Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of you're the Cure. I've got a great guest today. Dr. Alan Christensen is joining us.
Just a superb clinician. He's a naturopathic doctor, Dr. Christiansen.com that's what the S O N is where you can find him. But I'm reading straight off the website the first diet clinically proven to reverse thyroid disease. A groundbreaking new book from New York Times best selling authority and naturopathic physician Dr. Alan Christiansen. And I can testify personally, well, not personally, but for a patient of mine last week testified to the success. You can mark her down as one of these, I think later in this. Yeah, up to 70% of people feel significantly better and reverse their thyroid disease, not manage reverse, which is fine to manage. Don't feel condemned if you're managing. But we like to get to the root cause if possible and reverse it. And thyroid in particular seems to be so tricky.
And when I first started learning integrative medicine 14 years ago, hypothyroidism was one of the first things the doctor that trained me, Dr. Roby Mitchell, Dr. Fit, he was all about hypothyroidism and subclinical hypothyroidism and all the clinical signs and symptoms of hypothyroidism. Even when your blood test said no, you're normal, which is all I learned in medical school to do is really check one blood test, tsh, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. But Dr. Mitchell taught me to go a lot deeper and it turned out it seemed like almost every single patient walking in the door had hypo or low thyroid based off symptoms, even if their labs were normal. So we really aggressively went after that.
But I didn't see a whole lot of disease reversal. I saw some symptoms get better and sometimes not get better or sometimes get better and then regress. And just a lot of management really is what it was. I mean it was great for people to feel better. But if there's a way to go deeper, we should if we can truly reverse disease. So I first Learned about about Dr. Alan Christensen last year in 2025, read his book the Thyroid Reset Diet. Have it right here. I highly recommend it, guys. You can get it on his website or I'm sure Amazon and just it really made sense. That's one of the things that guides me and I think guides a lot of my patients and listeners is just an aha moment where that makes sense. It's probably the most common phrase we hear as we teach People about root causes of disease. And Dr. Christensen made this thing just make sense. So we've implemented a lot of what he's teaching in our clinic, in our protocols, and have seen some significant reversals. So I wanted to bring Dr. Christensen on just to talk about this approach. There's lots of different approaches to hypothyroidism. We've. We've had others on the show in the past, but today we're going to talk about a unique approach. So, Dr. Christensen, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us.
[00:02:54] Speaker B: Dr. Ben, thank you so much for having me. I'm glad to be here with you.
[00:02:58] Speaker A: Well, first, before we jump into thyroid and the book, Just a Little Bit of History, and it's specifically naturopathic physician. The state of Texas does not recognize the naturopathic medical degree. I think there's seven or eight states that do. But just explain a little bit of that for listeners who are new and maybe don't understand what a naturopathic physician is. And how did you get into that line to work? And just a little bit of your backstory.
[00:03:23] Speaker B: Sure. Yeah. Great questions.
I was a kid frustrated with my own health and nerdy kid into books early along and realized that I needed to learn how to improve my health because nothing was making a difference. I had some mild cerebral palsy when I was born and very bad motor coordination from that. Gained a ton of weight by adolescence.
And, you know, that's when the social sphere starts to matter. And it was. It was not good. I was really struggling with my weight and being an outcast and started reading health books and things.
Not easily, but with effort and trial and error, things turned around and I became pretty passionate about healthy diet and exercise and whatnot. And I wanted to go into medicine all along, but I wanted to do it in a way to where those things could be a big part of it.
And that's where I learned about the naturopathic medical profession and wanted to do really internal type medicine, endocrinology, But I wanted to focus on lifestyle. And so I learned a way in which this allowed for licensure for good training. Basically, I had doctor mentors who pulled me aside and said, kid, if you want to do that, you're going to violate standards of practice. And I was pretty disillusioned for a while. So I learned about this profession. And I think we're at 26, 27 states for licensure now. You know, quite a few more. In some states, we act just as primary care doctors. Full prescribing rights and we have specialties as well. So I'm a board certified naturopathic endocrinologist.
And that's kind of how, what got me going into that. And in training I saw those struggling with thyroid disease and I saw that they had a lot of the same struggles I had with weight, but lifestyle alone wouldn't do it. And I really wanted to unlock what were some good answers for that. So that's been a 30 year quest as of now.
[00:05:08] Speaker A: Well, well, just for the listeners, especially the new ones, I want y' all to understand that around 1910, Abraham Flexner was an education specialist and he was commissioned by Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller to go survey the landscape of medical education.
And he found that there were naturopathic medical schools, homeopathic medical schools, allopathic, osteopathic, chiropractic, herbalist schools, all kinds of. And he recommended or basically his conclusion, you know this, my paraphrase is there's too much chaos out there. We need to standardize it to one model, we need to license that model, we need to fund that model. And he chose allopathic. So those institutions, those hospitals, research facilities and schools became kind of the standard. And that's what the AMA got involved and started licensing doctors out of those schools. And a lot of these other schools shut down. The homeopathic schools pretty much there were 20 plus and they, by 1920 pretty much were all done. Herbalists were out. Natural. A lot of naturopathic schools had to close. So historically pre1910 there was lots of natural medicine and all these other modalities. These is how I'd summarize it.
Basically come alongside in parallel with and line up with the body's innate healing mechanisms. And not just healing, but we shouldn't really be sick if we give the body what it needs and avoid what it doesn't. It just functions just like a well engineered Ferrari. You don't expect it to ever break down if you steward it the way the engineer and the designer that created it, you know, says to do that. So similarly, when, when things do start to go awry, these natural healing arts over the many, many centuries figure out ways to use herbs and sunlight and water and different natural things to, to just give the body that extra little boost over the hump so that it fixes itself. But allopathic, obviously, and there's a time and place for it, but it's using pharmaceutical based chemical inputs, sometimes surgical inputs to kind of just very aggressively deal with a symptom. But when it comes to thyroid. Let's just.
Just go there. So what I learned is to check this hormone coming out of the brain to the thyroid called tsh, thyroid stimulating hormone. And basically the brain is telling the thyroid, hey, we need you to kick into gear and make more hormone because we don't have enough.
