Eric Bakker: Greetings, greetings, greetings.
It's Eric Bakker, the naturopath. You're still looking at my channel, this is cool. I think
this channel's been up for about eight or nine years now, so it's a long time. Let's
do a video on thyroid, overactive thyroid. So how do you treat an overactive thyroid in a person?
Thyroid is certainly a condition that's probably relevant to my family
because I've had it going back a few generations in my family. So I had some thyroid nodules
several years ago, this would have been about probably 10, 15 years ago, even 20 years ago,
which I successfully got rid of with iodine and selenium. They disappeared.
But my mom had half her thyroid taken out because of overactive thyroid. And in her case,
my mother's case, like in a lot of patients I've seen over the years,
anxiety and stress and tension seem to be paramount with overactive thyroid.
So overactive thyroid patients can be autoimmune or non-autoimmune. Autoimmune, meaning you've got
antibodies being formed. Diagnosis, autoimmune thyroid disorder with increased formation of
auto antibodies that bind to the TAs, the thyroid stimulating hormone receptors in the thyroid cell
membranes and stimulate the gland to function over the top, to hyper function. That's Graves' disease
or autoimmune hypothyroid. But I can assure you, you can also have non-autoimmune hyperthyroid like
me, and you can also have mixtures of hyper and hypo. And that really mucks the doctors around
because they don't like this iffy kind of stuff, they like either black or white. But with thyroid,
it's all gray. You can have part of the thyroid that's overactive and a part that's underactive,
all at the same time. And I've seen it. I've seen people exhibiting symptoms of
hyper and hypo a lot in the clinic. Basically what I'm telling you is
the thyroid becomes imbalanced. So how do you get the thyroid back in balance?
Let's talk about a few points I've written down here. We're going to talk about the hyper today,
not the hypo, not the low thyroid. Low thyroid is I think more common. And in fact, if we look
at America, North America alone and probably same as New Zealand and Australia, about 40% of
the population roughly have got some form of low functioning thyroid. And it can be brought about
by adrenal stress or it can be brought about as a standalone, but often when the thyroid's playing
up, it'll be part of a dysfunctional stress axis, including the hypothalamus and the adrenals.
There'll usually be some type of imbalance there. So the first thing I do with hypothyroid patients,
I let them talk. I let them sit in the chair and talk for 15, 10, 15 minutes.
I observe their rate of speech, I look carefully at their body movements,
I look at a lot of things with people. To me, it's all about observation and also these things, these
things tend to work quite well when you're sitting with people because everything that goes in here,
somehow in there gets converted to some type of understanding of what's going on. And most people,
and any detective or good police officer will tell you this, most people hang themselves on
their own admission. They'll tell you they're guilty. They'll tell you what they did. It's
the same in a clinic as it is in a police station. It's no different. Except here they
don't get any jail sentences. Okay. But I have been known to beat people around their head,
mind you with a soft object, like a piece of foam or something.
I've always said that smokers need beating around their head with a pillow, and it works.
When it comes to hypothyroid though, patients often have big issues when it comes to their
lifestyle in terms of relaxation, anxiety, inability to sit down and take it easy,
always wanting to get up and do things. So I'll never forget a case I had several years ago
when a husband brought his wife in, who was extremely hyperthyroid. And she was literally
pacing the floor in my room, she couldn't sit down for too long. And I basically said, "I've got the
perfect solution for this patient and I know it's going to work really well." And the guy said, "Oh,
I'm so relieved. I'm so happy." And he said, "What is it?" And I said, "Well, it's quite
old fashioned. It's called a ball and chain. We've actually put the chain around her ankle
and the ball on the ground and she can't go anywhere. So she's basically..."
And the guy said to me, "That's absurd." I said, "No, it's not." I said, "Look at your wife. She's
wearing out my carpet." And I said, "Sit down, relax." And she sat down but even when she's
sitting down, she's fidgeting. And a hyperthyroid really affects the person in different ways.
