Eric Bakker, The Naturopath.
We're back on the topic of omega-3 fish oil.
The question today: Can omega-3 fish oil helped me with my thyroid?
Can thyroid health be positively influenced with omega-3?
Have you been to a health food shop lately, or looked online, say at Amazon or iHerb?
There's hundreds of products you can get for thyroid health, all claiming to cure your
thyroid disease and all this sort of nonsense.
Well, I've got a very dear respected friend, Dr. Michael Godfrey here in New Zealand who
lives on the East Coast, Tauranga, quite a nice place he lives.
Mike's been an amazing medical doctor for a long time, and I've had many discussions
with him over the years.
I just read one of his articles in a 2017 organic magazine.
Mike's a very, very, very experienced doctor, must be in his seventies or eighties by now.
And Mike's article was basically about two things for the thyroid.
Two things, iodine and selenium.
The two things that most people watching this video right now will probably not be getting
in their diet, iodine and selenium.
I need to spend a lot more time on this channel working on thyroid content because adrenal
and thyroid patients were basically my bread and butter for many years.
That's what I worked on for over 10, 15 years were endocrine cases, complex endocrine cases
involving hypo or hyperthyroidism, and often hypoadrenalism at the same time.
So, selenium, three Brazil nuts a day will give you the selenium you're looking for.
It is a key element that drives seleno-enzymes.
So there's about 25 different seleno-enzymes, enzymes driven by selenium.
So you need selenium, really, in your diet to activate multiple enzyme pathways.
Just try to remember, though, glutathione peroxidase is a very important enzyme and
the saturation of that enzyme by selenium gives us an idea on how much selenium people
really need in their diet.
People need a lot more selenium than they're told.
Now, iodine.
You cannot make any thyroid hormones without iodine, at all, really, so you need iodine
in your diet.
We know that the Japanese get between three to six milligrams per day, Americans wouldn't
even get a 10th of that, probably a hundredth of that.
So these are critical elements you need for thyroid health, iodine and selenium, so look
more into that.
But omega-3 plays a big role when it comes to thyroid, because it has EPA and DHA in
it.
And particularly the EPA component of the fish oil is anti-inflammatory.
The thyroid gland is one of our most complex of all our endocrine glands, many experts
believe it's actually the most important gland because it interfaces really with the pituitary
and the hypothalamus, and the rest of the body.
Every single organ in the body is affected, every cell is affected by thyroid function.
It's exquisitely complicated how it works, but it has got very simple nutritional requirements,
that's the sad thing.
Complicated things yet can run simply.
Automobile's complicated, but it runs on gasoline.
I mean, that's not that hard to figure out, is it?
The problem today with thyroid is not so much will omega-3 help thyroid patients, it's,
why are people having too much omega-6 in their diet, which tends to push them more
into a pro-inflammatory state?
So eating the crappy oils, like corn oil and canola oil, all these hydrogenated oils and
these...
Not good, not good.
So going more into omega-3 consumption, fish and supplements that contain omega-3, or foods
like walnuts, and going out of the omega-6 is a clever move for people with Hashimoto's
thyroiditis, for example, or Graves' disease.
So people with major thyroid dysfunction really need to do a major diet overhaul.
Any kind of autoimmune disease will need that.
So the evidence is strong when it comes to omega-3 reducing inflammation, but there is
also evidence suggesting omega-3 supplements can boost thyroid hormone uptake, which is
great news for those with hypothyroidism, a condition that with a large percentage of
people suffer with today.
It's just made up of 40% of people, like four out of 10 could have some low functioning
of their thyroid.
A journal of nutritional biochemistry study in 2010 discovered that when animals received
fish oil, they had high levels of thyroid hormones...
Sorry, the receptors, they had more receptors.
They also had enzyme levels that were increased than the animals that didn't take any fish
oil.
So I'm a big fan of omega-3 supplements for people with low-functioning thyroid.
I really believe that it will help them boost your receptor quality and quantity.
But on top of that, remember: selenium, iodine, zinc.
Zinc's also a critical one.
So iodine, selenium, zinc, B vitamins, and probably trace elements like manganese, these
are all important for thyroid health.
You can get them usually through a good diet.
Thanks for tuning in.