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Natural Treatment for Hypothyroidism

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The term “natural treatment” is quite subjective to say the least. For most, it simply means treating their hypothyroidism symptoms with natural supplements and without the use of medical drugs. But should that really be considered natural? When it comes to a natural treatment for hypothyroidism, I believe that there’s a far more “natural” means that are entirely neglected.

When you think in terms of a natural treatment for hypothyroidism, it’s important to grasp the importance of supporting your body’s natural ability to heal rather than relying entirely on supplements.

Supplements definitely have their place but you have to keep in mind that you didn’t become hypothyroid because you are deficient in supplements.

The Importance of Your Diet

Most people fail to understand that your diet is by far the most important factor in any natural treatment for hypothyroidism.

The foods that you eat have far reaching effects when it comes to your thyroid. Your diet dictates your hormones, the health and functionality of your digestive tract, and many other processes that all greatly impact hypothyroidism.

So I want to strongly iterate the point that if your diet is not properly supporting your thyroid then you will never truly heal. And some people can partially compensate by relying entirely on supplementary hormones but this does not offset the damage that is done by a poor diet. And sooner or later, it will catch up with you one way or another.

Below I’m going to outline 3 key components of a truly natural treatment for hypothyroidism.

Balancing Your Hormones

Your hormonal system is far more intertwined than you probably realize. Every hormone tends to affect the others either directly or indirectly. And this is why balancing your hormones is a necessary part of any natural treatment for hypothyroidism.

Estrogen and Progesterone

Hypothyroidism tends to be more prevalent among females and it’s because they naturally produce a lot more estrogen than men do which makes them much more susceptible to the hypothyroid effects of excessive estrogen. But this is also becoming a more common issue with men these days.

Once your estrogen levels get out of balance they tend to cause an exponential problem. And that is because there is a feedback mechanism that causes hypothyroidism to promote the buildup of estrogen while estrogen further suppresses your thyroid. So it’s easy to see how this can cause your thyroid to spiral out of control.

Progesterone on the other hand works to offset the negative effects of estrogen and promote the healthy function of your thyroid.

Insulin and Cortisol

Another pair of complimentary hormones that require balancing as part of the natural treatment for hypothyroidism are insulin and cortisol. And these hormones work together in order to help maintain proper blood sugar levels.

Insulin is important because it plays an active role in delivering key nutrients to your cells as well as helping your liver to store the glycogen it needs to convert your inactive thyroid hormone to its active state.

And cortisol has an opposite effect and should be kept to a minimum as part of your natural treatment for hypothyroidism. Under times of stress and when blood sugar drops too low, cortisol is released to bring your blood sugar back up. But it also has many anti-thyroid effects such as blocking the liver from converting your much needed hormones.

Pregnenolone

I also wanted to touch on the importance of the hormone pregnenolone in this equation.

Pregnenolone is the precursor hormone for all of the highly protective steroid hormones that your body naturally produces. These hormones include progesterone and DHEA. But when you’re hypothyroid, your body can’t produce the pregnenolone that it needs because it requires thyroid hormone in order to do so.

Supporting Your Liver

Few people understand the important role that your liver plays in the whole thyroid process. And so it’s easily a forgotten part of the natural treatment for hypothyroidism.

If your liver is not healthy then it cannot properly store glycogen. And your liver requires a good amount of glycogen or sugar to properly convert your thyroid hormone to its active form to be used by your body.

Also, when your liver is unhealthy, then it cannot properly detoxify all of those estrogens that I talked about above which is such an important part of your natural treatment for hypothyroidism. If your liver can’t detoxify estrogen, then it will continue to build up, making you even more hypothyroid along the way.

When problems like this are not corrected then as the problem worsens, you can easily become more and more dependent on supplements and find that they are losing their effectiveness.

Choosing the Right Supplements

Before discussing the role of supplements in your natural treatment for hypothyroidism, I think it’s important to again reiterate the fact that your diet must come first and foremost. As I mentioned earlier, without focusing on your diet, any sort of hypothyroidism treatment is going to be far less effective.

