by Amanda Malachesky | Dec 18, 2017 | Functional Medicine and Coaching, Functional Nutrition, Symptoms
I’m referring, of course, to the carnival/arcade game where robotic moles pop up from holes all over a game board, and you get points if you can hit the moles before they hide back in their holes again.
It’s kind of hard to hit them, and no matter what you do, more of them keep popping up again until your time is up.
Is there a way to win the Whack-A-Mole game so no more moles pop up?
Nope.
Sometimes, we treat our health and symptoms like the Whack-A-Mole game. Headache? BAM! Ibuprofen. Anxiety? BAM! Alcohol or benzodiazapines, like valium. Depression? BAM! Anti-depressants like SSRI’s. How about hormone problems? BAM! Birth control pills.
It’s reflexive and pervasive. Most of us have been raised to think this way. Symptoms happen, and we do what we can to make them go away right then. If “A”, then “B”.
But what if you want to figure out WHY the headaches, anxiety, depression, or hormone trouble? Wouldn’t it be better to remove the cause for the headaches, especially if they are common and frequent? The anxiety or other symptoms?
Hitting the symptoms with temporary fixes is a lot like the Whack-A-Mole game…you might knock that symptom back into its hole, but it’s just going to explode out of its hole again. A better fix might be to unplug the game. That way, no more moles are ever going to come out!
People can be impatient with what’s required to take this different approach to their health problems. It’s nowhere near as easy as popping a pill, and hoping that the problem won’t re-emerge. And for a while, this approach can seemingly succeed in keeping symptoms at bay.
However, eventually, if the original source of the problem is still there, you’re going to continue to need that pill to keep you on your feet, which can get expensive, both in money AND with side effects. (Have you ever read the side effect warnings on medication labels?)
Root Cause Resolution: Unplug the Whack-A-Mole Game
Resolving your symptoms at the source takes a bit more time, but with the proper guidance is totally possible. Let’s take the headaches as an example.
First things first: when are they happening? How often? When did they first start? What else was happening then? Did you change jobs? Move? Experience another stress? Begin eating a new food? Is it always before your period? A thorough health history and timeline can help illuminate the original cause of the headaches. These questions give us the initial clues to figure out where to try approaching the situation.
Let’s say that you’ve noticed that they always come around when you ovulate and right before your period. You also notice several other symptoms around that time that you also struggle with, such as irritable and dark moods, tender breasts, cramps, and diarrhea. You crave chocolate, but it makes your cramps worse.
Knowing all of these facts provides us with a lot of helpful clues. Now we begin the work of sifting through your day-to-day to identify which foods and behaviors may be contributing, and remove them.
I’m sure you can infer that we’re likely seeing a hormonal challenge with this hypothetical headache case, because the symptom shows up at certain parts of the monthly hormone cycle. And you might be tempted to say, “They have PMS.”
This may be true, but PMS is truly just a label, and doesn’t tell us anything about the specific players that make things better or worse, or how to approach. The first place I want to explore when hormones are at play is blood sugar handling.
What?
Yes. Hormone imbalances often begin with blood sugar handling. So more questions: are you eating protein with your breakfast? Are you eating throughout the day? What does your food intake look like? Are you getting protein, fat, and fiber in with each meal and snack? Does your diet include a lot of high carb foods? Junk foods? Caffeine? And so on…each of these can help me understand whether you may be experiencing blood sugar ups and downs that may be impacting your hormones.
How about dairy products? If they are regularly in the diet, their hormone content can impact hormones as well, especially if they aren’t organic. Are there other inflammatory foods in the diet, such as gluten or sugar? How about missing or deficient nutrients that might help the body function better, like magnesium or vitamin B6? Are there other signs of this deficiency?
Even before we get past “diet”, there are lots of possible supports for someone who presents with “hormonal headaches”.
There are many other pieces, such as exercise, stress, and sleep, which could be involved as well. Cleaning up all these areas often results in symptom resolution, for the headaches and other things that may be there as well. We could choose to take the Motrin and call it good, knowing that we’ll need to try to hit that mole when it shows up again next month…
Or, we could be proactive, and create a playing field where the moles just don’t pop up at all. We essentially REMOVE the moles from the game, so we don’t even need the Motrin, or antidepressants, and curiously, many of the other symptoms that plague us reduce in frequency or go away altogether.