So if the TSH is starting to climb higher and higher and higher, that's the brain saying, I'm starving for more thyroid. Hey, thyroid, kick into gear and make more. So basically, an allopathic doctor is going to check that TSH blood test, and if it's high, he's going to give you a synthetic form of thyroid hormone, T4, and we'll talk about that in a minute. But T4 is the hormone the thyroid makes. Turns it into T3, the active form later. But that's it. I'm just giving that background. That's what I learned. I'm sure I learned the T4, T3 stuff somewhere along the way, but in clinic, where in my residency and watching these older doctors, you just check the tsh, and if it's high, you give levothyroxine or Synthroid. If it's low, you back it off. And that's pretty much it.
So, Dr. Christensen, what did you learn about thyroid? How to diagnose thyroid conditions and how to treat thyroid conditions? I know we only have 45 minutes here, so that's a loaded question.
[00:08:25] Speaker B: Ask me what I learned. I'll give you a brief version of that, and I'll give you what I. What I believe now.
[00:08:30] Speaker A: Okay, good. Yes.
[00:08:32] Speaker B: What I learned was that that was the conventional approach you mentioned. Fine. And the naturopathic conventional, the functional, natural world was more about just based on symptoms. If someone had possible thyroid symptoms, you would address that, and sometimes you would measure things like basal body temperature or whatnot. And the treatment was giving natural thyroid hormone and giving doses, escalating doses, until there were side effects or until there was some improvement. And honestly, I don't think that's a great approach these days. I think the big schism is not really.
Are we using natural medicine or synthetic medicine? I think the real issue is what's going on in the body? Is the body broken? Do we need to step in and change something? Or is the body doing its best to adapt to circumstances and can we change those circumstances? I think that's really the first thing to delineate.
[00:09:20] Speaker A: That is a great point. The circumstances that are impacting, because thyroid in particular, although I'm sure the whole body is so impacted by stress, by nutrients, lack of nutrients. But as we'll learn here in a minute, too much of a nutrient. You know, my listeners are very keen on iron and iron overload from iron fortified foods and excessive iron driving oxidative stress and inflammation. So donate some blood to get rid of your excess iron. So listeners just remember that of course iron is vital for health. We need it would die without it. Our hemoglobin, red blood cells carry oxygen because of this iron. But excessive iron can be a problem in the body.
So that's one of these environmental or circumstantial things that can play a role is that that nutrient profile. So what Dr. Christensen was just saying is go deeper because what, what you said, Dr. Christensen, just monitor symptoms. If someone's symptomatic, give them a natural thyroid supplement until they get a high heart rate. Basically tachycardia, palpitation, sweating, weight loss, that's too much thyroid and back off a little bit. But I found that, you know, sometimes be helpful, but overall not, not a great approach. So when and how did you learn about the new approach? And let's dive into what that approach is for sure.
[00:10:37] Speaker B: And the idea that the gland can of course be compromised, it can be taken out and someone needs it. And what you said about checking the TSH, giving synthetic T4, that's life saving. You know, if someone's gland is gone or it really shut down.
Exactly. That is life saving. And you also mentioned how we base things, a lot of things on a brain hormone. So there's many times when people have abnormal thyroid levels that their thyroid is actually functioning just fine. Or if it's not, it's not because it's the primary culprit. You mentioned stressors, nutrient levels. Many factors can be affecting it. Now the other thing going on is that almost all adult thyroid disease in the modern world is driven by the immune system. And we call this Hashimoto's thyroiditis. The body can eventually break down the thyroid and paradoxically the immune issues, they can cause symptoms regardless of what the thyroid is doing.
So you can have the thyroid shut down from Hashimoto's and the low thyroid can cause symptoms, but you can also have this autoimmune thing going on. The thyroid has not yet been affected, but there still are symptoms and problems. And that's, that's the most common thing happening. So the trick is why does this autoimmune thing happen and what are the most effective ways to manage that?
[00:11:52] Speaker A: Okay, so the body's own immune system is, is out of balance and attacking, potentially attacking Parts of the thyroid gland itself.
That's the primary driver of thyroid disease in modern times?
[00:12:04] Speaker B: Completely. Yeah. Yeah. We. There's blood markers that show when it's happening, but those blood markers, when they're absent, that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen.
So we measure thyroid antibodies. A lot of folks with this process have high thyroid antibodies, but some don't. You know, half people with Hoshimoto's don't have measurable thyroid antibodies. So, yeah, this is the default cause of the thyroid slowing down and causing symptoms.
[00:12:29] Speaker A: And historically, has that been the case or is this on a rise?
[00:12:33] Speaker B: It's a fascinating question, Dr. Ben. So historically, this was first discovered in Japan, which is why we named this after Dr. Hiroko Hashimoto. In the modern world in the US this was extremely rare.
You mentioned that flexner report of 1910. There's a lot of stuff going on around that time in medicine. So 24, 1924, they started. I'm sorry, 1914, they started fortifying salt with iodine. And it was appropriate because there was a really high rate of goiter in young men in certain pockets of the country.
And if you had a goiter, you were not eligible for military service. So it impinged upon the draft for World War I.
And the fortification did reduce pediatric goiter greatly. But the difficulty. You talked about iron having this window. You need some. You can get too much. All nutrients are like that and a lot of nutrients. That window is really broad. You know, a speck of vitamin C like, like 10, 20 milligrams can prevent scurvy. But, you know, thousands of milligrams may be useful and are pretty much always harmless. So there's a broad range there, some nutrients, there are genetic variations that make that range narrower. And this is something here to where my views have evolved so much over time. You know, fresh out of medical school, I didn't think a lot about iodine, apart from we need some and you die without it. And historically, it caused these issues. And then I started hearing more about all these things it could help with, and it made a lot of sense. But I also saw people who would have problems from too much of it. And then there was more studies coming out showing how there is genetic variation and thyroid disease, the biggest predictors of family history. You know, if. If you were an identical twin and your twin had thyroid disease, your odds are more than 70% of getting it. So it's really tied to certain genes, and we now know those are genes that are involved with processing iodine. So some people, a subset of people, they've got a different tolerance for iodine based on their genetics.
[00:14:30] Speaker A: Interesting.
Well, talk a little bit about a little more about the. The goiter and the need for iodine. Because when I first started learning 14 years ago, there was, you know, some practitioners that are.
That we're doing a very high dose of iodine, that that was maybe the culprit, not enough iodine.