But it’s also important to talk about the natural effects of aging and other factors that do affect your thyroid, which you might not have complete control over.

As you age, your hormone production changes and you begin to naturally produce less thyroid hormone and many of the protective steroid hormones. And this allows many of the other anti-thyroid hormones to have a greater effect on your health.

And this is when the right supplements and/or medication become a necessary part of even a natural treatment for hypothyroidism.

Fine Tuning

It’s important to find the right supplements and at the right amounts to meet the specific individual needs of your body.

For example, some people need only the thyroid hormone T3. Other’s need some combination of thyroid hormones T4 and T3. And this is a process that can take some time to figure out. But when you do find the right combination the results can be amazing.

It’s also important to keep in mind that as you progress through this natural treatment for hypothyroidism and your other hormones begin to balance, they too will impact the effectiveness of any supplementary thyroid hormone you take. For example, as your stress hormones decrease, your need for thyroid hormone will increase.

Hopefully by now you realize that a natural treatment for hypothyroidism involves much more than just using natural supplements. It involves utilizing your body’s natural healing ability to correct the underlying imbalances and dysfunction that led you to become hypothyroid in the first place.

Hypothyroidism and Infertility

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There’s a very clear link between hypothyroidism and infertility but it’s something that is not widely discussed for various reasons. Unfortunately, because it’s not widely discussed, infertility continues to rise and is becoming a much bigger and more expensive problem.

Infertility is one of the many hypothyroidism symptoms and largely a hormonal issue that can, more often than not, be corrected by overcoming hypothyroidism and the other associated hormonal imbalances. But instead of taking this common sense approach, we tend to try to force fertility to occur in a less fertile environment through in vitro fertilization and implantation. But no one stops to consider the long term health implications that this can have on the fetus.

This important link between hypothyroidism and infertility is oftentimes missed and many doctors claim that with many cases it’s impossible to fully restore fertility.

However, I would argue that this assumption based on evidence of many completely infertile post menopausal women who have successful become pregnant and given birth to healthy babies. There have been reports of some of these women being upwards of 60 and even 70+ years of age.

If a woman who has been post menopausal and has not ovulated for years can become fertile again, then I believe that a lot can be done for much younger women who have been given no hope.

The Link between Hypothyroidism and Infertility

As I mentioned above, infertility is largely a hormonal issue. But most people fail to realize that there are many factors that they have complete control over that affect their hormones for both the good and the bad.

When it comes to hypothyroidism and infertility, the two primary hormones to consider are estrogen and progesterone.

Most people understand that they need adequate progesterone, the pro-gestational hormone, in order to conceive and maintain a healthy pregnancy. Progesterone increases drastically upon conception and continues to rise throughout pregnancy. And this is because of the protective effect that progesterone has on both the mother and fetus.

But few people realize the implication of estrogen on both hypothyroidism and infertility. Estrogen is actually a hormone that does not support fertility even though the medical community argued that it did for many years.

Just look at how birth control pills work.

hypothyroidism and infertilityBirth control pills contain small doses of estrogen that increase your body’s estrogen levels up through the time of ovulation. And the increase in estrogen causes the cells of your uterus to consume more oxygen. And when your uterus consumes more oxygen, it literally steals the oxygen that is required to support the implanted egg, or embryo. Without enough oxygen, the egg cannot continue to develop.

And hypothyroidism and infertility go hand in hand because one of the main effects of hypothyroidism is the increase of estrogen within your body.

The two effectively feed off of each other. One of the many negative effects of estrogen is that it suppresses the release of thyroid hormones from your thyroid gland which in itself can cause hypothyroidism. And when you become hypothyroid, your liver becomes unable to properly inactivate and detoxify estrogen, so estrogen continues to build up in your system. And this increase in estrogen feeds back to further suppresses your thyroid.

This feedback mechanism quickly spirals out of control and hypothyroidism and infertility will persist until your hormones can be properly balanced again.

