Episode 72 – Do You have an Iodine Deficiency?

Speaker 1: 00:00 This is Dr Chad Edwards and you’re listening to podcast number 72 of against the grain.

Speaker 2: 00:06 Welcome to against the grain podcast with Dr Chad Edwards, where he challenges the status quo when it comes to medicine. We get into hot topics in the medical field with real stories from real patients to help you on your way to a healthy lifestyle. Get ready because we’re about to go. Go against the grain. Right.

Speaker 1: 00:26 Well, hello everybody. Dr Edwards, what is up? How are you doing another day in paradise. Having a great day. Glad I’m here. Uh, what would you say is the highlight has been the highlight of your day so far? Be being here. Oh, I got to see multiple patients today and knowing that pay that we’re making a difference in how people feel, look and perform and we’re able to enabling them to optimize their health. I mean, that’s, that’s what gets me out of bed. Really? Yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. That’s pretty cool. It’s knowing, you know, when I was doing traditional medicine the way I was trained in residency, I’m. I had an effect, you know, I mean, I don’t think I did. I don’t think I wasted my time. Uh, I certainly had an effect, but I remember vividly when I was a medical assistant for several years and our army medic or preventive medicine enlisted guy kind of thing.

Speaker 1: 01:24 And I remember working with a physician that talked about, I struggled with family medicine versus emergency medicine, family medicine and emergency about it for a long time. And one of the reasons because this doctor said, you know, most of the things that you see patients going to get better whether they see it or not, you know, it’s just like what you do doesn’t really matter. And I was like, holy crap, that’s like the most frustrating thing in the world. I get out of bed and I go through my day all day long and they didn’t make a crime but a difference. Are you kidding? You know what I know in emergency medicine that’s not the case. And it’s, you know, I still work in the Er, not love that part. And there’s no question. Some of the decisions that I make are life and death decisions and that’s pretty cool, you know, and what I did and in my, you know, traditional medical practice, uh, I made some difference, but what I see in my clinic and the way people often follow up or doing it in a way that at least around here, nobody else is doing.

Speaker 1: 02:27 There are certainly people across the country that do functional medicine and then do it, you know, better than I can or better than I am. And I learned so much from them and I try to pay attention to what they say. And uh, you know, I learn more every day. But, um, I, I think we do amazing things, not because I’m smarter than anybody else, but because I actually listened to my patient a Sir William Osler, you know, the founder of Johns Hopkins and one of my, he’s not my mentor. It’s just a guy that it was brilliant, phenomenal. Uh, and he said, listen, your patient, he’s telling you the diagnosis. Well, when your average physician spends about three minutes listening to their patient, they can’t determine their diagnosis because they’re not listening. I mean, I hear it all the time. So, uh, it, it just, it’s humbling to be able to make the difference that I feel that we’re making now what?

Speaker 1: 03:18 And that’s based on what our patients are saying, not me. Sure. And so if you want to, I don’t know if, if people listening wanted to go check out and see some patient testimonials, where would or hear from some of the patients that you’ve worked with, where should they go? Well, first revolution, health.org. And I’ve got a section on testimonials and they’re categorized by prolotherapy in different things. You can read our Google reviews. We’ve got multiple of them and people telling their stories are the same thing on facebook. Um, interestingly, today I was, I was at, we got a great review from a patient that we saw this week. And so I went on to read what he had to say. And as I looked at our reviews on facebook, there were, uh, there were three reviews that gave us three stars. And I was like, I wonder why they gave us, you know, we’re not going to please everybody.

Speaker 1: 04:08 I mean, I, and I know that I’m okay with that. Um, but I wonder what happened, why did we only get three stars and didn’t have any of that had, you know, one and two is just three, four and five. But what happened on those threes? And all three of them, all three of them had never been seen in my clinic. None of them are there. Nay. I have no records of any of them. Their faces didn’t look familiar. And I was like, what? They didn’t write anything. They just gave stars. So Wha, wha, why best shady? Why would you put stars when you’ve never been seen in our? No. Had no interaction with our clinic whatsoever. I just thought that was really interesting. And I’m, I’m sure there are patients that are upset. While I know there are patients that are upset with me because they didn’t, I didn’t do things the way they wanted or you know, we’ve had poor customer service at some point or know any of those kinds of things.