This is functional nutrition, and how we work to remove the root causes, and how we avoid health Whack-A-Mole.
This approach is how we get power over our life back from our health complaints, by understanding how our actions and choices are impacting our symptoms, and making different choices.
by Amanda Malachesky | Dec 11, 2017 | Digestion, Functional Medicine and Coaching, Inflammation, Symptoms
I know every single one of you out there reading has experienced a symptom at one time or another…a headache, an upset stomach, aches and pains, bad moods, or fatigue. This seems like a wide-ranging list, and it is. But what if I told you that each of them has its roots in inflammation?
It’s becoming widely accepted that most symptoms, illnesses, and diseases have inflammation at their core. Inflammation is an important, natural, and normal part of our immune and injury-repair response, like when you have a fever, or have a twisted ankle.
But what about those situations where the inflammation seems to get turned on, and doesn’t shut off? What about those chronic symptoms that repeat monthly, daily, or weekly, like panic attacks, PMS, migraines, bloating, diarrhea, or joint pain. How do you normally handle them?
Many of us reach for an over-the-counter or prescription medication to handle these bothersome symptoms. Let’s face it: when you have a raging, pounding headache, or a panic attack and you have stuff you need to do, our impulse is to shut that annoying symptom off so we can get on with our day.
But symptoms that return over and over again are signs that something isn’t right in our bodies, and they should be addressed. The OTC and prescription meds can help relieve the immediate symptoms, but this is only a short-term solution. And what about the silent inflammation that you can’t feel in your body, but that is causing internal damage nonetheless? Heart disease is a classic example of this. I want to share a little about how symptoms show us that inflammation is present…
Silent Inflammation
Inflammation is a normal and natural part of our body’s response to injury or invasion. When you twist that ankle, or breathe in a virus or bacteria, immune cells rush to the area to clean up the injured tissue, or kill and remove the invaders, and this causes swelling, redness, heat, and pain. These symptoms are proof that the immune system is at work and doing its job.
A fever is your immune system trying to make your body an inhospitable environment for an invading virus or bacteria.
An allergy is a different kind of inflammatory response, where the immune system has become sensitized and trained to react to an invader, even if it isn’t a dire threat, like a pollen, or a food, like peanuts. In minor cases, this can lead to hayfever or skin rashes, with itchy and watery eyes, sneezing, and nasal congestion, and in severe cases, anaphylaxis.
If you have an allergy, I’m sure you likely know it, and avoid the allergens to the best of your ability, to avoid the symptoms.
But sometimes, we are sensitive to foods or other environmental contaminants, but we aren’t yet aware of them, because we are constantly exposed to them, and the effects are sub-clinical, or below a detectable experience, and this is one source of silent inflammation.
Another major source of silent inflammation that you may not be aware of is frequently elevated blood sugar. In this case, excess sugars are converted to triglycerides, and these sticky triglycerides, along with the LDL cholesterol, adhere to the inside of our arteries.
This artery “spackling” shouldn’t be there, and the arteries become inflamed from the build up, in an attempt to fix the situation. The trouble with this process is that you can’t feel it. It doesn’t cause any specific signs or symptoms until the process has been going on for years.
If you have regularly occurring symptoms, especially of the digestive variety, mood challenges like depression or anxiety, aches and pains, headaches, or fatigue, it’s likely there are sources of inflammation in your diet, lifestyle habits, or living environment that are contributing to your discomfort.
Though there is often an ongoing, and regular exposure to these items, the response is low-grade, and the effects may be sub-clinical, or below the level where you can experience them. But even if you aren’t aware that they are contributing to inflammation, they are slowly creating damage to your cells, organs, and systems.
Eventually, you begin to notice you don’t feel quite so energetic anymore, you have a harder time getting out of bed in the morning. You can’t exercise like you used to, or worse, you start experiencing symptoms that get in your way of living life like you’d like to. You feel down and out, and don’t want to go out with your friends, you have headaches that keep you home from work, or anxiety that makes it difficult to travel, or you hurt all the time, and you can’t play with your kids or your grandkids. These impacts are real, and account for a lot of missed work and missed opportunities and fun.