Common Causes of Hypothyroidism and Infertility

Excess Estrogen (Estrogen Dominance)

I’ve already discussed the connection between hypothyroidism and infertility above so I don’t think it needs repeating. However, it’s important to understand that any mechanism that leads to hypothyroidism will have the same effect of raising estrogen levels, regardless of whether or not estrogen played a factor in causing your hypothyroidism to begin with.

Estrogen can also come from outside sources.

One which I have already mentioned above is birth control pills. Oftentimes, it can take months after getting off of birth control pills before you can successfully conceive. And this depends entirely on how long it takes your body to inactivate and detoxify all of the estrogen that has built up.

For many women with liver dysfunction, they may not be able to conceive even after getting off of birth control until their liver issues are resolved.

hypothyroidism and infertilityAnother common and significant source of estrogen is from estrogenic chemicals such as xenoestrogens which are prevalent in plastics, pesticides, and many other industrial chemicals.

And lastly, there are even certain foods that are estrogenic by nature. Soy, which is often touted as a “health food” is very estrogenic and oftentimes wrongly recommended to women to help improve fertility when it is actually having the opposite effect.

Progesterone Deficiency

On the other side of the coin, you can become deficient in progesterone which has the same effect as estrogen of promoting and being promoted by hypothyroidism and infertility.

Progesterone is naturally synthesized from the hormone pregnenolone which requires vitamin A, cholesterol, and thyroid hormone to make. So if you are hypothyroid and lack thyroid hormone then your body might not be able to produce enough progesterone to support the fetus.

Another common factor in progesterone deficiency is stress. When your body is under chronic stress then it begins to slow down the production of progesterone in favor of producing more stress hormones.

So, stress can lead to progesterone deficiency which can also play a big part in both hypothyroidism and infertility.

Polyunsaturated Fats

hypothyroidism and infertilityThis is a major cause of hypothyroidism and infertility that nobody ever hears or talks about. And it has a lot to do with the fact that this is a very controversial topic. But in the end, the research speaks for itself.

Polyunsaturated fats in your diet actually cause your body to produce more estrogen. So a diet that is high in polyunsaturated fats can actually cause both hypothyroidism and infertility to develop based on the feedback mechanism between estrogen and thyroid that I mentioned above.

But there’s also another feedback mechanism at play here because when estrogen increases, it causes your body to release more polyunsaturated fats into your bloodstream which perpetuates the problem.

Vitamin E Deficiency

Vitamin E has many beneficial properties that can greatly improve both hypothyroidism and infertility.

For starters, vitamin E helps to offset the effects of estrogen in your body. It also protects your body against the unwanted effects of polyunsaturated fats. It boosts your thyroid function. And it also helps to increase oxygen to the fetus.

Studies have shown that vitamin E increases fertility in both males and female and helps prevent miscarriages.

So it should go without saying that vitamin E is a very powerful nutrient that can offset many of the issues that contribute to hypothyroidism and infertility. By incorporating a good hypothyroidism diet and hypothyroidism treatment protocol, you can effectively improve your thyroid function and drastically improve not only your fertility but also the health of your baby once you conceive.

Thyroid Treatment

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When it comes to hypothyroidism, there are a lot of thyroid treatment options to consider. But most of the available options do hypothyroidism sufferers an injustice by relying entirely on taking a pill to solve their thyroid problems. But the way that your thyroid works is far more complex than that. So this pill popping approach is really an inadequate attempt to solve a much bigger and deeper problem.

We’ve become far too accustomed to popping pills to solve all of our health problems when there is always an underlying cause that really needs to be addressed. And hopefully it makes perfect sense that you didn’t become hypothyroid or suffer from any other health issue because you somehow became deficient in pills. It just doesn’t work that way.

There are many thyroid treatment options available today but they all have their flaws. And one major flaw that I see is that all of them are one-size-fits-all approaches to a very complex problem. If you really want to correct the underlying problem(s) then you have to take an in depth look at what is truly going on with your body.

Individualized Thyroid Treatment vs. One Size Fits All Approach

For decades now, the conventional medical community has been promoting T4 only thyroid medications as the best thyroid treatment option, but with sickening results. Not only has T4 alone been ineffective but it has actually been responsible for making many people even more hypothyroid and worsening their hypothyroidism symptoms.