Speaker 1: 05:02 So I’m, we’re not batting a thousand, but you know, we try to bat better every day for sure. Sure. And I know that your approach functional medicine leads us to a lot of, against the grain topics. Okay. Yup. And in different, uh, things that we talked about here on the podcast. Yeah. Which one are we getting into today? Today we’re going to talk about a sort of a nutritional elemental kind of thing, but this has come up a couple of times this week and I thought, you know, I don’t think I’ve done anything on iodine so we should do that. I had died iodine. I’ve heard iodine at least 354 times in my life. Yeah, I have no idea what it is. So today will be 3:55. Yes. At least that’s right. Alright, so let’s get into it. What is iodine? Iodine? Iodine is a, is a chemical, it’s literally an, a, just a single atom, a chemical that has an effect on a lot of tissues in the body, far more than most people think.

Speaker 1: 06:11 If I say, if I wanted you to associate iodine with either a tissue or a disease, do you have any idea what that would be? Um, jaundice. No. Okay. No, that’s not it. Okay. So I, I think I don’t want to speak for everyone. I think the most common thing would be thyroid goiter. I was close. Yeah, that was, it’s only half the body away of the, you know, in, in fact goiter was a very common thing, uh, you know, back in the 18 hundreds and certainly before that. What is, what is goyder setting me up to speed. It’s an enlargement in the thyroid gland and it happens because of basically an iodine deficiency. So your thyroid hormones t three, t four, also t one t two a cannot be released from the thyroid gland. They’re stuck in the thyroid follicle, um, when there is insufficient iodine.

Speaker 1: 07:03 So you’ll make the protein portion. Um, the, um, yeah, the amino acid portion, you’re where you’re making kind of that backbone that gets made and it gets kind of stuck in there and until you have sufficient iodine, it doesn’t get released as thyroid hormone so it can’t go out and do what it’s supposed to do in the body. And so all these, uh, this, this, um, thyroid gland just enlarges and enlarge as and in larger and larger to get bigger and bigger and bigger. It’s almost like a buffalo hump in the front of your, in the front of your neck, that’s thyroid gland can get huge and it’s a pretty easy fix. You just give them iodine. So it was pretty cool. Uh, but you know, the World Health Organization says that one and a half billion people live in an iodine deficient region. So iodine we can get from our nutrition and that’s basically where we get it.

Speaker 1: 07:58 Uh, but you know, like Japan for example, a lot of iodine intake, it’s, we get a lot of it from seafood and seaweed and sea kelp and things like that. When you’re out in the great plains where there’s not a lot of, you know, the ocean or the vapors from the ocean have had to go halfway across the country. You lose a lot of that and certainly there’s some wash out. The rain will wash the iodine away from the ground and it’s not a very abundant mineral anyway. Um, and so there’s a lot of, a lot of potential for deficiency in iodine and goiter being one of the most well known. I’ll say that for sure. Uh, so thyroid, the impact on thyroid and goiter is a big reason why we need to talk about iodine. Okay. So iodine deficiency. So you said one point, 1 billion people

Speaker 3: 08:55 live in a iodine deficient environment at one point five. Actually one point that about a third of the world’s population. Wow. Okay. So one point, 5 billion, that’s a lot of people, um, is goiter the only way that it manifests itself or, or do do you, is it easy to live with iodine deficiency and not know it?