How to Reduce Hidden Inflammation
The good news is that there is a lot you can do to reduce hidden inflammation! Clearly identifying the sources of this silent inflammation is the key to resolving chronic symptoms, and even disease diagnosis at the root cause level.
The place to begin is always with food. So many of us are suffering from unacknowledged food sensitivities. When you know where to begin, this is an area of our life that we have total control over.
The biggest food players in silent inflammation are gluten, dairy, and sugar. The place to begin is by eliminating them for a minimum of three weeks, and then add them back in, to see if your body can tolerate them. If you find you can’t tolerate a food, now you are armed with some very valuable information about how your symptoms are connected to your food, and you can make appropriate choices, and make the necessary choices to reduce or eliminate your symptoms.
Often, people feel dramatically better when they try this: they lose weight, their moods and sleep improve, their aches and pains decrease significantly, their lab markers improve, and they have more energy. I see this all the time with my clients.
If these three foods don’t make much of a difference, then the other players need to be identified.
Certain foods added to your diet can help reduce inflammation while you work on identifying your unique culprits. Turmeric is a long-recognized mediator of inflammation, and supplementing may help with many types of inflammatory conditions including joint pain, digestive conditions like IBS and IBD, cancer, diabetes, and more. Other anti-inflammatory foods include ginger, greens, berries, healthy fats from wild-caught fish and olive oil, and more.
The guidance of an experienced nutrition coach can help you navigate this process, and identify the specific foods, habits, or environmental irritants that are contributing to your issues. Things like sleep habits, exercise, mold or chemical exposure, stress, and so on can also be contributors.
What are your contributors? Are you aware of any of them? Comment below to share what you find impacts your feeling of well-being.
Despite research and trials, are you still confused about what to eat to avoid your symptoms and feel better? A whole-picture approach is important when using natural methods to address a health problem. I encourage you to download your free copy of Roadmap to Gut Recovery, my free action guide that gives you action steps you can take right now to get started identifying your unique symptom triggers and root causes of your condition.
If you need more individualized help, I invite you to schedule a free, 30-minute Assessment Session with me. I can help you identify where your next best steps should be on your healing journey, and we can explore whether we would be a good fit for working together.
by Amanda Malachesky | Dec 6, 2017 | Brain Health, Digestion, Functional Nutrition, Inflammation, Symptoms
What body system is at the center of any illness, symptom, diagnosis, happy moods, well-being, and vibrant health?
If you guessed the digestive system, then you nailed it! Digestive symptoms are strong clues that something isn’t right inside our bodies, and that our digestive system needs a little bit of extra attention. Things like constipation, heartburn, acid reflux, bloating, gas, and more are important message that are worthy of our attention.
Sometimes, this can seem a little bit confusing. You mean that digestion plays a key role in depression or anxiety? Or heart disease? Or Arthritis? The answer is yes. Here’s how.
Reason #1: Digestion is our Source of Needed Nutrients
A full spread of nutrients is needed for the body to do everything it does: power our muscles and brain so we can move and work, repair damage, detoxify any exposure to harmful substances, maintain appropriate levels of minerals and vitamins, and so on.
If shortages of nutrients become significant enough, function begins to break down. For example, if we don’t have enough B vitamins and antioxidants, such as vitamin A, C, and E, then we won’t be able to neutralize cell-damaging free radicals, because this clean up process require these nutrients.
Digestion is our source for these nutrients that power thousands of essential body functions every single day. If digestion is compromised, by hidden infections, inflammation from food sensitivities, previous antibiotic use or other medications, or other factors, it’s not too difficult to become deficient in important, necessary nutrients.
Interestingly, many of the nutrients we use are synthesized in our digestive tracts by the resident bacteria. If we have an imbalance of this microbiome, we may have a compromised ability to create and use certain nutrients.
Cleaning up the digestive system is super important, to make sure we are able to access all the nutrients we need from our food.
Reason #2: The Gut Has a Direct Communication Line to the Brain
The digestive system has a direct line of communication with the brain: the vagus nerve. When something goes wrong in the gut, say it gets invaded by a bacteria, the vagus nerve sends a signal to the brain that something is wrong, and this can affect our moods.
Have you ever heard the expression “I had a gut feeling”, or “I had butterflies in my stomach”? This is the gut-brain connection in action. How about the way in which nervousness can trigger diarrhea or nausea? Same thing.
