may have a defect elsewhere in their thyroid hormone physiology, the number of people potentially suffering from low thyroid symptoms is likely to be double.
This means millions of people are suffering from fatigue, constipation, dry skin and hair, and are having a difficult time losing weight, and it may not be coming directly from the thyroid gland itself.

The thyroid gland is considered to be the primary metabolism gland in the body.  Its hormones act directly on the nucleus of every cell in our body to increase our metabolic rate.  If thyroid hormone cannot get into the cell, low thyroid symptoms will exist.  And therein lies the problem, and confusion, of thyroid function.

Low thyroid symptoms may have nothing to do with the thyroid gland itself.  Let’s use an analogy to illustrate.

Imagine a circle of people sitting next to one another.  The first person gets a message, who then whispers it to the second person, who whispers it to the third person, and so on.  When the message gets to the fifth person, she has to translate the message into another language before telling it to the next person, who then writes it on a piece of paper and must shoot the message like a basketball into a waste basket across the room.

How many possibilities exist for that message to somehow get distorted, or otherwise not make it into the waste basket at the end?  Multiple places, which represents a simplified, but accurate, picture of how thyroid hormone physiology works.

There are at least eight major defects that can occur with thyroid hormones, all resulting in the inability for thyroid hormone to get into the cell and therefore all causing low thyroid symptoms. Only one of these defects has to do with the thyroid gland itself, which is why so many thyroid issues are missed in conventional medicine – they simply don’t look for the other defects.

Getting back to the question of which diet will correct low thyroid symptoms, it should be pretty clear by now that no one single diet or food can fix all of these defects because in every case, there is a different cause for the defect.  For example, one person may not be able to convert their thyroid hormones, while another person might have too little free thyroid hormone available, each person having the same symptoms, but each requiring a different solution.

If you are experiencing low thyroid symptoms, it may or may not be related to your thyroid. But rather than spend your time trying to fix it with nutrition, you’d be better off trying to find out which defect it is first and then take the appropriate nutritional steps to correct the underlying cause.

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