Speaker 1: 09:18 Absolutely, and I would argue that most people, especially in today’s environment, most people, if they have an iodine deficiency, don’t have any idea, and there are a number of a number of things that manifest because of, or at least in part because of iodine deficiency. So little brief list, mental retardation, in fact, iodine deficiency is the most common preventable cause of mental retardation. So certainly if you have a down syndrome that’s not because of iodine deficiency, but the most common preventable reason for down center, uh, for um, mental retardation is iodine deficiency. So we talked about Goiter, uh, increased, uh, child and infant mortality. So like babies and kids dying is, is another one, infertility or breast cancer. And so iodine causes estrogen production to increase and it also increases the sensitivity of the tissue or identify agency, I should say. Uh, it also causes the estrogen increases the estrogen sensitivity in the tissues.

Speaker 1: 10:31 And estrogen is a pro growth. Specifically as drone is a pro growth hormone. When there is iodine deficiency, you don’t make enough, you don’t metabolize your estrogens appropriately. And so you’re not making the same amount of trial. And all, there’s a very interesting connection with the estrogens and I had done so a very interesting. So with iodine deficiency you can see an increase in breast cancer, prostate cancer for men, fibrous cystic breast disease. If you’re a woman and listening and you have fiber, cystic breast disease, you need to consider iodine replacement, Cretinism, you know the pygmies, you’ve heard about that. That’s a condition called Cretinism. And that’s because of iodine deficiency. Attention deficit hyperactivity, Adhd, add. There is an iodine component in some cases, uh, in, in, in, uh, in these patients, sids or sudden infant death syndrome, multiple sclerosis. The list goes on and on and on about potential problems that have an iodine component or iodine could be contributing to the cause.

Speaker 3: 11:39 So, so iodine, it sounds like you said it’s a single malt single molecule. Adam. Adam, yeah. Adam single. Adam. Yeah. Um, so it’s a pretty simple substance. Yep. Very. Um, but has such a

Speaker 1: 11:54 large profound effect. That’s exactly right. And I think, you know, the United States government actually, it very interesting, you know, when you look at food fortification, you know, I’ve done some, some research into how did we start fortifying food, you need to go buy cereal in the grocery store and I’ll say fortified with, well that those food don’t naturally have high levels of those things. So they’re fortified. It’s added. So salt, we started iodized salt in the 19 twenties kind of timeframe. I don’t remember the exact date. Uh, I’ve done some research on that, but it was one of the first foods that we actually, a fortified. We added iodine and we did that because of the high amount and it started in, in Michigan actually because that area had a particularly high level of goiter. So they started adding iodine to salt, which was very inexpensive to do and it provided a reasonable amount of iodine and they made a big impact on goiter.

Speaker 1: 13:01 So when you look at the Rda recommended dietary allowance of a, or I’m sorry, recommended daily allowance of iodine. It’s 150 micrograms per day. So how do they get rdas? It’s based on what do we see as the intake level below which we see disease and in this case goiter. Then we’ll add 10 percent as a safety buffer. So what prevents goiter and you know in, in this case it’s going to be a, it’s going to be an a, a, an intake of iodine, have a 135 micrograms per day, you know, at that point and below we start seeing goiter. So we add 15 percent of that 150 micrograms is your rda. How much do you get from iodized salt? 70 seven micrograms of iodine per gram of salt. So we’re talking about a really small amount of iodine in salt, so you’re going to have to eat two grams of salt per day in order to, in order to meet the RDA.

Speaker 1: 14:12 The problem is, is that, you know, as we talked about here, the only one on this list that we just read and mental retardation and the goiter and infertility and all the breast cancer issues and all those things. The only one that we’re trying to prevent with the RDA is goiter. And no one is even looking at these other issues, even though we know, like we talked about Cretinism, um, you know, that nobody’s looking at that. And I think most of them would argue that if, if you’re preventing goiter, you’re probably also preventing cretinism now I would agree with that. But there are other issues. Adhd who, who asks the question about how much iodine are you giving adhd? Kids were not. Nobody asked that question in. Why do you think that nobody’s asking that question? Uh, I think that there’s, well, there’s a lot of misinformation about iodine.

