Hypothyroidism Revolution

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Hypothyroidism and Infertility

August 16, 2012/0 Comments/in Symptoms /by Tom Brimeyer

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.

Birth 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.

Another 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

This 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.

Diet for Hypothyroidism

August 12, 2012/5 Comments/in Diet /by Tom Brimeyer

Finding the “right” diet for hypothyroidism can be easier said than done. There are tons of diets that all claim to improve your thyroid health, however, they lack the science to back up their claims. And this can be dangerous, especially when many of these diets recommend foods that have been shown to negatively affect your thyroid.

Below I have laid out some general but useful tips that you need to consider when choosing the right diet for hypothyroidism. All of these tips are based on research that accounts for the nutrients required for your body to not only produce thyroid hormone but to also to convert it and deliver it successfully to your cells where it is used.

An Anti-Inflammatory Diet for Hypothyroidism

The best diet for hypothyroidism should be very anti-inflammatory by nature. And this is because inflammation from your diet or any other source, causes stress to your body and activates your body’s natural stress response.

The stress hormones involved with this stress response work against your thyroid to slow you metabolism as means of telling your body to conserve energy so that it can either overcome or outlast the source of the stress.

But when the stress becomes a continuous problem such as eating an inflammatory diet that places your body under daily stress then those stress hormones continuously slow your thyroid which causes many problems.

Do Grains Have a Place in a Diet for Hypothyroidism?

There are many sources of inflammation within your diet but one of the biggest and most common is from gluten containing grains such as wheat. And yes, all grains contain some form of gluten and in some amount. Wheat is just the one that gets the most attention.

Not only that but starchy grains contain sugar chains made up entirely of glucose. And glucose alone will have a much great impact on your blood sugar than many other forms of sugar. So it’s quite common for people who eat a heavy grain based diet to have blood sugar imbalances and oftentimes develop insulin sensitivity, or diabetes.

Anti-Inflammatory Proteins

Yes, protein is good for you and it needs to be a big part of any diet for hypothyroidism. But also keep in mind that not all protein is created equal.

More than a decade ago, our diet used to be quite different. We would make use of the entire animal that we ate instead of merely using a few different cuts of meat. And that included using the bones and organs as well.

Fast forward to today and all we eat are a few cuts of muscle meat which tend to be far less nutritious than other parts of the animal. But more importantly, muscle meats are higher in amino acids like tryptophan, cysteine, methionine, and histadine which tend to promote inflammation.

This is why I always recommend incorporating bone broths and gelatins into your diet for hypothyroidism in order to get plenty of the anti-inflammatory amino acids such as glycine.

Aside from that, the anti-inflammatory proteins have a host of other benefits. They help regulate fat metabolism. They improve your clotting factors. They have even been used for more than 100 years to treat diseases such as diabetes and arthritis.

Saturated Fats

Another very important component to any diet for hypothyroidism is saturated fats. The benefits of having saturated fats in your diet are enormous. But you have to break through the invalidated misinformation out there that has led so many people to wrongfully believe that saturated fats are bad.

For starters, saturated fats are easily metabolized. They inhibit the release of histamine which is responsible for much the inflammation within your body. They also counteract the effects of the inflammatory proteins I mentioned above.

But possibly most important to your thyroid, they promote availability of thyroid hormone receptors, allowing your cells to use T3 more efficiently.

Coconut oil is one of the best saturated fats that you can eat. It’s made up almost entirely of medium chain fatty acids such as Lauric acid, which are directly converted into usable energy, instead of being stored away as fat like some would like you to believe.

Butter is another great choice of fat in your diet. Butter contains plenty of nutrients such as vitamin A and vitamin D which are necessary for healthy hormone production.

A Hormone Supportive Diet for Hypothyroidism

Another very important aspect of the best diet for hypothyroidism is that it must support healthy hormone function. And I can’t emphasize this enough.

There are many different hormones within your body that all play different roles. But keep in mind that many of these hormones all interact with each other and many work to balance each other out. And when one hormone becomes out of balance then it can create a cascade of effects that effectively cause many other hormones to become imbalanced.

Take your thyroid hormone as a very simple example. Your body requires thyroid hormone along with vitamin A to convert cholesterol into the cascade of protective hormones including pregnenolone, progesterone, and DHEA.

But when you become hypothyroid and lack thyroid hormone then your body can’t produce enough of these protective hormones which protect your body from a number of different health issues, including cancer.

And I’ll also note that when you lack the thyroid hormone to convert cholesterol, then it should make perfect sense why your cholesterol becomes elevated. And using cholesterol lowering medication to drive your cholesterol lower in the absence of thyroid hormone is not doing you any good. But by following a good diet for hypothyroidism you can effectively increase your thyroid hormone production and naturally lower your cholesterol.

Selenium

Selenium is one of the most important nutrients to your thyroid and the best diet for hypothyroidism will make sure that you eat plenty of foods that are high in selenium.

This nutrient is so important because it’s used readily by your liver to convert your non-active form of thyroid hormone to the active form that can be used by your cells. And if you don’t have enough selenium then you quickly become hypothyroid.

The most notable foods that are rich in selenium as well as other thyroid supportive nutrients is seafood such as shrimp, muscles, crab, etc.

Vitamin A

As I mentioned above, vitamin A plays a very important role in your hormone production. And it also plays an important role with your thyroid function.

Too little vitamin A will suppress your thyroid, making you hypothyroid. But too much will also do the same when it’s not properly balanced with thyroid hormone.

So it’s important to make sure that your diet for hypothyroidism allows you enough vitamin A to not only promote healthy thyroid function but to also ensure that your body is capable of producing the necessary protective hormones to keep your thyroid healthy.

Vitamin E

Vitamin E plays a little bit of a different role when it comes to supporting your thyroid. There are many foods that should be excluded from your hypothyroidism diet because they tend to directly affect your thyroid function.

One example of a food that will negatively affect your thyroid and should not be allowed as part of your diet for hypothyroidism is polyunsaturated fats. These fats work to suppress your thyroid and block the use of thyroid hormone by your cells. And vitamin E is one nutrient that can really help offset the anti-thyroid effects of polyunsaturated fats.

But it also does much more than that. It also helps balance the negative effects of estrogen which also works against your thyroid. It is anti-inflammatory, prevents the degeneration of organ and muscle tissue, and is a proven factor for preventing heart disease and miscarriages.

A good hypothyroid diet doesn’t have to be overly complicated. It just has to naturally support your body’s needs so that it can produce and utilize its thyroid hormone effectively and efficiently. And it should go without saying but it’s a necessary component of any good treatment for hypothyroidism.

The healthy functioning of your thyroid is essential for life. The healthier your thyroid, the longer and healthier life you will live. So regardless of whether or not you are experiencing any major symptoms of hypothyroidism, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of eating the right diet for hypothyroidism to not only reverse the various health problems you might have but to also ensure that you live a happy and healthy life.