And compared to the RDA, I mean, we're talking mega doses. So like 12.5 milligrams, 25 milligrams, 50 milligrams.
Would you say, does the research or published data support going that high on. On your dosing?
[00:15:10] Speaker B: Well, I'd pull a couple things apart. I can pull out plausible mechanisms and then publish research, and there are plausible mechanisms. You can make a lot of arguments that seem to make sense about that. And I. I went through a lot of those arguments myself, and I thought they were internally consistent and fascinating. But we've got a lot of data on iodine. You know, I mentioned how we fortified in the US back in 1914. They've tracked hundreds of countries that have fortified and how their rates of thyroid disease changed. And there's many people that can honestly do fine with a pretty big range of iodine. They're not that sensitive to it. The way we look at it now is that there's two. There's two large genetic patterns among humans when it comes to iodine metabolism. One group of humans is probably best adapted to being in coastal areas.
They had a pretty regular supply of iodine. They almost never went without, and sometimes they got a lot. So they relied better on mechanisms to expect it and to be able to detox when there's a lot of it. And the other main gene variations were adapted to areas that were quite a ways away from the coast. They were further inland. They almost never had excess. They often had very little. So they got good at holding onto it, but they had to let go of the capacity to tolerate a lot of it.
And iodine, we think about things that are strong at sanitizing or sterilizing. You know, you put iodine back in the day on a cut to keep it from getting infected. We think about peroxide or bleach. Those are all things that do that. So they're things that generate free radicals, and they're necessary, they're essential. But if they're not tolerated well or processed well, they can then cause localized tissue damage. And they can also cause the immune system to start attacking the thyroid structures.
So the things we measure in Hashimoto's are thyroid peroxidase antibodies and then thyroglobulin antibodies and thyroid peroxidase, that's an enzyme that turns on iodine within the thyroid and thyroglobulin is a protein that stores it. So of those who are genetically sensitive to it, if they're above the window of what they tolerate, then their immune system can start attacking those iodine activating and iodine storing structures.
[00:17:18] Speaker A: Okay, so there's a subset of people who will be saturated with iodine and are not able to expel that iodine. Get rid of it, flush it out, get it out of the thyroid gland to the urine, to the toilet, and it'll just stack up and store in that tissue to the point it's causing a problem. The immune system is going to come in and attack that or try to deal with that in some way is what you're saying.
[00:17:44] Speaker B: You said it smoother than I did. That's exactly what's going on.
[00:17:48] Speaker A: Okay, so do we know, is, is there research on how much iodine does a thy, human thyroid gland need?
And, and do we know dietarily how to kind of replace maybe what's utilized and, and, and you know, metabolized?
[00:18:08] Speaker B: We've got a lot of data points around this. Actually this was the first time we tagged a nutrient to a disease and it was really, it was really a groundbreaking step. Both pretty much for causing the whole field of endocrinology to be born, but also nutritional sciences. This was the first thing we knew in both of those realms about managing thyroid myxedema comas and also the role of iodine. So we got a lot of data points around this. So the sweet spot, looking at populations, it's narrow, it's probably about like for adults. And adults needs, I want to say, are different than pediatric needs, pregnant women's needs, but non pregnant adults. The sweet spot where disease is the lowest is about 50 to 200 micrograms per day from all combined sources.
Now the World Health Organization has shown that those that are not prone to thyroid disease can usually tolerate 1100 micrograms for a while without much harm. The really bizarre paradox with iodine is that when you're above your needs, it's just like you've got none. It's just like you've got, you're deficient in that.
I came to think about this like, like wiring in a house. You know, funny thing. So yesterday I had a griddle out and I had the griddle turned on and I was doing some. Some eggplant. I sliced some eggplant. I was sauteing on the griddle. Well, I had the air fryer going, too. And no, I'm wrong, I'm wrong. I was doing polenta on the griddle and I had the eggplant in the air fryer. That's what it was. So when they're both on at once in my kitchen circuit, it draws so much amperage, it blows the fuse. Right. So too much current now, you got no current now. There's no power anywhere. And it's just like that with iodine. So when you're above your personal tolerance, you see the same things happen. You would see if you were deficient in that. And that's what's so uncanny.
[00:19:53] Speaker A: Can you talk a little bit about iodine fortification? You mentioned the salt, but where are we getting iodine in the modern diet or beyond diet?
[00:20:05] Speaker B: Yeah, the salt is a great point. So 20, 19, 14, we started fortifying. Hashimoto's was extremely rare in the West. In America, we'd almost never seen it. The rates of Hashimoto's went up 26 fold in the following decade after fortification. So Olmsted County, Minnesota, this is where the Mayo Clinic is and was founded, and they were tracking these things back then, and they saw these rates skyrocket.
Denmark did the same thing in the year 2000. They saw it happen as well. So. So salt, salt, iodine can be added deliberately or it can be present just as a byproduct. So a lot of sea salt can have it just there, even if it's not fortified. Those are two big sources.
We also see it then in a lot of foods, honestly, as a contaminant. So processed grains and a couple of things are fascinating here. Processed grains and dairy. There's so many people that say their thyroid does better when they cut those out for a lot of reasons. And they've studied things like casein or gluten, and they're not as straightforward as being dangerous. But these things are sources of a lot of hidden iodine.
So you buy bread in the market, and some breads will list iodized dough conditioners, but even the ones that don't.
This is the thing that I learned along the way, is that, you know, you get a list of packaged food and it's a paragraph long and it's small font. Well, that's enough reason to put it back, right? Yeah. But all that list is not comprehensive. There's a lot of stuff that's not on that list. And iodized dough conditioners are clear examples of that. They're not always listed. And sometimes even processed gluten free breads can have iodized dough conditioners. So, so yeah, processed grains, dairy products are big things.
And dairy. This is a teat sanitizer. Farmers are trying really hard to get away from that because it's an irritant, but it's still the most common teat sanitizer in use.
And then there's things to where a lot of foods that are good foods and stable things in the diet for a lot of reasons. But if someone is trying to get really low in their iodine, they may be foods they want to watch temporarily. And that's things like some types of ocean drive sea products, not so much for freshwater products.
Egg yolks are there as well. And then we think about sea vegetables. These are all things that contain a lot and push someone over the edge. That's the diet. We can also touch on supplements, personal care products. It's the, and then thyroid meds and it's a total iodine from all sources that matters.