Speaker 1: 15:03 So, you know, I talk about iodine with my patients a fair amount. We can test for iodine deficiency and we will supplement iodine. But you know, for years iodine has had a bad rap and they’ll say that there’s a lot of toxicity and there are some studies showing that there can be some side effects. And there was one study then it’s referenced on an article on my website where I’m talking about iodine and for a hundred years there’s data on this stuff and you know, under one gram a day, one gram. So the RDA is 150 micrograms, so 15 percent of, you know, the, this amount. We don’t really see any kind of hyperthyroid or reactivity with iodine above that. It’s extremely variable. Some people can have problems, but so there’s a lot of misinformation about the toxicity of iodine and it’s probably as good a time as any to talk about.

Speaker 1: 16:01 Uh, you know, in fact, I think it was in the 19 eighties. It may have been a little bit before. Um, you know, prior to the, that the 19 eighties. Oh, we’ll just call it the 19 eighties, I think that’s when it was. We used to use iodine as a dough stabilizers for bread. So bread had iodine in it for a long time in the 19 eighties. They determined they were concerned there was to my knowledge and if anybody knows any different, please let me know. To my knowledge, there was no evidence of iodine toxicity, but there was concern about it without any evidence to back it up. They pulled iodine out of bread and added bromide. So bromide is also a highlight in the periodic table, you know, they all line up in the same place and they added bromide. Now how much bromide do we need on a daily basis?

Speaker 1: 16:52 Zero. Absolutely zero. It’s actually considered a toxin. It competes because it’s a highlight. It competes for iodine location or, or at the, at the, um, in the binding site. So when you’re talking about iodine, we have to have a certain intake. We got to meet at least the Rda, but there’s also this issue of bromide toxicity. You can also talk about chloride and fluoride toxicity. All of those things compete for the same receptor. When you’re trying to optimize someone’s health, you are trying. There’s a competitive inhibition, meaning the higher or the more toxicity we have of these other things, we need more and more iodine to displace those things and prevent some of these issues of iodine deficiency, whether it’s relative or absolute. And so they took the and out of the bread. Correct. Which because they believed it to be some kind of toxin or something.

Speaker 1: 17:52 Yeah, you can. I mean, you can take too much iodine and in some people and have problems. You can get hyper thyroid, you know, there’s some other things that you can get, but I just, I mean I’ve, I’ve been using iodine in my practice and I itch extremely rare to see any kind of problem when you’re paying attention to your patient, you can actually pick up on those problems and you just make an adjustment, but then they replaced something that had zero daily nutritional value and is actually a toxin and is actually a toxin because of the fact of what it has on the body in competing for the iodine receptors. Absolutely. Okay. Well let’s take a quick break when we come back on a wrap up. The approved and needed uses for iodine. Okay. And then we’ll wrap it up. Sounds good.

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Speaker 1: 19:16 okay. We are back with Dr Chad Edwards and we are talking about iodine in all things that rhyme with iodine. So I’m going to start, I’m to say iodine. And then Dr Edwards, you say the first thing that comes to your mind, iodine. Iodine. Okay. Excellent. It was a good extra exercise there. Um, so iodine is a very simple substance or a single atom. Substance. Okay. And it’s. They used to use it in bread. Yeah. Did they ever put it back into bread? Nope. Not to my. Not, not as a, uh, an industrial stabilization, right? Yep. Now there’s a lot of things that I don’t fix it. Goiter is probably the most prevalent. Yep. Okay. What else is there that we don’t know about iodine in terms of educational purposes? In everyday use? Yeah. So I would argue, I mean, I use it in my practice across the board.

