hello health champions today I want to talk about the thyroid and how thyroid
problems are so much more common than people realize
we'll cover ten of the common signs and symptoms that your thyroid might be in
trouble and we'll talk about the causes and solutions coming right up
hey I'm dr. Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if
you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works
make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don't miss
anything the thyroid gland is a small flat gland sitting right at the front of
the throat it is responsible for metabolism and it acts kind of like a
thermostat in your body it turns the heat up and down and you have 40
trillion cells in your body and every one of those cells have thyroid hormone
receptors that means the thermostat the thyroid determines how much every cell
in your body does of whatever that cell does so if the thyroid slows down
everything in your body slows down when they diagnose tyroid problems they
typically only look at one thing which is TSH and then they look at a range
from 0.5 to 5.0 anything in between that is normal even though the high number is
10 times higher than the low they don't really differentiate in this range
you're just hypo normal or hyper so if it's over five point O then you're
diagnosed with hypothyroid on hormone replacement therapy in the
real world though there's a few more things to look at so instead of just
going from 0.5 to 5.0 we look at a more optimal range from one point eight to
three point five and the sweet spot is right around 2.5 so now if you're
between 3 & 5 then you're not fully hypothyroid you don't have the label but
you're functionally hypothyroid you have reduced function and then on the other
end this is where things are completely different this is where this is a hidden
problem because you would think if this is functional hypothyroid and the orange
then this would be functional hyper but both of these are actually
functional hypo but four different mechanisms here it is very very common
and this is because the pituitary which makes thyroid stimulating hormone is
underperforming so it's just not sending out enough TSH so now you're still
functionally hypothyroid and this happens very often with insulin
resistance and metabolic syndrome because of a low-grade systemic
inflammation how common are thyroid problems done well hyper thyroid where
it's overactive is kind of rare it's only about 1% but hypothyroid is about
tend to 50% of the population where it's underperforming and most commonly it's
because of iodine deficiency there's about 800 million people in the world
who live someplace where the soil doesn't have a lot of iodine and about a
quarter of those people are hypothyroid they have an underperforming thyroid in
the United States there's 13 million people or about 5% of population who are
on medication on hormone replacement and in Canada a recent study suggested that
about 10% of people 1 in 10 have a thyroid problem in Germany a study of
ninety six thousand people ages 18 to 65 they did a very sensitive ultrasound
study of the thyroid and they found that 33 percent of the population had
abnormal thyroid either because the thyroid was an abnormal size it was
larger swollen or because it had nodules there were some pathological tissue in
the thyroids of one in three and then we realized that this was a range of 80 to
65 years old but that this increases dramatically with age so we don't have
exact numbers but probably about 50% or more of people over 50 years old have
some kind of thyroid AB normality let's run through the signs
for quick and then we'll talk about most importantly what's causing this and what
we can do about it so the first sign is temperature and
then if your hypothyroid then you're going to be sensitive to cold these are
people who always wear sweaters they want extra blankets they can't stand
air-conditioning and they always want to be in the Sun or where there's a heater
hyperthyroid is the opposite these are people sensitive to heat so they always
want the air-conditioned or a fan blowing sign number two is metabolism so
if you're hypothyroid then you usually see some weight gain and this is despite
less appetite so everything slows down you don't eat as much but despite that
you're gaining weight hyperthyroid the opposite now you have weight loss but
this is despite having a voracious appetite
there's doesn't matter how much you eat you just can't seem to put on any weight
sigh number three is changes in your hair and with hypothyroid you get coarse
hair and hair loss in hyperthyroid you get fine brittle hair but you still get
hair loss so both extremes are still a sign that the body's out of balance is
just not working really well number four has to do with a bowel function so with
hypothyroid everything slows down and you get constipation with hyperthyroid
everything speeds up and you get frequent bowel movements and diarrhea
the fifth sign has to do with mood and if your thyroids underperforming very
often you'll have depression poor focus and memory problems because you're just
not making enough energy to support those functions but with a hyper thyroid
you have other problems even though you're making a lot of energy now
instead you have agitation and anxiety and you still often have
poor focus you just can't center yourself
also with hyperthyroid physically you'll often see a tremor like a resting
vibration number six is a classic koi tur when we have hypothyroid because of
iodine deficiency there is little iodine available so the thyroid grows just so
it's has more tissue to be able to absorb every little bit of iodine it's
an attempt to compensate for a lack of iodine but in this case there's nothing
wrong with the thyroid tissue it's healthy tissue it's doing what it's
supposed to it's just up regulating it's not pathological tissue
however with hyper thyroid we can also get an enlargement but that's because of
tumors and nodules in the thyroid and rarely would we see anything like this
grapefruit size enlargement this would be a benign Gorder meaning
non-pathological tissue with hyper thyroid and nodules we'll see a slight
enlargement but nothing like that number seven is skin changes and
hypothyroid we get rough coarse dry skin with hyperthyroid we get thin and paper
like skin the eighth sign has to do with the eyes and with hypothyroid you get
swollen puffy eyes it's like everything swells and just kind of shuts down it
slows down and shuts down with hyper thyroid you often get bulging eyes and