[00:22:28] Speaker A: Well, let, let's do touch on that on the medication part a little bit because obviously Americans are on a lot of medications.
What are some of the most common medications that contain iodine?
[00:22:40] Speaker B: Well, there's the ones that are commonly used and then the ones that contain a lot. So the most commonly used ones here are thyroid medications. And these are among the top two to three widely prescribed medications globally and they have been for decades now. It's not bad that they have that there. That's, that's how they work. You know, you mentioned T4, T3, so the 4 and the 3, those are iodine atoms on that particular tyrosol moiety. So they're part of the active ingredients. But the relevance though is that back to that window of requirement. If someone's already at the hot top of their window from their medication, then they've got to be that much more cautious about their other sources or else that just shuts down the medication, their body can't use it. Right.
[00:23:20] Speaker A: You mentioned egg yolks.
Is that a naturally occurring thing in the egg or does that, is that dependent upon the type of feed?
[00:23:30] Speaker B: Totally dependent upon type of feed and other factors.
The window that I talk about for iodine, that 50 to 200, that's a great one for maintaining general thyroid health. When someone like when you're talking with a patient to have them reverse that like you've done, we shoot for a lower window for short term.
So I like short term. Like to be three to six months for someone to be the most restrictive. I don't like diets be too restrictive longer term. But egg yolks are great foods to add back in once they've got more leeway back again.
[00:23:58] Speaker A: Okay, well, let's go ahead and kind of jump more into that protocol. I mean, you've kind of been stating it, but just to review for the listener what Dr. Christensen is saying. The subset of folks that can't flush iodine out, you get exposed from fortification of the salt, from the dough, pro dough, the breads, the dairy medications, thyroid meds, whole host of things. So excessive iodine in the, in the thyroid gland can't flush it out. The immune system attacks. So Dr. Christensen's protocol is basically, let's avoid iodine, minimize it to a high degree for a time, three to six months. And so there's specific foods that are higher in iodine. You want to avoid those and, and, and eat the other foods for a time.
And then just naturally the body's gonna flush all that iodine out and the immune system will turn itself off. As far as the autoimmune attack. Is that right or there other things?
[00:24:57] Speaker B: It' right. But another layer of nuance is that one of the problems of this extra iodine is that iodine can't work. The body is. The body's blown the fuse. So now you're no longer getting the beneficial effects of iodine within the thyroid. So the trick is to let that reset, you know, get to a window to where the excess can be cleared, the body can calm its defenses, and then start taking it up again and using it properly.
[00:25:21] Speaker A: Do you recommend deciding on that window of three to six months based off if you antibody levels have gone down since you said half the people won't have antibodies, or do you base it just off symptoms?
[00:25:33] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. So they're both relevant. So yeah, some with Hashimoto's don't have measurable antibodies. In those cases, you can't track that for short term changes. But their symptoms, their thyroid function, and then their immune response are the biggest things in the short term. Longer term, thyroid structure can be taken into account as well.
[00:25:51] Speaker A: Okay.
If someone doesn't have antibodies that are showing, but they have a lot of the symptoms, you're suspecting autoimmune thyroid. Do you typically run ultrasounds to look for architectural changes and then make the diagnosis or just clinically you're suspicious and make the diagnosis clinically?
[00:26:09] Speaker B: When I was practicing, almost everyone I saw already had thyroid disease. And a lot of them didn't have ultrasounds done and they were a good part of screening. So I would run them in those cases.
And yeah, that's the main way we distinguish the 0 positive common Hashimoto's from the seronegative Hashimoto's towards more invisible.
[00:26:27] Speaker A: Okay, and then talk about the ranges.
Do you shoot for ranges on thyroid hormone, TSH, T3 and T4, or is it a little more of a broad window?
[00:26:40] Speaker B: This is, this is an interesting thing. So when do thyroid medications help? So there's a lot of talk in natural medicine about what optimal levels for the thyroid should look like. And there's some really hard science that validates some of these ideas, one of which is that those who lack a thyroid and they're dependent upon medication, there's good data saying that if they don't have, you know, a little more medication, meaning like a lower TSH score, they may not feel normal. It's pretty irrefutable. But there's been a lot of revolution in the last couple years about when do thyroid medications help?
We thought for a long time that anytime the TSH was elevated, it meant the body was lacking in thyroid hormones. And now we're learning is that for some people they just have elevated TSHs. Sometimes there's clear reasons for that. You mentioned some of the real big ones, sometimes there's not. But we call this subclinical hypo to where the TSH is abnormally elevated, but there's still hormone coming out. And one large paper was done by the BMJ. Jama did one. These were 2018, 2019, about a million people tracked all together.
And if you take someone with subclinical hypo and you put them on medicines and you look at another group that's not on medications. We used to think that the medications would improve symptoms, they would cut their risk of future thyroid problems, it would cut the risk of heart disease, you know, cause better benefits overall.
We don't have evidence to support that. There's a lot of evidence now saying the contrary. So my views have evolved on that. Many people require thyroid medications and some of them do better on fine tuning and optimizing.
But the data on medications, reversing symptoms at a group level. And for me that said a lot because in the natural medicine world you don't just put somebody on a medication, you're having them change their lifestyle and oftentimes their life, you know, and their mindset and their spiritual beliefs. And there's a lot of big, powerful things going on. And I think for many years, when I was someone who would prescribe thyroid medication for levels that were maybe subclinical or even normal but not optimal, when I would see someone get better, and I was younger, I was quick to assume that the medication is the part that helped. But now, from more time and seeing more of these studies, I would argue that in those cases, when someone did get better, it was from the other factors. It was from their nutrients, their diet, whatever else. When the meds are done all by themselves, in those cases, they don't seem to make as big of a difference and they do carry risks.
[00:29:02] Speaker A: Yeah, talk a little bit about nodules.
Very, very common to see thyroid nodules on ultrasound. Is that something that concerns you? Is there a certain size that concern you and do you see those go away?
[00:29:16] Speaker B: Yeah, great question. So nodules are super common. You know, as, as adults your age with a percentage is about your odds of having a thyroid nodule. So, yeah, 50 year olds, it's about a coin toss.
