What is the number one complaint patients have when they go into their doctor? Tiredness. Lack of energy is the biggest complaint folks have on their routine exams. Sometimes this is due to anemia like iron poor blood or low vitamin B12 levels, which shows up on your routine blood tests. But most of the time low energy is a thyroid problem. Thyroid hormone tells all the cells in your body to make energy. It controls your energy level day to day. In an emergency you have an override switch called adrenaline you can pump out to get instant energy for a few minutes, but it is very short term and costs you in increased inflammation. Your basic metabolic energy level is run by your thyroid hormone – specifically the hormone known as T3, triiodothyronine.
Now you would think, considering how important T3 is, that doctors would test for this hormone regularly. But they don’t. Instead they test for TSH, the hormone from your pituitary gland that tells your thyroid to produce the hormone T4, which your body then turns into T3. They do this because T3 and T4 levels bounce around all day while TSH levels move slowly and respond to the average levels of T4 across the day. If there is something wrong with your thyroid gland on average, then your TSH levels will go up. This logic worked well 100 years ago when the primary type of thyroid problem was due to iodine deficiency. Your thyroid needs iodine to make T4. When there is not enough iodine your T4 levels go down (causing the active T3 levels to go down and you get tired.) Your thyroid shows this by swelling up real big into what is called a goiter. This was a big deal 100 years ago, particularly in the mid-west. That is why they decided in the US to add iodine to salt to stop this deficiency. While you might still see iodine deficiency in third world countries, it is rarely seen today here in America. Although, as people start using more sea salt and mineral salt without added iodine, iodine deficiency is becoming more common once again.
The problem we have today is that 90% of thyroid problems in this country are autoimmune thyroid disease, also called Hashimoto’s disease. A equally large problem with thyroid hormone (but not thyroid gland) production is the suppression of the conversion of the inactive T4 hormone to the active T3 form by the stress hormone cortisol. With cortisol suppression the thyroid gland is just fine, but you end up with not enough T3 thyroid hormone to tell your cells to produce the energy you need. What I find crazy is that it is almost impossible to find a doctor who will order lab tests to check for these two most modern causes of low energy, but they will still always run a lab test for the type of thyroid problem that was common 100 years ago. Even worse is that when the old TSH test comes back normal they will insist that you do not have any thyroid hormone problems. It is not like what I am writing about is some weird new age holistic medicine mumbo jumbo. This is all common knowledge in the world of physiology, immunology, and endocrinology. There are literally tens of thousands of peer reviewed research papers written on this subject.
Why do I believe doctors don’t look for something that is such a common problem? I believe that this is because the only treatment for both of these conditions is massive lifestyle changes. There are no drugs or surgeries that can help with this. Doctors hate prescribing lifestyle changes because they know most of their patients won’t do them. Rather than form an adversarial relationship with their patients they just ignore the problem. After all, being tired isn’t going to kill you. It just makes you miserable. Doctors are interested in saving your life. Making you more energetic is not part of their job description.
But what if you want more life in your life? What if having no energy really sucks for you and you are willing to do what it takes to regain that energy? What do you do? The first step is to test yourself to see if it is likely that you have low thyroid hormone levels. Yes, we can easily do lab blood work to test for this. It typically costs between $100 and $200 depending upon what all we are testing for. But I would recommend a simple at home test first – the basal body temperature test. This involves simply testing your under-the-arm body temperature before you get out of bed in the morning for a week with a basal thermometer. This temperature should be around 97.6 degrees. If you have low active thyroid hormone levels, one of the consequences is your cells do not generate enough heat energy to keep you fully warm. If you find that your morning temperature is low, like in the 96 – 95 range then low thyroid hormone is a likely cause. Here is a set of instructions and a tracking chart. https://www.pedagogyeducation.com/PedagogyEducation/media/Resources/Posters/Basal-Temperature.pdf
Other common symptoms are hair falling out, dry skin, weight gain, constipation, puffy face, fatigue, weakness, hoarseness, and increased sensitivity to cold. If you have low basal temperature and any of the named symptoms then lab work would help distinguish the specific cause.
Getting rid of stress to lower cortisol levels requires major lifestyle changes. In the short run we use a special transdermal supplement called PS (AdrenaCalm cream) to lower cortisol levels. PS is destroyed in the gut so taking a pill does not work. I have written many different articles on how to lower stress in your life. It is not easy to let go of our rush rush lifestyle. What about the other cause of most low thyroid issues? What causes Hashimoto’s disease? Hashimoto’s is an autoimmune disease. All autoimmune disease basically begins in the gut. There is usually some degree of pre-existing genetic susceptibility which, by some estimates, affects about 30% of the population. Combine that with the right inflammatory conditions in the gut and the person develops an overt disease manifestation. There are more than 80 different autoimmune diseases, and Hashimoto’s is one of the more common ones. We can’t do anything about our genetics, but we can do something about the health of our gut.
What we are looking to do is reverse the condition known as leaky gut. Most of our immune system is in our gut because the wall between the outside world and our insides is only one cell thick in our intestines. Our outer skin has a dozen layers of cells to protect us from bad stuff, but our gut lining is only one cell thick. Certain foods and chemicals attack that thin layer and tear holes in it. When holes appear bacterial toxins, allergenic proteins, and many other poisons are able to get into our blood stream and lymph. This makes the immune system go crazy trying to stop this from happening. When these toxic elements get into our bloodstream they travel to our tissues and glue themselves onto our healthy cells. When this happens our immune cells attack those healthy cells and destroy them. This is autoimmune disease in a nutshell. When those toxins attach themselves to our thyroid, our immune system attacks our thyroid causing thyroiditis (thyroid inflammation). This causes our hormone production to happen in jumps and spurts rather than in a nice regulated manner.
The worst toxin for the gut lining is glyphosate (Roundup), followed by gluten and casein (wheat and milk). Other plant based foods contain other toxins like lectins, saponins, oxalates, tannins, histamines, solanine, and many others. Add to that the chemical poisons added to our foods as preservatives, coloring agents, and industrial processing chemicals, and we have quite an assault on our thin little gut lining. Getting better means eliminating all these poisons from our diet. Glyphosate and gluten removal are universal for every autoimmune patient, and the rest of the plant chemicals will depend on individual differences. Those of you that have gone organic and gluten-free know how big a lifestyle change this is. There is no more ordering out for food, almost nothing on restaurant menus we can eat. (I say we because I have 7 different auto-immune conditions.) We basically have to cook every meal for ourselves from fresh organic ingredients. If you are sensitive to various plant lectins and defense chemicals then even organic means nothing. You end up eating a carnivore diet. Carnivore is the route most people with autoimmune conditions are finding the most success in putting their conditions into remission. (There is no cure for autoimmune, only remission.)
Can Hashimoto’s be put in remission? Yes it can. I have done it. I had massive antibody levels against my thyroid 15 years ago and now they are almost down to zero. My memory was seriously bad as my brain was being attacked, and now it is back to normal. My energy is much better and life is looking pretty good. I keep playing with different foods to see what I can get away with, but typically this only lasts a short while before symptoms start showing up. Healing autoimmune is a lifelong journey. There is no permanent fix. The good life is available, but doing whatever I want and eating whatever I want is not on the good life menu. As rude as it sounds, I have to take care of myself, be kind to my body and respect its needs. Maybe that is not such a bad thing…
Take care,
David