Right now at this very moment, you could be
deficient in selenium. Or you could be toxic
in selenium. You could have too little,
too much, and it's very difficult to know the difference.
So this is how to figure it all out.
Hi. I'm Dr. Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com,
and this is Chris Masterjohn Lite, where
the name of the game is
"Details? Shmeetails. Just tell me what works!"
And today we're going to talk about how to
manage your selenium status.
And selenium is unique among the
minerals in that there is
such wide variation in soil levels of selenium.
And there is such random incorporation of
selenium into plants that just directly reflects
whatever the soil is, that you're roughly
50% likely to be not getting enough and 50%
likely to be getting too much, and it's very
difficult to know the difference because a
lot of the symptoms of deficiency and toxicity
are the same. So selenium is one of those minerals
where I think basically everyone should be
getting it tested at least once to see where
they wind up because you really don't know
whether all the food that you're eating is
coming from low-selenium, normal-selenium,
or high-selenium soils. So let's talk a little
bit about what we might expect to see as consequences
of deficiency or toxicity. One of the things
that's most generally true about selenium
deficiency is that it increases your vulnerability
to other stressors. So quite often the consequences
of selenium deficiency are not related exactly
to the selenium. It's that you became more
vulnerable to a virus, or you became more vulnerable
to a toxin. So a general loss of resilience
is a feature of selenium deficiency.
What we are likely to see most commonly is alterations
in thyroid hormones. For example, Hashimoto's
thyroiditis appears to be at least partly
related to not getting enough selenium.
And look when you actually measure your thyroid
hormones, if you see low T3, the active thyroid
hormone, and you do not see just as low of
T4, or you do not see the characteristic rise
in TSH necessarily, but this low T3 stands
out, then that could well be an indicator of
not getting enough selenium. Certain cancers
seem to be related to not getting enough selenium,
especially prostate, colorectal, and lung cancer.
And although it's not clearly documented,
I believe that white spots and streaks in the
fingernails can probably occur in early deficiency.
We do know that these occur in selenium toxicity,
but I believe they probably occur in both.
In severe deficiency of selenium, you get damage
to the liver and the heart, and you have white
nail beds with fingernails falling out.
Most of us are not going to be vulnerable to that level
of selenium deficiency. When you look at toxicity,
which is usually caused by consuming foods
grown in soils with very high selenium,
you see damage to the liver similar to what
happens in severe selenium deficiency.
You can see hair loss, and you can see nails getting
brittle with white spots and streaks that
may fall out. The main factor determining whether
you get too little or too much selenium is
the selenium content of the soil that your
foods are grown in, which is something that
you have relatively little control over, unless
you do a lot of research. Selenium is richest
in organ meats and seafoods, and generally
animal foods have more consistent selenium
status than plant foods do. So one way to become
less vulnerable to the effect of soil is to
eat more animal foods and to include among
those animal foods the organ meats and the
seafoods that are rich in selenium. Brazil
nuts are an excellent source of selenium,
but as a plant food, they are highly vulnerable
to variation according to the soil.
So although Brazil nuts are always a fairly good source
of selenium, they can range from being just
a good source, to being an excellent source,
to having too much. Because soil has such
a strong effect on selenium status, I think it's
wise for everyone to get their plasma selenium
tested, which is the best marker of selenium status.
In serum or whole blood, you're probably
going to get the same value, but it's better
if you can, to get selenium measured in plasma.
Plasma selenium should be between 90 and 140 mcg/L.
There is a whole blood
selenium measurement on the Genova ION Panel,
and although I generally like the Genova ION Panel,
and it features as one of the most important
tests that I use in the comprehensive screening in my
Testing Nutritional Status: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet ebook,
I do not like the selenium test on the
Genova ION Panel for two reasons.
One, it's that it's whole blood, and it's better
to measure it in plasma, but the second big
one is that the reference range they use equates
to 130 to 320 mcg/L, and it's quite clear from
the literature that the risk of diabetes may
increase over 140. So I think it's better
to just get a stand-alone plasma selenium test
from LabCorp and make sure that your selenium
is between 90 and 140, with a sweet spot
to shoot for being around 120 mcg/L.
If your selenium levels are too high,
then the course of action should be to
remove the likely sources of
the excess selenium from the diet,
including any supplements, and to
generally support your defense against
oxidative stress. It's a complicated
topic, but I have a whole section on it in
Testing Nutritional Status: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet.
If you do not get enough selenium, then
the first ideal step to start with is to include
more organ meats and seafood in your diet
as selenium sources. But you can also supplement
with selenium, and when supplementing with
selenium, I generally recommend limiting it to 100 µg
per day of selenomethionine. You can of course
use 200 µg per day for faster results,
but you probably want to cut that dose back to
100 or less once you achieve your
sweet spot of plasma selenium.
I would not use methylselenocysteine,
and I would not use selenite or selenate.
Generally you may expect it to take
five months for a given dose of selenium
to stabilize a given level of plasma selenium
status, but generally when you're correcting
a deficiency, you could use a higher dose like
200 µg per day for three to four weeks
and see pretty fast results.
If you're dealing with children,
you can cut the dose of the supplement down
to 1 to 1.5 µg of selenomethionine per kilogram
of body weight. If you have signs and
symptoms of selenium deficiency that do not go away
when you correct your selenium status,
you may want to look at methylation
because although methylation does not
seem to be important to absorbing
selenium, it does seem to be important
for the proper biological utilization, or using
of selenium, and for resources on managing
methylation, I recommend seeing my page at
chrismasterjohnphd.com/methylation.
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All right, I hope you found this useful.
Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com. And this has
been Chris Masterjohn Lite.
And I will see you in the next episode.