And so on one hand, it can be easy to think everyone has them, we want to ignore them. But on the other hand, somewhere between 3 to 7% of them do harbor thyroid cancer. And if not, they will. So they are significant. They are, they are worth watching. And some just grow on their own, some crank out hormone on their own, and there's nothing that you can do outside of those cells that changes that. But many of them are influenced by your overall health. So the iodine status is part of that. You know, being deficient, which is rather rare, or being at some excess, those can both be problems. For that, weight gain can be a big driver for thyroid nodules. You know, very unusual amounts of other nutrients can be a factor as well. But yes, overall health impacts them. And there's good evidence that some nutraceuticals can cut the odds of them growing. So there, there are often natural ways to help with nodules.
[00:30:20] Speaker A: Okay. And you may not plug it, but we're definitely plugging it at the end. Because you have a nodule support supplement. We've used that in our clinic with, with success.
And just overall thyroid. We'll talk about the different nutraceuticals here in a minute, but just want to. And guys, again, it's Dr. Christiansen.com. lots of free resources on there, lots of education. I love Dr. Christensen's All about education and then some really great supplements on there too. For thyroid in particular.
You mentioned thyroid cancer can you talk about that relationship a little bit or what? Just your own personal feeling or scientific evidence based that's out there on causes of that. Is that increasing also? And have you seen that reverse with some protocols, natural protocols, reversing natural protocols.
[00:31:12] Speaker B: I've not had experience in that. Rates of IT prevalence in that. There's very good evidence that the prevalence of that has increased. Last three decades roughly tripled. There were debates for a while as to whether we were screening more often or there really was more of it. The best data today suggests that there's some of both, that we are screening more and it is really on the rise. We look at some of the big cancers that get a lot more attention.
The breast, the prostate, the ovarian. Valid things to be concerned about. Their rates haven't changed a lot in the last many decades. But thyroid cancer has been been called the fastest increasing type of cancer amongst women in the modern world. So totally on the uptick.
Things that give rise to it that correlate with the risk genes are the big one, you know, controllable factors. The iodine is also one of those. So being way above one's window can also be a driver for that. So just one more argument to stay at a healthy range for it.
[00:32:05] Speaker A: Okay, I know Hashimoto is so common and, and escalating, but talk a little bit about Graves. And for the listener, that's another autoimmune disease, but it's the.
It manifests as excessive thyroid hormone production, which can translate to symptoms like a fast heart rate, jittery, anxious feeling, insomnia, a feeling of impending doom even. You can be so amped up, sweating, weight loss, stuff like that. But excessive thyroid, is it similar mechanisms that drive that and, and is the protocol to try to reverse that autoimmune similar?
[00:32:41] Speaker B: Yeah, great question. You know, neglected to put context on how common these other things are. Graves is somewhere around half to 1% of the adult population can get that. Now. Overt hypothyroidism, the thyroid totally shutting down is kind of similar to Graves as far as the frequency of it, the subclinical to where it's still working just fine. But there's abnormal blood levels that can be 10 to 15% of the population.
And then Hashimoto's even just based upon the serum scores, which miss a bunch of it, that's probably about 25 to 27% of the population.
So the odds of having autoimmune thyroid disease versus your thyroid shutting down, way more common. So back to Graves disease, a really Odd thing that's not intuitive is that Graves disease and Hashimoto's are almost the exact same disease. They're talked about as being on a continuum nowadays in the literature.
So in one case, the thyroid occasionally shuts down, like in Hashimoto's. In the other case, it almost always gets overactive. So there's similar things going on with the immune system. I think about it as you've got parts within the thyroid that manufacture hormone, and then parts outside the thyroid that are listening for signals. And those things are almost the same molecules. So I think about like a. Like you got a short circuit in your doorbell. So you can imagine that, you know, it's midnight, the doorbell's going off, there's nobody there, right? And you go out and it goes off again. So that's Graves disease. The brain is not asking the thyroid to work, but the signal's going off randomly. And the thyroid thinks it's being told to work, so it keeps dumping out more and more hormone. Meanwhile, your brain is saying you're out of control. The brain shuts down the signal for it to work, but that doesn't matter because it's got the short circuit, so it's still making extra amounts of hormone. And the autoimmunity with Graves is autoimmunity against that doorbell wire. It's triggering that response. And that often overlaps many people who have that. The majority of them also have autoimmunity against the internal structures of the thyroid. So if someone has Graves, they've got a really high chance of having some Hashimoto's response as well. There's a smaller subset that's the opposite. So some with Hashimoto's can also have that Graves autoimmunity. But you're right, the manifestation is very different with Graves disease. There's not large data sets on whether dietary change alone can reverse it. Anecdotally, I've heard many people who were not eligible for the common Graves treatments, such as radioablation, thyroid removal, or thyroids blocking medications.
But they were able to do rather thorough iodine avoidance, and many that has been adequate. For some, it's not because once the thyroid is making so much extra hormone, that extra hormone itself becomes a vicious cycle for the autoimmunity. And it makes this whole feedback cycle. So it takes some way to break the cycle. Now, the medications that are used to slow Graves disease, all they do is they prevent iodine from entering the thyroid. That's what their whole job is.
So when someone's in that acute state the less they're consuming, the less there is to make. So. So yes, that that approach can be a very good adjunct for acute grades as well. Not always a standalone treatment, but can be a very good adjunct.
[00:35:54] Speaker A: Yeah. So basically getting a thyroid reset diet in one hand with your medication to block your excessive thyroid in the other hand.
[00:36:03] Speaker B: Yeah. And the medicine will work a lot more quickly. You won't need it for as long. And when things are managed well with Graves, there's about a 95% chance of it just occur, completely go into remission within about 18 months.
[00:36:16] Speaker A: Have you found in your experience, other than the excessive iodine saturation, are there other drivers that you would look for? I'm just thinking about like root canals, mercury from a silver filling or glyphosate, or just any other, you know, black mold, mycotoxins, you know, other things like that. Or is it pretty much the iodine's the primary driver?
[00:36:38] Speaker B: Well, so there's, there's the most common, best documented thing, and then there's just the body's global stress response. So the more the body is balancing and trying to juggle against various other problems, the worse it's going to respond to anyone. So all those factors are totally relevant. Most of those things haven't been looked at in clinical trials as like standalone therapies, but they're all factors. This is where it takes working with a good clinician to look through your personal health. And what are all the stressors on your table?