There are lots of studies being published all the time showing how the composition of the gut microbiome has a profound affect of emotions and health. Balancing your microbiome is not only the key to decreasing digestive symptoms and making sure you can access and make important vitamins and other nutrients, it is also the key to promoting positive moods, and protecting your body from invading microorganisms.
The gut immune system is designed to protect us from hitchhiking bacteria, parasites, viruses, and fungus. If this system goes down, or is imbalanced, we are vulnerable to infection, imbalance, and all the downstream effects (see Reason #1).
80% of the immune system is centered in the gut, because besides our respiratory systems and reproductive systems, this is the place where we are daily exposed to outside influences. This means it is also the place where we have a lot of leverage to shift the terrain of our health.
Reason #3: Healthy Elimination Means Healthy Detox
Now we’re going to talk about the other end of digestion, which is elimination. Like I mentioned in Reason #1, our body uses lots of its nutrients to clean up and detoxify incoming pollutants.
In today’s day and age, we are constantly exposed to chemicals in the form of pesticides, herbicides, xenoestrogens, heavy metals, petrochemicals in air pollution, and many of us work in environments where we are exposed to other types of toxins.
Our liver does the heavy lifting here, using up all those antioxidants and B vitamins and amino acids to break the toxins down into water or fat-soluable parts that can then be eliminated by the kidneys in the urine, or by the bowel, in the stool.
But how many of us poop irregularly, or struggle with constipation? Ideally, we should be pooping 1-3 times per day, with ease. If you aren’t eliminating regularly, it’s likely you aren’t efficiently eliminating all those environmental toxins that your body is working so hard to break down. These toxins accumulate in the digestive system, and can affect the balance of the microbiome (see Reason #2), or are reabsorbed from the bowel, and can end up depositing into tissues in the body, and causing problems.
Making sure you are regularly eliminating is a super important part of supporting digestive health, and promoting overall health.
How do we make sure the digestive system is working well?
The first step is to remove any inflammatory foods. I always start my clients with removing gluten, diary, and sugar. If we need to identify other foods, we go deeper, but many people find that these three foods are actually contributing to digestive and deeper trouble.
The next step is to supply nutrients that may be deficient, to make sure the body can keep performing its essential functions of maintenance and detoxification.
Lifestyle habits regarding sleep, stress management, and exercise often need to be rearranged to support health, and improve and promote effective digestion.
Finally, if all these changes don’t resolve digestive or other challenges, we need to explore whether there may be hidden infections in the digestive system or elsewhere that need to be addressed.
Working through these steps provides powerful relief from many common symptoms, and even some diseases.
Who knew? Digestion holds the key to better health! What have you found that best supports your healthy digestion? Comment below!
by Amanda Malachesky | Jul 18, 2017 | Functional Medicine and Coaching, Functional Nutrition, Genetics, Symptoms
It’s not so unusual for me to be following an emerging aspect of health science that most people haven’t yet heard of. My latest conquest: understanding methylation.
SO what the heck is methylation? Methylation is a biochemical process of cell and DNA maintenance and clean up. It is happening throughout your body millions of times every single minute, and happens constantly throughout your life. Without methylation, your body couldn’t survive. Intrigued yet?
The reason methylation is important is that some of us carry genetic variations called SNP’s (pronounced “snips”) that can impair our ability to efficiently perform methylation and the needed DNA maintenance to keep our bodies healthy.
The methylation cycle depends on many different genes, and the function of one or more of them may be impaired by the genes you were born with. As biochemical compounds move around the four methylation cycles, if an impairment is present, certain compounds may become elevated or depleted in bottlenecks created by your unique genetic weak links. Some of these bottlenecks can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, neurotransmitter disorders, digestive problems, alzheimer’s disease, hormone metabolism problems, inflammation and autoimmune diseases, cancer, autism, ADD, chronic Lyme, chronic viral infection, and more. If you are someone suffering from complex, multi-system illness, exploring your genetics and your specific genetics related to methylation may provide some very useful information.
The good news is that knowing the appropriate information about your genetics can enable you to support your weak links in your chain with nutrition and lifestyle choices, which can help prevent or reverse current or future illness or disease. You owe it to yourself to learn about your genetics!
