Discover Dr. David Brownstein’s insights on the hidden iodine crisis and its link to thyroid disease in this eye-opening exploration.
Uncovering the Link Between Iodine Deficiency and Thyroid Health
In a recent discussion, Dr. David Brownstein and Dr. Peter Osborne shed light on the alarming prevalence of iodine deficiency in the United States and its significant implications for public health. Iodine deficiency is increasingly linked to the rise in thyroid disorders and hormone-related cancers. The conversation highlights how environmental toxins, such as fluoride and bromide, are displacing iodine in the body, leading to serious health consequences. This conversation emphasizes the need for greater awareness of iodine’s critical role in hormone production and overall health.
Dr. Brownstein draws on decades of research to explore the historical significance of iodized salt, once hailed as a public health miracle. He explains how modern dietary habits and environmental factors may be undermining thyroid function and overall well-being. The discussion covers the connections between iodine levels and thyroid health, as well as the potential links to breast and prostate health, urging individuals to consider practical steps to reclaim their health and address iodine deficiency.
Unveiling the Silent Epidemic: How Iodine Deficiency is Undermining Thyroid Health
What um what do you feel like is the driving factor behind you know the iodine deficiency? We’ve got the goer belt up in the kind of the north mid midn northwest part of the country. But what what are your thoughts on iodine deficiency and and why it’s so prevalent? But the quarter so the iodine I I you know interesting.
Interesting with iodine you you talk about iodine with anybody whether they have any knowledge of iodine or not. Everyone seems to be interested in iodine. They their their eyes perk up a little bit. they they stand up a little straighter when you when iodine is discussed because it’s an interesting for whatever reason it’s an interesting.
Substance for people. So you’re right the goer is where I live in around the Great Lakes. It’s the states the border of the Great Lakes. It’s Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and that state down south that we’ve beaten four times in a row. Um starts with a lowercase O. Um or four or in a row.
Um, so and and they did win a national championship this year. They won a two- loss national championship and they’re fourth place in the Big 10. Congratulations for them. They’re not undefeated reigning national champions like anyways. So iodine, if you draw a line from the central United States down,.
Including where you live in Texas, um the whole mid part of the US has seriously low iodine levels in the soil. And what’s happened because of poor farming techniques and erosions and you know things that iodine levels have fallen across the United States and according to the national health and nutrition examination survey which the.
Government does every 10 years and we’re waiting for this last one. This last one was supposed to be released during co they haven’t released it yet but iodine levels have fallen over 50%. And during that time iodine levels have fallen over 50%. We’ve seen rapid rises in all the thyroid illnesses. Hashimoto’s, Graves, hypothyroidism, and thyroid cancer.
Plus, we’ve seen increases in all those glandular diseases, including cancer of the ovaries, uterus, breast, prostate, pancreas, and of course, the thyroid. And um the first thing we should be doing to make America healthy again is let’s let’s let’s correct iodine deficiency, which is rampant across the United.
States. It’s in we’re all eating very, you know, we’re all eating pretty much the same foods these days. Um, and the food supply is just deficient in iodine because the soil is deficient in iodine. Do you think that flidation has anything to do with it like like competitive halid? So iodine is part of the hall family.
From the if we go back in time to high school for those that did take science majors or you know beyond. Um the the periodic table of elements group 17 which is on the right side of the the periodic table is is the hallides and the hallides in order of their size are fluoride bromide I’m sorry fluoride chloride fluoride chloride bromide and.
Iodine and each of those hallites are competitive inhibitors in the body meaning if you get one hallide in at high amounts it can kick the other ones out two of those hallides are essential we can’t live without them every cell in the body needs and requires them. That’s iodine and chloride. Chloride we get from.
Salt. Um sodium chloride. And two of the helides are toxic non-essential items that have no known therapeutic value in the human body. That’s fluoride and um broomemide. Now, we could argue about whether fluoride is helpful for preventing uh cavities, which studies have shown that countries.