[00:37:05] Speaker A: Yeah, well, speaking of stressors, in your clinical experience, if someone was just by the book, literally the thyroid reset diet book, they were being diligent with their diet, they were working on exercise, working on just cutting processed food in general, doing some good nutraceuticals. You know, we're really, really dialed in.
But had a chronic stress from whatever circumstance in their life. They just couldn't get away from this chronic fight or flight situation.
How much have you seen clinically that that's going to keep them sick or, or have them hit a ceiling of healing, so to speak?
[00:37:50] Speaker B: Well, so I would pull apart changing thyroid function and then really changing their lives and feeling better.
So changing thyroid function. One of the studies that have cited took people that had pretty marked hypothyroidism for the savvy listeners. Their TSH scores averaged about 14. They were well below range for hormone output. They were positive for antibodies, and they had been there for several years. Kind of tough to find people who weren't already treated in some way, but there they were, and they didn't have them manage stress or avoid pesticides or help their gut or take nothing. It was just get it on low iodine. That's the only thing that was done. And in that study, 78% of people were totally normalized in three months just from doing that. And of those who weren't, all but a few had radically improved. So if we reframe it to say how many got totally better or close to it, it was a little over 95% and that was the only thing they did. So if the question is really what's the biggest needle mover for changing thyroid problems, that's it. If the question is what's relevant for renovating health and getting health back online again, if the thyroid's the main issue, holding back someone's health, that can make a big difference. Regardless, if the thyroid's a problem, that's an important thing to do. But for many people, there's other factors affecting their health. So. So yeah, this is the biggest single factor for the thyroid global health symptoms. Well being, that's a journey, you know, it's not. I wish, I wish it was that quite that simple, but it's not that simple.
[00:39:18] Speaker A: Yeah, right, great answer. And I'd agree 100%.
Put you on the spot a little bit, which you can say pass if you want to.
And I'm trying to think about some of my long term patients in the distant past for fibrocystic breast disease. Sure we would use a high dose for a short period of time, high dose iodine, and just symptomatically would see that painful cystic breast disease improve totally. And honestly, I don't remember as to your point earlier. Did they implement, you know, some diet changes and lifestyle changes and other things too, but is there a mechanism where that could have some physiological role at that higher dose for fibrocystic breast disease in particular?
[00:40:09] Speaker B: Definitely talk about this in a lot of detail and that's kind of what got a lot of the excitement of iodine on the table. So there's a couple of papers in the GYN world showing just that, that somewhere around per the study, like 60 to 70% of women with fibrocystic breast disease could see their pain go down by three quarters or more and that could last for a couple months. It was really dramatic. And this is a condition that could be extremely painful and didn't have a lot of good solutions. Most of Those studies used 5,000 micrograms of iodine per day, well above the RDA, well above physiological requirements. Some doctors took that to mean that these women had a deep seated iodine deficiency that couldn't be managed otherwise. That was, that was one interpretation. Nutrients can be nutrients, but nutrients can also be drugs. You know, so back to the skin infection. If I went out and snagged my arm on a thorn and got it infected, iodine could be a treatment that helped that infection. But that wouldn't be proof of an iodine deficiency. Right. That's just a drug like effect of it. You know, if I had high cholesterol, I might be able to take a super high dose of niacin and lower that, but that wouldn't be a proof of a niacin deficiency. It's not always a bad thing, but it's not the same thing as the nutrient acting as a nutrient.
So I pull that one apart first. What we now know about mechanisms is that there are different parts of the body that regulate iodine more so than others, not very many. So thyroid tissue and breast tissue are among the main ones. There's a few other pockets that mentioned they're not worth going into. But yeah, the breast tissue also regulates iodine. It's got the same pump that the thyroid does, that same switch that I talked about, that fuse mechanism. And the reason it's there is because most nutrients that end up in breast milk, the amount in mom's blood is totally fine to have in the breast milk. It works, just strict carryover, but not iodine. The body has to regulate it more closely. So it's got to be able to block it when there's too much or it becomes harmful for the baby.
So we know, we now know that fibrocystic breast disease is mostly driven by free radical damage to breast tissue and that there's genetic variation on how that iodine pump works. For some women, they're pulling in too much iodine into their cells. That creates some free radical damage that can cause some fluid retention and some pain. That mechanism is also present in many types of breast cancer. So you've got normal, non lactating breast tissue, then you've got lactating breast tissue, then you've got fibroadenomatous and breast cancer. And those are escalating in terms of how much they aggressively pump in iodine. So when you do a high dose of iodine, you shut off the pump and for a little while you stop that extra iodine from damaging those breast cells and you can dramatically lower those symptoms. But the GYN world moved away from that as a good treatment option because it didn't tend to last very long. And because there were negative effects elsewhere in the body from it.
[00:42:59] Speaker A: Wow, that's an incredible design.
The. The growing baby could be damaged by too much iodine. So the body regulates that particular nutrient and. And shuts off excessive amounts going in the breast milk. Fascinating.
Well, this has been great. And.
And we've got a few more minutes, I think seven or eight minutes here.
[00:43:25] Speaker B: I've actually got another 10 on top of that. I sent you a note in our chat. I've got a little more leeway than I thought. I'm good for another. Another 15 minutes.
[00:43:32] Speaker A: Okay, awesome.
Well, I know I'm going to get this question from my patients. Testing the actual iodine level.
[00:43:39] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:43:40] Speaker A: But my patients are also used to the fact, because I say it all the time, is we got to be careful with testing. We course do a lot of testing, but testing has its limitations. You know, if you're testing the blood, that tells you what's in the blood, but don't tell you necessarily what's inside the cells, and it just tells you what's in the blood in that moment. And what about this afternoon and all the different things? And what about urine and saliva testing and. But iodine, obviously, if we're saying that there's this group of folks that are sensitive, they're getting too much. Could we test the level? Is there a good test?
[00:44:11] Speaker B: You know, that's the most logical question. And the frustrating thing is there is, but it's not. There's not a tissue test. It's an analytic evaluation.
So the best way to gauge it is just by inventorying one's day's intake. And I can talk more about how to do that. Now. There's testing iodine at an individual level, at a population level, and there's testing to find deficiency or testing for excess. So you got like, four options in there.