How to Assess Your Genes
To identify your particular genetic methylation weak links, you first need to have your genetics tested. This is a very simple saliva test, taken at home with a kit from 23andme or a similar service.
Buy a 23andme Genetics Screening Test Here
When you receive the kit, you register it online, take your saliva sample, and mail it in. Results typically arrive in 4-6 weeks.
Once you have your 23andme results, you need to send your data to a third-party service, which will evaluate and interpret the raw data, and send you a report describing whether you have the “normal” SNPs, or mutated SNPs. I like to use the report from Metabolic Healing which costs $37, or StrateGene, which costs $45. There are free reports available as well, such as from GeneticGenie, but they generally don’t check for as many SNPs, and are less complete.
What to Do With Your Genetic Information
Now that you have your genetic information and your report, you now need to consider how to interpret the information. It’s become quite popular for practitioners to look at those reports, and suggest supplementation based on your genetic SNPs. This is not an appropriate approach, in my opinion.
Your genetics are fixed, but just because you HAVE a SNP doesn’t mean that that SNP is expressing in a negative way. It’s important to consider the information you receive in the context of your actual medical and health history, and sometimes to perform current biochemical tests, such as blood, saliva, or urine tests to see if the SNPs are truly an issue. For example, if you have a mutation for the Vitamin D Receptor (VDR) gene, you don’t necessarily want to supplement with Vitamin D without testing your blood levels.
It’s a great idea to discuss this genetic information with your doctor or another practitioner who can help you interpret the results to create a plan. Click here to make an appointment with me to discuss your genetic results.
If you’d like to read more about methylation, I recommend an easy-to-understand book by Amy Yasko, called Feel Good Nutrigenomics: Your Roadmap to Health. This book describes the very complex science of methylation and genetics for the layperson, and provides a strategy to address your own personal genetic shortcomings to enhance your health. This can lay a foundation for either shifting your complex health issues, or practicing preventative health care for yourself and your family.
by Amanda Malachesky | Jun 26, 2017 | Brain Health, Functional Medicine and Coaching, Functional Nutrition, Stress, Symptoms
As a practitioner, I really like to help my clients delve into the why behind their health problems, and to explore angles they may not have considered before. The four main pillars of the programs I create for clients are diet, exercise and movement, sleep, and stress.
Stress really wreaks havoc on our health in so many different ways, and it’s one of the foundational areas I help with. Stress can impact our sleep, decrease the function of our immune system, disrupt digestion, mess up our relationships, and leave us feeling anxious, tired, worn out, frazzled, and spent.
What I’ve also noticed, however, is that it can be SO difficult to let go of our habits and patterns that allow a stressful mindset to continue. But to move forward on our healing journeys, we must dial down the stress. This includes reducing or removing hidden infections, like parasites, viruses, or bacterial infections, environmental stresses like mold or toxins, negative people in our life, or dealing with hidden nutritional deficiencies. But it can also mean retraining and reframing our brain and how we respond to our daily life.
Here are some signs that you might need to work on training your brain for calm:
- Even when you are trying to relax, your brain remains busy, thinking about a million things.
- You have difficulty falling or staying asleep, because your mind is busy, or startles easily.
- You lose your temper easily, even from small inputs.
- You are plagued by memories or dreams of scary, traumatic, or stressful events.
- You regularly have negative thinking patterns, where you assume the worst about people, the future, or your current situation.
- You struggle with phobias or non-specific anxiety.
I want to share a few resources for you to explore if you are needing to retrain your brain for calm. Especially if you are a person who is carrying the burden of trauma in your past, I want you to know that there are ways to help your brain and body release those stored memories and process the pain attached to them. You will always have the memories, but it is possible to separate the emotional charge from them, so they don’t run your life anymore.
Emotional Freedom Technique
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), also called tapping, is a method of helping the brain to discharge stressful and traumatic events, and reach a state of resolution and peace. EFT was developed by Gary Craig, a Stanford-educated engineer. It has been particularly useful for those suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but has also proven useful for managing pain, phobias, anxiety, illness, and many other conditions.