And it has taken more than 60 years but conventional medicine is now starting to realize that most people who suffer from hypothyroidism do in fact benefit more from a combination of T4 and T3 hormones. But most doctors are still practicing the same old ineffective methods because old habits die hard.

Many people have found that they do far better on thyroid extracts such as Armour Thyroid which have been used for more than 100 years. Armour is a combination of both T4 and T3 in ratios that more closely resemble how thyroid hormone is produced and secreted by your thyroid gland.

One word of caution regarding Armour Thyroid is that although it had been the natural thyroid medication of choice for decades, it has more recently been sold and reformulated which has raised many questions to its effectiveness as a thyroid treatment today.

But the biggest problem is that both of these are one-size-fits-all approaches to dealing with hypothyroidism. It’s essentially saying that your body has a problem producing and/or delivering thyroid hormone to your cells so we’re just going to give you more hormones in a pill instead of trying to figure out why your body can’t get the job done itself.

A far more effective thyroid treatment approach is to look at each patient individually and determine why is it that they can’t manage their own thyroid function to begin with.

This would involve looking at everything that influences your thyroid including…

  • Diet
  • Gut Function
  • Liver Function
  • Hormones
  • Stress

You would be amazed at the effects that a good hypothyroidism diet can have on improving thyroid function. And more often than not, it’s a poor diet that is a major contributor to your hypothyroidism to begin with.

By looking at and identifying the problems in all of these areas, you can actually tailor an individualized hypothyroidism treatment program specifically to a person that will have a far more drastic effect on not only their thyroid but also their health.

Below are some of the more common but largely unknown hormonal factors that play a major role in suppressing your thyroid and affecting most thyroid treatment options.

Underlying Hormonal Factors that Affect Thyroid Treatment

Estrogen Dominance

Far more women than men suffer from hypothyroidism and it’s primarily because women naturally have higher levels of estrogen hormones in their body. But the truth is that almost anyone who is hypothyroid is going to have an imbalance of estrogen. And this is because estrogen and hypothyroidism go hand in hand.

Estrogen in general is well known to suppress your thyroid gland from secreting thyroid hormones. And when your liver doesn’t get the thyroid hormone that it needs, it can’t properly detoxify estrogen. So this causes estrogen to build up in your body which further suppresses your thyroid gland.

This continuous process puts you in a hypothyroidism hole which can be very difficult to get out of which is why addressing excessive estrogen needs to be a very important step in any comprehensive thyroid treatment plan.

Blood Sugar Imbalances

Your liver needs sugar for a number of very important processes. And when it comes to your thyroid, your liver requires sugar in order to convert inactive thyroid hormone T4 into the active T3 hormone.

And when you become hypoglycemic which is common with hypothyroidism then your liver can’t store the sugar it needs to do this. But I only know of a few select practitioners who even touch on the importance of certain sugars with thyroid treatment.

In the end, your body increases its own stress hormones in order to break down your muscle tissue to convert it into sugar for your body to use.

Stress Hormones

Blood sugar problems are only one mechanism for elevating stress hormones and really need to be accounted for with any truly effective thyroid treatment. But any form of stress whether it be, dietary, mental, emotional, physical, etc will elevate your stress hormones.

And when your body is under stress, it tries to conserve energy by suppressing your thyroid and lowering your metabolism.

Your stress hormones play the role of blocking your liver from converting T4 into T3 as well as blocking your cells use of T3. When the stress is chronic, this can cause T4 to build up in your body which also further suppresses your thyroid gland and worsens your symptoms of hypothyroidism.

Very few, if any, doctors or practitioners really focus on these different sources of stress in their patients’ lives and how these sources of stress are often some of the main hypothyroidism causes.

But also keep in mind that these are just a few of the common hormonal influences that affect your thyroid. There are many others that all have a cumulative effect of suppressing your thyroid and making many thyroid treatment options far less effective. And oftentimes this can hold you back from making real progress and getting real results with your hypothyroid symptoms.