And at a population level, you mentioned urine tests, blood tests. They're all very useful at a population level. So you're trying to see if this county is high or low. You check 500 people, you average it out, and you can answer the question. But the difficulty is that one test to the next, like you're saying they can vary so much you have to do, no exaggeration, hundreds of tests on an individual to be within 90% predicted value.
So blood tests are probably the toughest ones because the body regulates that. Regardless of your intake, urine tests mostly reflect your very recent exposure. But even not perfectly so, and I'm talking now about test to see if you're low in iodine. So test to see if you're getting too much. That's a little bit easier because the excess is spilled out in the urine. So urine tests can show if someone's above target with, with reasonable accuracy. But to see if you're getting too little, the most accurate way is just nutritional evaluations.
Iodine inventory.com, it's a free thing. I made that it asks you about thyroid meds, you know, dietary food categories, personal care products. If you've got, you know, FD number five in your, in your supplements or whatnot, all these hidden sources of it, it asks you all that stuff. And at the end of that it says, here's your likely window of daily iodine intake. Here's where that should be. So yeah, inventories are the most accurate tool at an individual level to look for iodine deficiency.
[00:46:03] Speaker A: Okay, so someone's enjoyed the podcast today. They, they've got Hashimoto or just thyroid disease or they're on thyroid medication. Step one, get the Thyroid Reset diet book. Understand even more, get educated even more, but basically follow the dietary approach. You want to talk about that a little more? I mean, you kind of already mentioned it, but like the green and red and yellow and, and you mentioned three to six months, but maybe talk a little more about that and then about some supplemental nutraceutical support that you have on your website that might could be combined together.
[00:46:38] Speaker B: Sure. When I wrote the book, I wanted it to be pretty comprehensive about a healthy diet overall, you know, not just a thyroid thing. The study that I cited for you before, how they radically reversed that in three months, that was a diet that just cut out all these iodine categories and didn't give it much more thought than that. But there is data, of course, saying that anti inflammatory diets matter, that you want a certain balance of macronutrients that some plant foods are nice to include. There's a lot of things we know about good diets in general and thyroid specifically. So I wanted this to be something that someone could follow, you know, longer term. And they could also do it if they were already gluten free or plant based or paleo. They'd have options that way. So that was the idea behind that. And with it it talks about those main factors. Here's the best, you know, balance of macros for the thyroid anti inflammatory foods. Here's how to get in your iodine window. And I broke foods down into those that are consistently high in iodine, moderate in iodine or lower in it. You know, we're not trying to avoid it, we want to just keep it to a reasonable level. And so the idea is that when you're making some change of lowering your antibodies, reducing your medications, helping your thyroid work better, you know, overcoming graves disease, you want to focus on those lower sources. So I call those the green light foods. And once you've gotten to your goal and stabilize things, your body's got more leeway. And again, I don't want diets to avoid more food longer than necessary of the natural foods. So then I encourage the maintenance stage. You can add back in some of those yellow light foods, especially things like egg yolks for more good seafood products. So that's a general idea with the diet. And in terms of the nutrients, as I was writing that, I wanted to miss nothing in terms of published studies about food or plant compounds and thyroid health. And I kept stumbling across a lot of good studies about various herbs or nutraceuticals or certain nutrients. And some things they could do quite well, like lowering antibodies. We've had high quality human placebo controlled studies saying that things like Nigella sativa or cordyceps or inositol, that they can independently lower thyroid antibodies. So I took things like that and just use the things in the studies and in the amounts and made a blend called antibody support for Hashimoto's. You know, I thought about just general nutrient needs as well and how multis are easy. They can make a lot of sense. But some things in a multi don't make sense. If your thyroid's a problem like mega dose of iodine or too much manganese, there's some odd things. So I did thyroid daily, which is a more thyroid specific multivitamin. You mentioned nodule control. That was another one that I made. So yeah, there's a couple of things that nutrients can really help with when it comes to the thyroid.
[00:49:16] Speaker A: Yeah, that's awesome. And guys, like I said, we've been using some of these and it's not just the one patient. From last week we've had a number of patients do really, really well. So I'd encourage y' all go to Dr. Christiansen.com check that out.
I want to spend a little bit of time just getting your opinion on weight.
You know, obviously the GLP1s are very effective in a way and very popular.
I notice metabolism boost is another nutraceutical blend that you have as well as adrenal energy.
But in historically I would, and I think a lot of natural doctors and patients too think about thyroid I'm overweight, maybe I need more thyroid support, which you have.
Is thyroid still the primary thing you would think about when it comes to just weight, overweight and obese, but metabolism boosting, so to speak. Is that thyroid just the absolute essential key or do you find some other very important parts to the metabolism and excessive weight, obese story?
[00:50:28] Speaker B: Yeah, all great points. Thyroid function is big for that and often not just about a simple deficit. Kind of an odd paradox that often shocks doctors is that people who are over medicated on their thyroid are more apt to gain weight than those who are slightly undermedicated. So it's always about balance in the body for those hormones. But the autoimmunity is a common thing that correlates with weight gain. So identifying and managing the autoimmune response and then the other big factor is the body's stress response. So our cortisol cycles, our cortisol rhythm, we talk about the fight or flight response. They also call that the feed and breed or the feast and famine response. So when our body is doing badly on our stress response, we crave different foods, we eat more so for comfort than just for nourishment.
And we partition the foods differently. We send less to our muscles and more to our visceral fat and we can't regulate our blood sugar as well. So these are all hormonal changes that occur that can drive food cravings and derail appetite and change our internal GLP1 metabolism. So, so yes, that that's a powerful factor that way. And I would agree there are those who have had benefits from GLP1 meds. But the thing that I'm concerned about is that all the studies so far suggest that they work if you stay on them. The idea about using them for a little bit for a jumpstart, I don't see data that that's likely to be effective. And with longer term use, we think about will these side effects accumulate, will be more pronounced over longer periods of time. So it's great for those who want other options. So yes, helping the metabolism, helping manage the thyroid. One thing in my, that I made too is a resistant starch blend. There's so much data saying how if our blood sugar is not balanced, then all those things are worse. Our own GLP1, our own cortisol. So when we can regulate our blood sugar, a lot of other things sort their way out, our appetite is more reasonable.