The personality affects the thyroid, the thyroid affects the personality. There's a
link there and when the link is understood and the person makes efforts to do the nice, slow
deep breathing to get the heart rate down, nice, slow deep breathing to push the parasympathetic
up instead of the sympathetic. And when the person starts really relaxing the body on a deeper level,
the thyroid starts responding. I've seen this in an incredible amount of cases. But to try and get
a hyperthyroid patient to relax, it's probably a bit like getting an atheist to become a Bishop,
literally. Catholic Bishop or whatever. So increase the goitrogen foods. So if
you're finding that the person is hyperthyroid and they've got a very overactive thyroid gland,
TSH is really low, not too high, and they've got hormones all over the show,
increase the goitrogen foods. So some people call them anti-thyroid foods, but when you
start increasing the amount of Brassicas you eat, cauliflower, broccoli, bok choy,
radishes, apples, cabbage, almonds, soy, walnuts, all these foods help to slowly slow the thyroid
function down a little bit. I eat lots of these foods. A big part of my diet is the Brassicas,
excuse me, that we grow ourselves. I've got huge... I haven't got my phone here. I was
going to show you my cauliflower pictures. We've got cauliflowers bigger than my head. Huge.
So we grow lots of the Italian Romano, beautiful spirali broccoli and the purple cauliflower and
all those sort of things. And whatever I have to excess, which is usually the case, I'll blanche
them and then vacuum pack that. That goes in the freezer, so I have large amounts of vegetables
always frozen, ready to pull out. And they're often the Brassicas. I love them. They don't cause
me any bloating or gas smell or anything. I'm so used to eating large amounts of these foods now.
They're really good and they've helped my thyroid considerably over the years.
The second tip with hypothyroid is check for food intolerances or allergies or sensitivities. I did
a video on this just before about stomachaches. The stomachaches is one of the symptoms of a food
allergy or sensitivity. Many thyroid patients have got a gut issue that needs sorting out.
So check out if there's a food that really create a discord with you, that's problematic
and get rid of it because otherwise your immune system is shadow boxing. It's trying to fight
and produce antibodies for a food that it doesn't want.
This is especially important information if you've got autoimmune disease. You need to get a food
allergy panel done in that case so you can really see if there's any antibodies being developed for
certain types of foods. Okay. The third point,
decrease the thyroid stimulating antibodies. So this is with autoimmune,
you can have up or down antibodies, but if your antibodies are sky high,
selenium will help to pull them down. So take 2 to 300 micrograms of selenium. So make sure
also you have your zinc levels checked. A chemist can sell you a small bottle of
zinc sulfate, it's liquid zinc, and you can do what's called a taste test to determine your
own zinc levels. Zinc needs to be good with any thyroid problem, and so does selenium.
Hair test may be relevant for some people for heavy metal toxicity. I discovered years ago I
had a mercury problem, which I cleared from the body when I was in my thirties, late twenties
or thirties. So a hair analysis is a good way to determine if you've got mercury or lead or
arsenic or cadmium in the body. And the metals can really cause a problem with the thyroid as well.
Increase phase two liver detoxification. So we call this glucuronidation pathway.
You need the sulfhydryl amino acids for this. I spoke about this previously in a video
regarding smelly farts and like sulfur. So nuts, seeds, grains, legumes are good plant-based
sources of the sulfur amino acids, as are the Brassicas, which I just mentioned, cauliflower,
broccoli for example. Chickpeas, couscous, eggs, lentils, rolled oats, or steel cut oats,
whatever you like, walnuts. These are all sources of cysteine, which is another sulfhydryl amino.
And allium vegetables of course, onions, garlic. I eat those every day. They're very good sources
of sulfur as well, which allow the liver to clear out and to detox. And the other
key one I like usually is vitamin C, about 2 to 3000 milligrams per day for hypothyroids.
But if you can combine a lifestyle component, especially the relaxation, along with the correct
supplementation and diet, it's going to go a huge way towards slowing the thyroid function down.
Hypothyroids don't usually have fatigue and they're often in fact need to chill out basically,
to slow them down. So if you can relate to that, you watch what happens when you start
relaxing more with hypothyroidism and become consciously aware of the tense
spots in the body. It's going to make a big difference. Thanks for tuning in.