If you care about your thyroid health,
and you eat millet, or if you eat gluten-free
foods and don't check the ingredients,
you need to watch this video.
Hi. I'm Dr. Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com. You're watching
Chris Masterjohn Lite, where the name
of the game is "Details? Shmeetails. Just
tell me what works!" And today we're
gonna be talking about why you should
moderate your millet. Now millet is a
grain and it's generally been a staple
of the poor, rural populations of the
Sudan, India, Pakistan and Africa. In these
places, in modern society, quite often
millet is consumed at very large amounts
in the rural villages and in smaller
amounts in the more densely populated
towns. Now we first started looking into
the goitrogenic effect of millet, which
means the ability of millet to hurt the
thyroid gland, and cause a disorder that
not only makes you feel really bad, and
decreases your cognitive function, and
your energy, and makes your hair fall out,
and all of this stuff. But also it's so
bad that the thyroid gland struggles to
try to produce enough thyroid hormone.
And in doing so, it enlarges and if it's
bad it can get to the point where the
enlargement is actually visible in
the neck. Now in the 1980s, we started
investigating the effect of millet
because the prevalence of goiter was
really, really high in the rural villages
of Sudan. And in 1981, investigators tried
to understand why. So one thing that was
clear was iodine intake was pretty low
across the board. But that wasn't all of
it. So in the towns, there was a much lower
prevalence of goiter, and there was a
much lower intake of millet. Almost
everything about the diet was the same
except that there was more
wheat and sorghum consumed and less millet.
The association with millet was so
striking, that where millet was consumed
as one-third of the calories, goiter in
school children was about 10%
for boys and 13% for girls.
But when millet increased from one-third
of the calories to two-thirds of the
calories, in boys the prevalence of
goiter jumped from 10% to 35%, and in
girls, it jumped from 13% to
55% percent. In one of the
villages, the intake of millet reached
73% of calories. In that village,
46% of the boys, and 75% of the
girls had goiter.The association with
millet was so striking that
investigators started studying millet.
What does it do to animals? What are the
interactions with other nutrients? Does
it matter how the millet is processed?
And a couple things became clear from
those experiments. First of all, the goitrogens,
the compounds that have a
negative impact on the thyroid gland,
were present in multiple parts of the
millet. They were present in the bran
which is removed during hulling and
refining, and they were present in the
endosperm, which is the starchy part that
you eat even if you refine the grain. So
refining the grain isn't gonna do
anything. Then they tested, what is the
effect of iodine? Adding iodine to the
rats, in the animal experiments, didn't do
anything to protect against the millet.
Then they asked what is the effect of
cooking? The effect of cooking was to
make it worse. Then they asked what is
the effect of traditional processing? In
the Sudan, where goiter prevalence was
really, really high, they de-hulled the
millet, then they soaked it for two to
five days in water, which allowed it to
ferment.
The soaking water was so likely to burn
your skin that they wouldn't let their
children near it. And they discarded it.
So investigators took millet, subjected
it to traditional processing, and it made
it far more goitrogenic. Across the
board, there was nothing that was ever
found to reduce the goitrogenicity of
millet, except a process called semi-wet
milling. Now I don't think any of us are
going to have a semi-wet milling process
in our homes.That would probably be the
only way to deal with this. But even
still, what they showed was that if you
use this process to keep the moisture a
certain percentage when you milled it
that was just right, and then you milled
it, and then you fed it as a raw flour to
the animals, it wouldn't be goitrogenic,
But we know that the starchy part
has the goitrogens, and we know that
they're activated multiple fold
by cooking. So all told, the evidence
shows that there is not anything that
you can do to avoid the goitrogenic
effect of millet, except to eat less
millet. Now, I think the real problem is
when people don't realize that they're
eating all this millet. So the perfect
example of that is gonna be people
who are eating gluten-free breads. Let's
google gluten-free bread. As we go
through the google results, we have some
ads, and if we go to the top result, it's
Udi's gluten-free breads, rolls, and buns.
The first product that comes up is this
millet chia bread. Now, the ingredients
are water, that's not going to hurt you;
tapioca starch, like we talked about in
one of the previous videos, tapioca
starch, which comes from cassava,
increases your need for iodine. That's
not a problem because you can just eat
an iodine-rich diet it's not going to be
a big deal. But if you're not paying
attention to that and you're eating an
iodine-poor diet, and you have tapioca
starch, that's increasing your need for
iodine, and you're adding millet, then
that's gonna be a big problem. So you
see millet seed is the second ingredient.
If you are eating gluten-free breads, and
you're not conscious about this, you
could very easily wind up in a position
where you're eating a lot of millet. So I
really, really think that the best thing
to do with millet is to not eat a lot of
millet. I think if millet's 5 or 10%
of your diet, it's probably fine.
Millet is 0% of my diet. But
certainly don't allow it to become
20 or 30% of your diet.
All right. I hope you found this useful.
Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com. You've been
watching Chris Masterjohn Lite, and I
will see you in the next video.