That fluoridate versus countries that don’t fluidate have the same number of cavities. Um, but fluoride is a very toxic element. It’s a it’s an extremely electrogative substance that can damage tissues. It should not be in our water supply, shouldn’t be in our food supply. And if if we’re going to use fluoride for anything, perhaps we could put it in.
Toothpaste and nothing else. And that might be adequate for fluoride, but you know, we’re getting over fluoridated from, you know, water and juices and everything else that it’s that it’s in. It’s in fluoride’s in a bunch of drugs as a as part of its chemical makeup. Um, and broomemide is another toxicide that’s all over the place. It’s in.
Computers and iPhones and electronics and carpets and curtains and food and drink. And my testing has shown over 30 years that we are over brominated and under iodinated and it’s it’s causing you know all these health issues that we’re suffering with as a country. So practical application there, filter your water, avoid avoid uh medicines if.
Possible that contain these these halides and um um avoid foods and other toxic compounds that contain broomemides and correct iodine deficiency because I you look if you get enough iodine in you can you can competitively inhibit a bromide out of the body. Um so bromite’s found as brominate vegetable oils. It’s in food and drink. It’s in a lot of.
Sodas. Um, bromide and fluoride are in some anti-depressant medications, some asthma medications. Um, and then it’s in all this, you know, blankets and curtains and carpets and mattresses and things, you know, we can’t get away from it in our country. A lot of brominated substances have been outlawed in Europe.
We still use them here. Um so it’s re so what what this has done essentially this flidation of our water supply and this over brominated everything else has made our iodine deficiency epidemic worse for us than it is for our predecessors and I think that’s why breast cancer rates continue to rise ovarian cancer uterine cancer pancreatic cancer thyroid cancer.
And well as as well as other thyroid illnesses like Hashimoto’s and Graves disease going up at epidemic rates so so correct the iodine remove as much as possible the other halides that that the body doesn’t need that are non-essential. Is this so so is this is this something that you feel like is why.
Thyroid disease is so much on the rise? Um you know what what would you say are the top you know five you know five things that are contributing to the deterioration of thyroids in humans today? Well, let’s say the top five are all the same things because it’s iodine deficiency number one, two, three, four,.
Five. And unless so when when I started when I started doing holistic medicine, I treated my dad with thyroid hormone. One of the first remember thyroid hormone testosterone were the first two things. His angina went away at 7 days and 30 days later his cholesterol falls 100 was it 300 below 200? So 150 points or so. without changing any of its bad.
Habits. Um, I start testing everybody for their nutrition and hormone balance. Everybody since my dad has gotten a hormonal and nutritional evaluation and I started finding all these hypothyroid patients out there, you know, for whether they had normal or not TSH levels, they started having T4, T3,.
Thyroid antibodies, you know, all disregulated. So I started using thyroid hormone. That was the first thing I really did for people. I first thing I learned about and I started putting people on natural thyroid hormone and just like my dad, people were getting better from a variety of illnesses and they’re getting.
Their energy energy back and their brain fogs improved and their you know everything’s practice is growing. I’m happy they’re happy. I think I’m doing them a service. Although I was bothered by how much thyroid hormone I was prescribing for people. why why so many people are requiring thyroid hormone to feel good and so I went back to the.
Biochemistry and started looking at the pathways and thinking well what are the co-actors that the thyroid gland needs to make thyroid hormone and thyroid gland needs magnesium it needs B vitamins it needs calcium it needs vitamin C it needs iodine to make thyroid hormone so I would try these co-actors in varying amounts of low.
Medium and high and to see if I could use less thyroid hormone I was using I would estimate The first 10 years of my practice, I had about 75% of my patients on thyroid hormone. Now, there were no ill effects seen with that. In fact, there were positive effects seen with that. But it was just it was unsettling.
To me to have to use, you know, I didn’t think we were designed by our maker to need thyroid hormone just because we’re getting older. But none of the co-actors could get my level of prescribing thyroid hormone down. They still needed a thyroid hormone to feel good. And iodine was interesting to me. Just like I said to you earlier that iodine is an.