Speaker 1: 20:17 It can help with thyroid, it can help with fiber, cystic breast diseases we mentioned. I think it’s a good idea for male patients in regards to prostate because those tissues need iodine, but different tissues take up different types of iodine. So there’s two different types. There’s iodine and iodide and they differ in an electron one single electron in here. I am probably using both interchangeably. That’s not true. Yeah, no. Do you need, you need both forms, Kelp that you would get, you know, the Japanese have a lot of kelp form, um, you know, the iodine and I think that’s iodine, not iodide. I’m quite sure. Um, so, uh, you, but you need both forms. Different tissues are going to take up different, you know, one takes up iodine, one takes up, out died and, but you need both for overall health, top to bottom, you need both.

Speaker 1: 21:12 Okay. So those are some of the things, you know, as I started looking at iodine several years ago, I learned a lot about what we need, what we get from salt, you know, the other thing is that, you know, the iodine deficiency, I would argue as much more common than we than we know. And part of that is, you know, I’m, I’m a big fan of the Paleo and I was a child of the crossfit movement and all of that stuff. And with that there was, you know, don’t eat processed salt, processed salt does deplete of its minerals other than sodium and chloride and doesn’t have full spectrum, you know, some magnesium and all different kinds of minerals and it’s just bleached in the way they process that. There’s a lot of toxic crap associated with that too. So just tagging onto our last podcast where we talked about toxins and skin and all of these things I’ve been toxins are every where you cannot escape it.

Speaker 1: 22:08 In fact, I was listening to a, a, a, a lecture by Dr Jill Carnahan and she is absolutely phenomenal and she talks a lot about toxins and she was, she is very strict in her nutrition, virtually 100 percent organic, all of those kinds of things and has been so for several years and she tested herself recently on glyphosate and came back very high. And so the point of that is, you know, you can go back and listen to our podcast on glyphosate and where you get that. But, uh, several, several podcasts that go, but, uh, that she is trying diligently to eat, very clean. I mean, she knows toxins better than 99 point nine, nine percent percent of the physicians out there. Yet she has evidence of toxins in her. And the point of that is that it’s probably next to impossible to completely prevent, uh, in fact, uh, she even says that 80 percent of the toxins we encounter are from the air we breathe.

Speaker 1: 23:08 I mean, you, you can’t, you can’t get away from that. I mean, you need air filters and things like that to just purify your anchor, to hold our breath for awhile, for awhile. That doesn’t do much for your health though. Okay. I’m so short term solution. It’s a very short term solution. That’s correct. Um, okay. So you need iodine and iodide. Correct. Okay. Um, so in terms of preventative measures of how to get the appropriate amount and we talk about the normal range and I think most people would fall in the normal range. In fact that’s what defines the normal range. Um, but uh, but for optimal health, for optimal health, are you saying, you know, sit down and have two grams of iodized salt, you know, in the evening or. Nope. And you know, it’s interesting when you look at the bio availability of iodine, meaning when you take something, when you eat something that has either done it, in this case salt the salt, the uh, the iodine in salt is much less bio available than the iodine that was inbred.

Speaker 1: 24:14 In other words, your, your levels in your body will go up proportionally more when there was iodine in the bread than the same amount of iodine in salt. It’s very interesting. Um, and so, uh, another question, um, that was probably one of the more intelligent questions I’ve asked on this episode. I’m a, can your body store iodine? Yes. Uh, I mean your, your thyroid hormones, you know, certainly we, uh, but you do need a, an ongoing supply. So yes, you store some, but yes, you can become deficient and deplete of that nutrient. So you do need an ongoing supply. Okay. And so how, what would you recommend as that ongoing supply in terms of nutrition, nutrition, being one of the core tenants of functional medicine in your clinic? What would you say for preventative measures and a ongoing supplement? Well, first of all, I would say choose a diet a appropriate in iodine.

Speaker 1: 25:12 Now it’s more difficult in the midwest if you lived in Japan much easier, you know, and interestingly, their rates of breast cancer and things like that are much lower. Uh, and certainly they don’t have the same amount of thyroid disorders but seafood and you know, see related foods like, you know, I wouldn’t call seaweed a seafood even though some people may, but when I say seafood, I think fish and, and those kinds of things. But uh, so seaweed has a special ability to concentrate iodine from the seawater. And then other, other seafood such as cod sea bass, haddock, perch, uh, you know, those kinds of things have higher levels of iodine. You can get it from a shrimp and those kinds of things. There are other foods, but it depends on the region. You know, in the Midwest we tend to have lower levels of iodine so you’re not going to get as much from the same kind of food as you would in other places where iodine levels are higher.