To use EFT, a person explores the roots of a difficult emotion and verbally expresses the situation in a particular way. The person then taps particular points on the body in a specific sequence while verbalizing a shortened version of the statement they created. It’s not clear exactly why it works, but I suspect that this method helps the brain reconnect the emotional impact of an event with the more analytical present-time mind, which allows the brain to process the experience and move on. I have seen this technique produce remarkable results for many of my clients.
Anyone can learn to do EFT for themselves by visiting the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) website www.emofree.com, and learning the method for free with a manual and/or videos. It doesn’t take long to learn, and can create a significant reduction in difficult emotions and trauma in a very short amount of time.
Eye Movement and Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy
EMDR therapy is an evidence-based type of psychotherapy, also commonly used to help with PTSD. Bilateral visual or aural stimulation is used to help the brain access it’s built-in methods for adapting to and processing trauma. It can help the person access painful or difficult memories, and then allows them to process them within a therapeutic environment.
EMDR therapy is available by seeing a therapist trained in the modality. To find a trained clinician, you can visit the EMDR Institute website. For further reading about EMDR, check out EMDR: The Breakthrough Eye Movement Therapy for Overcoming Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma by the founder of EMDR, Francine Shapiro, PhD.
Self-Hypnosis Recordings
I’m a fan of techniques and methods that my clients can use and access in their own home, at a time and place of their choosing. Self-hypnosis is a way to help the brain access a relaxed and suggestible state, and can double as not only stress relief, but retraining the mindset to a positive and healing state.
People with long-term chronic and complex illness can often become discouraged to the point where they believe they may never get well. This negative thinking pattern can become quite “sticky”, and can become a source of stress in and of itself. There are hundreds of self-hypnosis recordings out there. They are inexpensive, and focus on a wide array of issues, from insomnia, stress, specific illness, headaches, and even childbirth.
I like to suggest clients start with one or two recordings that they like, and consistently listen to them, while falling asleep, or any other time it is safe to do so. It can take some time to rewire the brain, so consistency here is key. As an example, I struggled with insomnia for several years, since my kids were born. I had trained myself to wake up to every little tiny sound at night, and could no longer sleep through the night. I tried a lot of solutions, including supplements, dietary changes, routine changes, and more, and nothing worked.
Last winter, I invested in a sleep hypnosis app, called Sleep Well by Surf City Apps, and began listening to it nightly. It took about 4 months, but slowly, I began to sleep deeply, fall asleep faster, and wake up feeling more refreshed. You can do this too! Get out there and find a recording that is relevant to you, and enjoy.
Meditation
No conversation about retraining the brain would be complete without mentioning meditation. Meditation is consciously focusing on your breathing and thinking patterns with the goal of calming the mind. Here are some of the many benefits of meditation:
- lowers blood pressure
- improves depression and anxiety
- increases self-awareness
- reduces chronic pain
- increases immune function
- improves sleep disturbances and fatigue
- improves gastrointestinal problems, such as IBS
- slows aging
- increases happiness
There are many meditation traditions, and ways to explore. Books, videos, recordings, and classes are all viable ways to access meditation and to give it a try. Here is one of my favorites, The Little Book of Mindfulness by Patricia Collard.
Many people imagine that meditation is a bunch of monks chanting in colorful robes, but it really is a practice of personal awareness that can be adapted to any lifestyle or spiritual tradition. Any activity at all can be an excuse to bring the mind to a meditative state, such as taking a walk, playing music, drinking your morning tea or coffee, or anything else that allows your mind to quiet itself.
I hope that this information is helpful for anyone suffering from a troubled mind.
How do you train your brain for calm? Comment below…
by Amanda Malachesky | Apr 5, 2017 | Chronic Illness, Symptoms, Thyroid
The thyroid gland is a small, butterfly-shaped organ located in the neck. The thyroid is an endocrine gland, and is the primary gland that controls our body’s metabolic rate. Thyroid hormone is used by all organs and systems.
The Most Common Thyroid Symptoms Are:
- fatigue
- cold hands and feet
- hair loss
- constipation
- dry skin
- anxiety or depression, or manic cycling (from manic to depressive)
- poor wound healing
- infertility
- too many others to list here….
Thyroid problems are very common, and Synthroid, the synthetic thyroid replacement medication, is the third most common prescription in the U.S. Usually, the medication is prescribed after a blood test reveals high Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH). However, Synthroid does nothing to address the underlying cause of the underactive thyroid gland.