And the old idea was that we would just avoid carbohydrate and have no glucose coming in and hope for lower Glucose level. As an endocrinologist, I started using the continuous glucose meters back in 98, and I saw for many people that didn't work. They would cut out carbohydrate and glucose would get higher. That's not uncommon. So the trick is what kinds of foods that supply glucose do so in a way that make our levels stable?
And we talk about complex carbohydrates, simple carbohydrates, but way beyond that, there's a compound called resistant starch, which is not a carbohydrate, it's not a fiber. It's not assimilated by the large intestine, I'm sure by the small intestines. It's simulated by the flora in the large intestine. So it basically flatlines insulin output for about 24 hours. So it makes blood sugar levels stable. Yeah, I was using the continuous glucose meters way back when and when I had people add in resistant starch. It just lets you stabilize your glucose so consistently that I didn't check quite as much because it was a simple trick. But there's a lot of data about that helping with visceral fat loss, diminishing insulin, diminishing appetite, lowering colorectal cancer risk. So that's my favorite single intervention for body weight is dietary, then also purified versions of resistant starch.
[00:53:39] Speaker A: What are some common examples of resistant starch dietary there?
[00:53:45] Speaker B: It's something that is found naturally in some foods that can be broken down with heat, and there's also broken versions of it that can be formed with cooling. So if you boil potatoes and chill them, you can amplify the resistant starch content.
Also, we see that bananas less ripe, so not so much ripe bananas, but less ripe ones, they have a fair amount naturally present.
And then white beans have a fair amount as well. The tricky part is that there are people who struggle with tolerances of those foods for various reasons, or they're watching their total caloric intake. So they've made purified RS extracts from natural food sources. I made one called RS Complete. We've done some clinical trials on, and that's a pretty remarkable for its effects upon the blood sugar and really no big chloric content, no big flavor. But it's a purified resistant starch.
[00:54:35] Speaker A: That's a great little hack in your clinical experience over the years, if you had to, because we'll probably start wrapping up here, just broadly speaking in the natural health realm and your decades of clinical experience. If you were just going to leave the listeners with, you know, some key points Thinking about longevity, health span, lifespan and health span, both.
What are just some of the key.
Obviously not getting too much excessive iodine is what we're talking about today. But what are some pillar or foundational pieces that you would say in your practice or essential for long life and healthy life?
[00:55:19] Speaker B: You know, early along in my career, I was much more of an interventionalist. I was much more excited about manipulating these blood levels with hormones or whatever else. And over time, I've come to respect a lot more about the wisdom of the body, you know, the power of nature. And. And I think that when things are off, that there are cases where the body cannot regulate again, your thyroid's out. There's certain things like that, but those are rather exceptional in nearly all cases, the body is regulating just fine in a bad situation. So it's not about hacking the body or forcing it to do X instead of Y. It's about the situation.
And that's often about things like our stress response, you know, how we feel about.
About our relationships, we. Or what our time is being put into, or our personal beliefs at a higher level of what we think matters in life, our time spent in nature. I think these things are so much bigger than we give them credit for. So, yeah, over time, I think a lot more about those factors, and I also think a lot more about the body being able to heal with simpler steps. Dietary change like you've talked about with your patient, that you guided her on or shift in those other areas, they. They do much more than I've thought based upon just experience and also looking at how the research is evolving. So those things are huge.
[00:56:36] Speaker A: Yeah, and I would concur. And almost the exact Same trajectory over 14 years started out lots of.
I call it micromanaging. Lots of interventions. Do this, do that. All good things, mostly all natural things, sometimes some big extra things, you know, you know, like ozone and ultraviolet blood irradiation and things we have in our clinic today. So it's not that they're bad, but like you, I've found that, man, if you can get these foundational pieces
[00:57:07] Speaker B: like
[00:57:08] Speaker A: nature, sunshine, movement, keep the. Keep these muscles worked and just eat basic real food, these real basics. But that stress response, it's huge. The, the how we see God, self, and others is the big three that, That I talk about, you know, the goggles that we interpret things through in these situations and relationships through. It's a really, really big deal. Just reminds me of a study I was reading about the other day. Just the power of your thinking.
And it Was I think at UT Houston, University of Texas Houston orthopedists did this study on meniscus tears.
It was 100 plus patients, maybe 180 patients. And he divided them, you know, two groups. In one group, he did the actual meniscus repair arthroscopically. In the other group, he told him he was going to do it and he actually poked the holes, put them under anesthesia, poked the holes, looked around in there, sewed them back up. So. And buddy tracked these two groups over time and they had the exact same outcomes. The group that actually had their meniscus repaired and the group that didn't, their pain response, their functional scores, all the things were equal. It was amazing. And there's so many. It reminds me, there was a study on housekeepers, hotel maid service. The housekeepers in the hotel doing their same activity, making beds, vacuuming, cleaning, you know, all the things.
But they told this one group, all this work you're doing, you're just work activity is actually exercise. It like counts as exercise. You're going to burn so many calories. Here's how many burn in average in a day or I don't know what exactly they told them, but got the point across it ladies, basically you're working out, you're getting a two for it's work and it's like going to the gym. They just believed and versus the other group doing the same work. But they didn't tell them all that. They didn't tell them the benefits like you're exercising.
And they monitored them over time. And this group that they told that to had less body fat, less overall weight, better blood pressure.
Just the power of the mind. It's huge. Yeah. So.
Well, Dr. Christensen, we're out of time.
Any last parting words? I do want to just one more time. The website Dr. That's Dr. Christensen. C h R I S T I a n s o-n.com check it out, guys. Like I said, lots of good education podcasts, freebies on. On education. There's great supplements.
You know, I personally recommend them based off our use so. And other books too. We didn't even talk about some of these other books like Adrenal reset, metabolism reset, etc. So y' all check out the website and where else can they follow you?
[00:59:54] Speaker B: Dr. Christensen, social media at. At. Dr. At. Dr. Alan Christensen. All the main social media platforms.
[01:00:03] Speaker A: Awesome.
Well, thank you for joining us. Thank you for your dedication to patients and to health and for just continuing to seek the truth and and educate all of us. We appreciate it.
[01:00:15] Speaker B: Thanks again for having me. Appreciate it.
[01:00:17] Speaker A: All right, everybody, I'm Dr. Ben Edwards. We'll be back next back next week with another great show. Remember, you're the Cure.
[01:00:25] Speaker B: Bye.
[01:00:25] Speaker A: Bye.