Interesting substance substance for most people whether they know about it or not. They start talking about it. They become interested. I was always interested in iodine. I grew up in Michigan. I I went to undergrad and med school in Michigan. I’m still in Michigan. It’s the Gorder Belt. It was known in the 1800s and 1900s that the.
Gorder Belt was an area of iodine deficiency. And are you okay if I get into that story of of Gordel? Um so in the in the early 20th century as the US was moving from east coast to west coast and the population was expanding. Um there was an epidemic of goiter that was starting to infiltrate the entire United States.
But concentrated in the Midwest and the the US government at its highest levels became concerned about this. They weren’t concerned because people were having goiter which is goer means swollen thyroid and they weren’t concerned so much from people having goiter. What they were concerned about was the.
Animals were having problems. The animals were having problems with the thyroid. They were having problems procreating and they were having problems growing to the right size. And there was a concern at the highest levels of our government that as the population expanded from east to west that the population was going to.
Outstrip the ability to supply enough food to feed that population because the animals were were not procreating correctly. So, there was a doctor at Case Western Med School, and I am blocking on his name, and I can’t believe I’m blocking his name out of me right now, who wrote a.
Paper about iodine while he was in med school that somehow caught the attention of federal government officials who who asked him to do a study on animals to figure out if putting iodine in their feed would solve this thyroid problem they were having and the procreation problem they were having. So he put varying amounts of.
Iodine in the feet of animals in a in uh uh just outside of Cleveland, you know, I think the Akran area and he found the minimal amount of iodine they added to animal food that all of a sudden cured their thyroid problems and their procreation problems and their size problems. He wrote a he wrote up a paper on it and he the US government used that.
Same amount of iodine per weight for humans to figure out how much the minimum amount humans need to solve their gyrer problem. And so they the easiest way and the cheapest way to get that into humans was in salt. So the government didn’t mandate but they encouraged the salt manufacturers to put iodine in their salt. So they that’s how.
We got iod i iodiz salt. So, iodiz salt was introduced to to that four-letter state with a lowercase O. It’s it’s known as Ohio, but lower lowercase O. O and four against us last four years, by the way. And um there he did a study of teenage girls and he found that the goer rate went down. I don’t have those numbers in my.
Head. Significantly reduced gator rate when they gave them um iodine. And so they iodized salt. The same studies were done in Michigan shortly thereafter. And they iodized salt first in Michigan and Ohio and found the goer rate went down. So the government encouraged all the salt manufacturers to make iodiz salt for the rest of the United States. This.
Was in the mid 1920s to late 1920s. And the goer epidemic was held as the first public health miracle via the use of iodine and iodiz salt. And it really helped things. you know, people weren’t walking around with these huge thyroids anymore. Um, and that’s how we got iodiz salt. Now, the interesting part was the interest in iodine went down after that.
You know, World War II came, World War II went and then um the goer epidemic was gone and and big pharma started coming up with drugs and iodine is a non-p patentable substance. It wasn’t it was cheap. There wasn’t a lot of money to be made in it and the interest just waned on it and it was done. When I was in med school in the 1980s, I.
Was very quickly taught about iodine, that iodiz solved the cider epidemic, that there’s no more iodine deficiency in the United States because of that. And that was about it. Didn’t really think about it. Um, we weren’t taught not to use iodine, but we weren’t taught to use it. And we were taught that there’s no basically we were taught.
There was no reason to use it because the the deficiency caused from iodine deficiency goer is is resolved. So um it was a it was a it was a public health miracle back then but over the years what’s happened is our exposure to broomemide and fluoride the toxic hallogens has gone up. We’re we’re much more exposed to these things than our.
Great-grandparents and our grandparents and great great-grandparents were. And therefore, our iodine requirements are higher now than our predecessors were. And I think that that’s again the driving link between one in seven women with breast cancer risk, one in three men with prostate cancer risk, thyroid cancer, the fastest growing cancer, and.
Then, you know, pancreatic ovarian uterine, you know, the rest of them going. And um I think the only way we’re going to reverse this is correcting this nationwide iodine deficiency problem.