Assessing the Thyroid
Thyroid hormone is created, released, transported, and used by a series of processes in the brain and body, and many things can disrupt the successful creation and conversion of thyroid hormone. A careful assessment of a complete thyroid blood panel is necessary to know where to direct action to correct a thyroid imbalance. This test includes:
- Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH)
- Free T3
- Free T4
- T3
- T4
- rT3 (reverse T3)
- Thyroid antibodies: TPO and TG
Evaluating the TSH value, as is most commonly done, only tells us that the body is trying to produce more thyroid hormone to make up for a deficiency, but it doesn’t tell us WHY the body has too little thyroid hormone. If you suspect a thyroid condition, you may need to advocate for yourself with your doctor to run the whole panel. Evaluating the full panel allows a pracitioner to identify where the hormone is losing its effectiveness. For more information about how to interpret your thyroid labs, as well as lots of other thyroid resources, check out Stop the Thyroid Madness.
Thyroid Disruptors
Many factors can disrupt thyroid function. Stress can really disrupt thyroid function. When we are stressed, our body has elevated levels of a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol inhibits the production of Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH), inhibits the body from converting T4 hormone (the transport form of thyroid hormone) into T3 hormone (the useable form of thyroid hormone), raises levels of rT3, which blocks the T3 receptor sites. Often, when stress is appropriately managed, and the adrenal system supported, thyroid levels return to normal. In this case, the thyroid dysfunction is a secondary problem.
Gut dysbiosis is another player in thyroid dysfunction. Some bacteria produce toxins, called Lipopolysaccharides, which decrease TSH AND disrupt the conversion of T4 to T3, while certain healthy bacteria assist with the successful conversion of certain intermediary forms of T3 into useable T3 hormone. Infection with pathogens can also impact the liver, as it tries to clean up their waste products, and T4 is converted into T3 in the liver. As with cortisol levels and stress above, when gut dysbiosis is corrected, by eliminating pathogens in the digestive system, thyroid symptoms often improve or disappear.
Problems can also occur at the cellular level: high stress, endotoxins (as mentioned above), systemic inflammation, and nutritional deficiencies can all disrupt the ability of cells to utilize the thyroid hormone at the cellular level. Addressing these kinds of root causes requires digestive function evaluation, nutrient status labs, and dietary and lifestyle modification.
Dietary choices can also have a huge impact on thyroid health, particularly with regards to autoimmune thyroid conditions. Testing for antibodies allows us to see whether the body is producing autoantibodies to thyroid tissue and damaging the thyroid gland. Antibodies will usually be elevated long before the organ has sustained permanent damage. Autoantibodies and autoimmune processes in general indicate that the digestive system needs support with it’s microbiome community, as well as the integrity of the barrier of the intestine. Consumption of certain foods, including gluten, diary, soy, and sugar are particularly damaging for those with autoimmune processes, which will be evident by checking for elevated TPO and TG antibody levels. If you’d like more information about how to get started avoiding these foods, click here to get a free recipe ebook by Dr. Izabella Wentz.
Help Your Thyroid Heal
A thyroid diagnosis doesn’t have to be a lifelong sentence to medication and feeling bad. Many people have been able to get into remission by addressing their gut health, adopting a thyroid-supportive diet and lifestyle, and for those that aren’t able to stop taking medication, using more bio-identical thyroid medications to provide more functional support.
If you know or suspect you have a thyroid condition, work with a functional health care practitioner who can help you fully evaluate your thyroid, test your gut for dysbiosis, and provide supportive dietary and lifestyle recommendations.
As a starting place for diet, you can explore and use the Autoimmune Paleo Diet. This diet removes foods that aggravate autoimmune conditions, and is anti-inflammatory. Changing your diet can be difficult, but it can also be the gateway to a positive change in your health. If you’d like to learn more about the Autoimmune Paleo Diet, Dr. Izabella Wentz, who recently released The Thyroid Secret film series, is offering a free, two-week cookbook and meal plan.
Click here to get your free copy.
The recipe book has 14-days-worth of delicious meal plans and recipes, including breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack for two weeks. It also has a shopping list for each week, so that you can go to the store, stock up on everything you need and move on with your life.
If you would like support evaluating your thyroid, you can schedule a consultation with Amanda here.