Speaker 1: 26:07 So nutrition is obviously best, but when we can’t do that, then we need to supplement with some iodine to ways that I generally recommend replacement in my patients. And one is [inaudible] solution and I lose Dr Lou girl that came up with this and he actually put in iodine and iodide into a solution. And two drops of Lou galls solution, two drops, one to two drops, a is equivalent to 12 point five milligrams or it contains 12 point five milligrams of iodine and iodide. So 12 point five milligrams and often we’ll just do one drop. And if you needed to dilute it out, you can dilute it out, you know, just added it into a glass and drink half the glass. I mean you can dilute that out. It’s really easy to adjust and it’s inexpensive. Another way that you can do that is with Iota Raul or some other, a pill or tablet form of, of iodine.

Speaker 1: 27:07 There’s a couple of different sources that I’ve used at my clinic. But uh, you know, just as a generic term, I’ll see, even though it’s a brand, uh, I’ll, I’ll say iota role, which is a tablet form of the exact same thing as legal solutions. So instead of a liquid, it’s a tablet. You can of course cut it in half recorders. And, and, you know, divvied up that way, but it is iodine and iodide, so good for total body iodine, those tissues that need of the different kinds. And so is that something that people could safely, uh, take, um, it, it’s hard to make any kind of blanket judgments there, but is that, would that be considered a daily supplement that you could take a regular basis and add that into your diet if you’re not currently getting that, a regular source of maybe fish or you live in the Midwest?

Speaker 1: 27:54 Is that something that you would, uh, uh, advocate for? Yeah, let me say it this way. I often recommend iodine replacement for many of my patients. Obviously I can’t make a, like you said, I can’t make it carte blanche statement. Uh, and I don’t intend this to be true medical advice and that’s no substitute for your, your relationship with your physician. But many patients benefit from iodine. There is a chance for toxicity, but you know, the study over a hundred years showed that one milligram or less is safe for just about everybody. And then it’s variable above that. And it just really depends how depleted are you a, what’s your source, those kinds of things. So many patients would benefit from it. Obviously consult your functional medicine practitioner for should you be taking it. So I think what you’re saying is now when I go out for, you know, after work, have a, have a glass of maker’s mark or something like that.

Speaker 1: 28:54 You’re saying get aside, have Sushi with that and that’ll be kind of, you know, the move. Well absolutely. And in fact, you know, I asked my wife earlier, I was like, okay, so we have, we’re sands kids tonight so we don’t, we don’t, we’re not unencumbered by children. So I was like, Hey, what do you want to do and what do you want to do for dinner? And she was like, Sushi, please. So we’re doing it tonight and you’re gonna, you’re gonna Order your role and you’re gonna. Think of me in iodine and all my kelp goodness in Kelp. Goodness. That’s right. Dr Edwards. Thank you so much for joining us, man. Thanks for discussing this topic with me. A lot of people need to hear this stuff.

Speaker 2: 29:31 Thanks for listening to this week’s podcast with Dr Chad Edwards. Tune in next week where we’ll be going against the grain. Are you

Speaker 4: 29:42 tired and fatigued? Are you frustrated with doctors because they just don’t seem to listen? Do you want to fix your pain without surgery? If you answered yes to any of these questions that we are the clinic for you, we offer prolotherapy prp or platelet rich plasma therapy, stem cell injections, ivy nutritional therapies, bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, and functional medicine to get you back on track to optimal health. Call our clinic at nine one, eight, nine, three, five, three, six, three, six, or visit our website at www dot revolution health battle. Order to schedule your appointment today.

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