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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.