Is it Your Thyroid?
by Jonny Bowden
Could your thyroid have an effect on your weight loss
efforts? Even if your doctor says it’s normal…
You bet it could. Underactive, sub-clinical
hypothyroidism is one of the most missed diagnoses in
medicine, and is responsible for an awful lot of
unhappiness. It also affects eight times as many women
as men. The symptoms of a low thyroid are often vague
and generalized — they can include weight gain (or
great difficulty losing weight), depression, fatigue,
bloating and often a malaise and lack of energy, not
to mention things like cold hands. Because a lot of
these symptoms overlap with those of so many other
conditions, the thyroid is often not suspected, and
goes untreated until much damage has been done.
Understanding why it often goes unrecognized why
mainstream medicine often overlooks it can help you
figure out if this is something that affects you and
if it warrants further investigation.
The thyroid, an endocrine gland located in the neck,
is a big player in determining metabolic rate. It puts
out several hormones, but for our purposes the
important ones are T3 and T4. Of these two hormones,
T4 accounts for about 93 percent of thyroid hormone
and T3 accounts for the other seven percent, but it’s
T3 that is the active one. (This is important to
remember because most mainstream doctors who prescribe
thyroid hormone will give you Synthroid, which is
basically T4). Under ideal conditions, the body
converts the inactive T4 to active T3, and it has
always been assumed that this conversion takes place
just fine in healthy people.
Unfortunately, it may not. The body needs the mineral
selenium to perform the conversion properly, a mineral
that is amazingly low in the American diet and in
which huge numbers of people are deficient. In any
case, even though there may be enough thyroid hormone
in the bloodstream, it may not be getting to its
target cells where it can do its metabolic work.
Mainstream medicine usually takes blood levels of T4
and T3, and if they’re "normal," they assume
everything’s just fine. But there are further tests
that may reveal a problem that doesn’t show up in the
basic test. Like all endocrine glands, the thyroid
output is regulated by an intricate system of checks
and balances. I think of it as a big system of
air-traffic control at an airport. Different people
watch different sections of the airfield and monitor
who’s coming and going, sending radio signals to a
supervisor who sits in the tower and listens for the
reports of who’s coming in and who’s going out. Based
on the information the controller is getting, he or
she tells the airplanes where to taxi. The system
works fine as long as the controller’s getting the
right messages from the guys beneath who are actually
monitoring the runways themselves. If the radio
signals are jammed, however, and the controller
doesn’t know it, she may be giving out the wrong
information to the airplanes. It starts with the
hypothalamus, which signals the pituitary to put out a
hormone called TSH (Thyroid Simulating Hormone). When
thyroid stimulating hormone levels are high, the body
thinks it needs more thyroid hormone. A test for TSH
that reveals a high level means that the body "thinks"
it needs more thyroid, so it’s sending out a
"distress" signal saying "give me more, give me more."
That’s why the TSH test is a better indicator of
what’s going on than the basic T3/T4 test.
Even the TSH test may not be enough to tell us
everything we need to know. According to thyroid
expert Raphael Kellman, M.D., we may need to look one
step further up the chain at the hypothalamus. The
hypothalamus is like the chief air-traffic controller.
It puts out a hormone called TRH (Thyrotropic
Releasing Hormone), which in turn controls the
pituitary output of the TSH (which in turn controls T3
and T4). Kellman maintains that tests of the
effectiveness of this signaling system actually reveal
thyroid problems that the other tests don’t catch.
It gets more complicated, so stay with me. When T4
(the inactive hormone) is converted to T3, the
conversion actually produces some inactive by-products
called rT3. Usually these don’t matter as long as the
ratio is about 10:1 in favor of the active T3.
Sometimes the system goes haywire causing the
conversion to produce far more of these by-products
than production of the "real thing." This syndrome,
discovered by Dr. Denis Wilson, is known as Wilson’s
syndrome, and it’s just getting recognized as a real
clinical entity. Your mainstream doctor may not know
anything about it yet. Obviously, such metabolic
weirdness would never show up on a basic test for T4
and T3.
Why are we seeing a virtual epidemic of under active
or low thyroid? Several theories have been put forth,
but one of the most compelling is that toxic metals —
like mercury — and other compounds to which we are
routinely exposed, like the by-products of aspartame —
get deposited in the thyroid, wreaking havoc on its
ability to function properly. Soy, so universally
touted as a wonderful health food may contribute to
the mix as well, since it contains goitrogens,
compounds that suppress thyroid function. How ironic
that an overweight woman following mainstream advice
to lose weight might be downing large amounts of both
diet sodas and soy products that in turn just might be
suppressing the very hormones that she needs to
accomplish the task?
There is an old, tried and true "low tech" way of
checking your thyroid at home that could give you a
clue as to whether or not it’s worth further
investigation. The Broda Barnes Foundation, a
thyroid-education group, uses this technique and it’s
very simple to do. Upon arising, take your underarm
temperature. Do it for two or three days in a row. If
it’s consistently below 97.8, and you’re experiencing
any of the symptoms I’ve mentioned, it’s probably
worth checking into further.