one of the classic examples is marty Feldman was a British actor and they
didn't need any special effects to make him look like that and they not sure
exactly why it looks like that but there's some tissue behind the eyes that
swells and makes the eyes protrude sign number nine has to do with energy and in
hypothyroid we often have chronic fatigue simply because there's not
enough energy made however in hyperthyroid we can still
have a lot of fatigue because even though a lot of energy is made it's
being used up for the wrong things it's being used up just to make heat and make
all the tissues burn through energy faster but we don't have energy for the
things we want and these people even though they're fatigued very often they
can't sleep because everything is just racing sign number 10 is changes in
heart rate and you guess this one hypothyroid is gonna have a slow heart
rate called bradycardia and the hyperthyroid is gonna have a very fast
heart rate called tachycardia and bradycardia would be often times in the
50 to 60 range and this isn't someone who is not athletically in good shape
and tachycardia can often be a hundred hundred and twenty or even higher let's
look at some of the causes if you are hypothyroid the most common reason is
iodine deficiency but if you don't live someplace where there's low iodine then
the most common reason is something called Hashimoto's and here's the
problem very very few people with Hashimoto's know that they have it
because it's an autoimmune disease and in the mainstream healthcare model there
is no cure there is no treatment for autoimmunity so they just test for TSH
and they give you some hormone replacement but if you want to find out
if you have Hashimoto's there are some tests for antibodies so you can test for
tpo thyroid peroxidase antibodies or for thyroglobulin antibodies if you're hyper
thyroid then the number one cause is called Graves disease and interestingly
enough that's also an autoimmune disease but it's a different antibody again so
now you're looking for thyroid receptor antibodies and if the hyper thyroid is
not on then it is probably a tumor typically
either in the thyroid or in the pituitary what do they do for treatment
hypothyroid is typically iodine or hormone replacement either a synthetic
or something more natural what are some of the problems with these treatments if
you give iodine to someone who is deficient then great that's not a
problem they're just gonna get back to normal but if you give iodine to someone
who has an autoimmune attack on their thyroid now very often you're going to
up regulate the activity of that thyroid and at the same time you're going to up
regulate the autoimmune response so even if these autoimmune people are iodine
deficient it is too early that's the wrong time to give them iodine there's
some things that you need to fix first and the problem with the hormone
replacement is that it doesn't address the problem the problem is autoimmunity
the symptom is low thyroid hormone so by giving them more thyroid hormone we're
treating a symptom but we're allowing the autoimmunity to progress and the
issue here is that the thyroid is a very very sensitive tissue it's very often
the first tissue in the body to get under autoimmune attack but if we don't
fix it early now we have many other tissues in the body like the gut and the
joints and the pancreas and the cerebellum and the skin that also get
affected and if we just take something to treat the symptom now it's a crutch
that is allowing the problem to get worse then how do they treat the
hyperthyroid they do it with anti thyroid medication so the thyroids
over-performing let's just do something to suppress it so they basically poison
it one way or another another way to do it is with radioactive iodine the
thyroid will absorb iodine selectively much
more than any other tissue in the body so if that iodine is radioactive if it's
laced with something then you're gonna kill off some of those thyroid cells the
problem with either of these is that when you put stress when you poison the
tissues then long term you tend to just create more pathological tissue with
more nodules and eventually you might have to do a thyroidectomy now that's
not always the wrong thing to do because these hyperthyroid people they can get
to a point where they have a thyroid crisis or a hyper thyroid storm and
that's life-threatening so if they get to that point then they have to take the
thyroid out they may not have any time to play around the problems with this
treatment is the same thing the medication is just a crutch
while the problem is allowed to get worse the surgery is irreversible if you
get to that point well it might be unavoidable but once they take it out
there's no going back and just like the hypothyroid the vast majority of issues
are still autoimmune so if we fix the autoimmunity early on then we may not
ever have to get through any of that what causes autoimmunity why would the
body start attacking itself well mostly it has to do with leaky gut and these
are two cells in the intestinal lining they're held together by different
proteins creating tight junctions but if something attacks or weakens these
proteins then the cells are not being held together so tightly and then large
particles that are not supposed to get through get through and now the immune
system starts reacting to that and leaky gut has many different causes but
primarily it has to do with allergies causing inflammation it has to do with
antibiotics altering the gut flora and causing irritation and sets aspirin
tylenol motrin Aleve non-steroidal anti inflammatory drugs are enormous
contributor to these problems sugar allergens lectins things in food
that are difficult to break down alcohol stress and processed food so all of
these things that we have an abundance of mostly in the last 50 years that some
of these things we might have had earlier on but it's primarily things
that we have introduced very recently and that's why these autoimmune problems
are growing very very quickly there's no quick easy fix to heal leaky gut but of
course first of all you want to make sure that you're not doing any of these
and then start looking at some more of the videos in the library of this
channel and learn how to address your basic health from the bottom up if you
enjoyed this video and you'd like to learn more about how the body really
works and how to get healthy then I think that video would be a great one to
look at next thanks so much for watching I'll see you in the next video