Hypothyroidism Causes

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There’s a lot of confusion and misunderstanding floating around regarding the cause of hypothyroidism. Most people are led to believe that the underlying cause of hypothyroidism is some sort of defect to the thyroid gland itself. But the truth is that there are multiple hypothyroidism causes that all need to be addressed as part of any successful hypothyroidism treatment protocol.

Is Your Thyroid Gland Really the Problem?

It’s true that most doctors are trained to believe that 95% of hypothyroidism is a matter of a sluggish thyroid gland that is incapable of producing enough thyroid hormone to support your body’s needs. And you can’t necessarily blame them because on a very superficial level, it makes sense.

But if that were the case, then 95% of hypothyroidism patients who were put on supplemental Thyroxine (T4 thyroid hormone) would respond favorably and their hypothyroidism symptoms would simply disappear. And doctors prescribe T4 because that’s the primary hormone that your thyroid gland secretes.

But the results of prescribing T4 have been far less than impressive. In fact, they have been outright horrid.

The majority of patients who are put on T4 medication get no relief. Many even get worse. And most doctors fail to come to terms with the fact that this form of treatment is more of a problem than a solution. So, they continue to ignore the various other hypothyroidism causes and reassure their patients that the medication is working but that there are some other “unrelated” problems that they now need to investigate.

The Truth About Hypothyroidism Causes

The truth is that there’s an entire long process that occurs between the time that your thyroid gland produces its hormones and the time that those hormones get delivered to your cells for use. And if any part of this process is broken then the end result is… hypothyroidism.

So, it becomes much easier to see that there are a number of hypothyroidism causes that you have to account for if you really want to correct the problem.

But it gets even deeper than that.

Unfortunately, when any one single part of this process is broken, all the other parts suffer as well, much like a domino effect. So it’s not as easy as fixing the one little broken link in the chain. Once this process is thrown off, you have to work to restore functionality to the entire process to get it working properly again.

And that’s why it becomes so important to address all of the hypothyroidism causes at the same time.

And while TSH levels are high in the majority of hypothyroidism cases (but not all) this is not necessarily an indication of a problem with your thyroid gland. If any part of the process becomes broken then your thyroid gland is going to naturally down regulate and stop producing so many hormones. And it’s important to use the right thyroid function test before basing a diagnosis off of TSH alone.

But it’s easy to point the finger at your thyroid as the problem and that’s a big mistake that most people and doctors make.

Below I’ve listed the 3 main parts of this process to give you a much better idea of what can go wrong and the various hypothyroidism causes involved with each individual part.

Hypothyroidism Causes Related to Thyroid Hormone Secretion

When it comes to your thyroid gland, there are a few factors that affect its ability to secrete the thyroid hormones that it produces (aside from other broken parts of this process).

Iodine Deficiency

One such issue is an iodine deficiency. But in industrialized countries now days, this is actually one of the very rare hypothyroidism causes. And supplementing with iodine should be approached with extreme caution because you can easily experience iodine toxicity based on many of the popular recommended dosages out there. And this can actually have a number of negative health effects and make you even more hypothyroid in the end.

So it’s important to always get appropriate testing to determine your true iodine levels instead of using a shotgun approach of iodine supplementation.

Excessive Estrogen

One of the very common hypothyroidism causes today that affects your thyroid’s ability to secrete your thyroid hormones is excessive estrogen levels. And this goes for both men and women although it’s more of a problem with women since they naturally have higher estrogen levels.

When estrogen is in excess within the body, it deactivates the proteolytic enzymes that are responsible for signaling your thyroid to release its hormones. So the thyroid hormones tend to build up within the gland and many times leads to goiters and Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis.

Progesterone Deficiency

The hormone that is responsible for opposing and balancing estrogen is progesterone. And one of the many beneficial roles of progesterone is to activate the same proteolytic enzymes that estrogen deactivates.

And a deficiency in progesterone oftentimes goes hand in hand with excessive estrogen.

Hypothyroidism Causes Related to Thyroid Hormone Conversion

Your thyroid gland produces primarily the inactive T4 hormone that must be first converted by your liver into the active T3 hormone in order to be used by your cells. And because this process is responsible for producing about 2/3 of your active thyroid hormone then it can be a major player among the various hypothyroidism causes.

Protein Deficiency

Hopefully you are well aware of the fact that protein plays an important role in your diet. And when you don’t get enough protein in your diet then your body begins to break down your own muscle tissue in order to get the protein that it needs. But this comes with a price.

The process involved in breaking down your muscle tissue requires the use of your body’s stress hormones. And when these stress hormones rise, they also block the conversion of T4 into T3 making this one of the hypothyroidism causes.

Low Carb Diets

There’s a lot of controversy out there regarding the healthiest diet. Some claim that low-fat is the only healthy diet. And others argue that carbs are the problem. But in reality, both are wrong.

But low carb diets can really cause some problems with your thyroid. And this is because your liver requires carbs in your diet in order to convert T4 to T3. So it’s safe to say that carbs are not necessarily the problem. It has more to do with eating the wrong carbs vs. the right carbs.

And this is where a good science based hypothyroidism diet comes into play. But you have to be careful because not every hypothyroidism diet is created equal. And some are flat out bad.

Lack of Salt

Let’s move back to the topic of stress for a minute.

One problem that goes hand in hand with hypothyroidism is the inability to retain sodium within your cells. When you become hypothyroid, your cells easily take up water and sodium is readily eliminated.

But sodium plays a number of very important roles in your body, one of which is to help keep stress hormones levels low. So, your stress hormones are naturally going to be high with hypothyroidism and if you’re not getting enough salt in your diet to then you won’t be able to keep those stress hormones under control.

And as I already mentioned above, stress hormones are another one of the hypothyroidism causes.

Over-Exercising

Keeping along the same topic of stress, many people over-exercise which only places more stress on your body. In fact, it has been shown that over-exercising with hypothyroidism can actually stop your body’s production of the active thyroid hormone, T3, immediately.

So if you think more exercise or working out harder is going to do the trick then think again.

Hypothyroidism Causes Related to Thyroid Hormone Utilization

There are a few hypothyroidism causes that affect your body’s ability to properly utilize thyroid hormone. But few have the far reaching effects of these.

Polyunsaturated Fats

Poly Unsaturated Fats are a major contributing factor with hypothyroidism. They can easily be put into the category that affects thyroid hormone secretion because they do play an active role in suppressing the thyroid gland from secreting its hormones. But these fats also have more far reaching effects.

Polyunsaturated fats also work by blocking the transportation of your thyroid hormone in your bloodstream. So, this means that even less of the needed hormone is actually making it to your cells.

And to make matters worse, once your cells do get the little bit of thyroid hormone, these fats make your thyroid hormone less effective within your cells. So it requires even more thyroid hormone to keep your metabolism and cells healthy.

And with the prevalence of polyunsaturated fats in everyone’s diet today, it’s very easy to see that this is another one of the major hypothyroidism causes of today.

Miscellaneous Hypothyroidism Causes

Of course, there are so many other hypothyroidism causes that it’s impossible to list them all. But there are a couple of others that I think are worth mentioning because they do shed some light as to why hypothyroidism is so common.

Natural Aging

As you age, there’s a natural shift that occurs in your hormone levels, thyroid hormone included. And as your body naturally decreases its hormone secretion, then it becomes more and more important to get these necessary hormones from other sources, such as this.

Diet

Our diets have changed drastically over the past century and unfortunately, it’s been entirely for the worse. And this has become another one of the bigger hypothyroidism causes of today.

We use to utilize the entire animal that we ate including the various organs, bone, etc. And many of these parts that we now discard without thinking use to be very rich in thyroid hormones. So we use to get a good amount of thyroid hormone directly from our diet. And that meant that our thyroid gland didn’t have to produce quite so much on it’s own.

Hopefully this gives you some insight into how complex this issue really is and that it’s not as simple as saying that your thyroid itself is the problem. Instead, you have to consider the entire process and all of the hypothyroidism causes that can be involved along the way if you ever want to truly be successful at healing hypothyroidism.