Nutrifol for Hair Loss in Hypothyroidism

Nutrifol for hair loss from hypothyroidism?

The short answer is no.

Here’s the long reason why.

If you are not familiar with Nutrifol, I’ll fill you in. I don’t watch a lot of regular tv but do watch some streaming services and I often see commercials for Nutrifol for hair growth.

I am always skeptical of things like this mostly because I have been sold supplements by practitoners I saw over the years that did absolutely nothing for me.

They state they use medical grade natural ingredients to target the root causes of thinning hair such as stress, lifestyle, and nutrition. Taking their product is suppose to give you quicker hair growth, and fuller, stronger, thicker hair.

I’ll have a screen shot of the ingredients with the transcript on my website. You can search for episode 116 or Nutrifol to find it.

Some of the ingredients include:

Biotin.

This does build healthy hair. Chicken & beef liver and egg yolks are best sources of this important nutrient. You only need 100mg/day per 100g of protein that you consume and most of us don’t get 100g of protein per day. I try really hard to get 100mg of protein per day and most days I only get in about 50g. You have to be really intentional with EVERYTHING you eat to get this much in. Nutrifol has 3000mcg or 300mg. In high amounts this isn’t toxic but can interfere with absorption of B5 and lipoic acid. High doses can also cause your bloodwork to present false positive results.

Nutrifol label

Read labels on everything so you know what you are putting in your body.

Vitamin C.

This helps manage stress by providing this nutrient to the adrenals. For hair, it contributes to our hair pigment and prevents gray hair or at least makes our hair more resistant to turning gray.

Fresh fruits and veggies are great sources. 100-200mg in supplement form may be needed if you don’t eat a lot of fresh fruits and veggies.

Essential Fatty Acids.

This supplement contains fish but it doesn’t really list how much. Deficiency in omega 6 fatty acids can result in hair loss. The best way to get your omega 6’s is to eat 2 egg yolks or 100g of liver each day. Fish oil is not what you need for the purpose of keeping your hair thicker and fuller.

Iodine.

RDA for iodine is 150mcg/day. Nutrifol has 225mcg. If you have Hashimoto’s or Grave’s disease, taking iodine even at this amount can increase your antibodies and an autoimmune attack on your thyroid.

Iron.

Not in this supplement but deficiencies and excesses can cause hair loss.

Selenium.

The ultimate thyroid supplement touted by everyone on the internet as something you need if you have thyroid problems. Selenium helps us manage stress but too much can cause your hair to fall out and it may raise your risk of diabetes and cancer. Measure blood levels before taking selenium in supplement form. Optimal levels in plasma are between 90-140 ng/mL for most people. Amounts in food vary depending on the content of the soil where the plants were growing and where the animals were eating.

Zinc.

Deficiency early in life can lead to impaired hair growth. Supplements help with decreasing infection, inflammation, and oxidative stress.  Oysters, and red meat are the best sources.

Vitamin E.

This should always be given in a combo of all forms or tocotrienols, not just a single form like in Nutrifol which contains only alpha-tocopherol but in a small dose.

Horsetail.

This has silica in it and has been shown to improve hair luster and may prevent the rate at which your hair falls out. It is the silica that does this and horsetail is said to have high concentrations. Fiji water also has a fair amount of silica in it.

Japanese Knotweed.

This is a good source of resveratrol and is an invasive species plant. It is used in traditional Chinese medicine to aid in GI health and circulatory health. There is zero info that I could find on hair growth or preventing hair loss for this particular plant. It is the resveratrol I believe that is the key here as it is an antioxidant. Antioxidants help protect cells from damage. Blueberries are also antioxidants!

Solubilized Keratin.

This provides amino acids to replace the keratin lost as we age. It may reduce fine lines and depth of wrinkles- I’m all for that! 500mg along with zinc, B3, Copper, B5, B6, and biotin in a 2010 study improved the quality of the human hair shaft creating smoother, shinier hair and reduced the number of hairs lost during washing. This info on keratin, came from a supplement company- just so you know. I’m a little leary of the info when it comes from supplement companies because their whole purpose is to sell you said supplement.

Nutrifol has a blend of 530mg in 4 capsules of amino acids, keratin, horsetail, and knotweed.

Now I want to talk to you about supplements. The supplement industry is a $39 billion industry with over 166 million Americans using them each year. There are around 85,000 supplement products on the market with 1000 new products coming to market each year.

23,000 ER visits are attributed to supplement use each year but side note there are over 730,000 yearly ER visits associated with adverse events to the medical use of prescription drugs. So there is a .015% chance that a supplement will send you to the ER. I still recommend not guessing at what you need to be taking and work with someone who will honestly tell you what you might need.

I’ll give you just a quick history of the regulation of supplements.

The Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914 required narcotics to only be sold through a prescription. In 1927 the Bureau of Chemistry split into the Food Drug and Insecticide Administration and the Bureau of Chemistry and Soil.

In 1930 The Food Drug and Insecticide Administration became the FDA.

In 1938 the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act said that the FDA should oversee cosmetics and therapeutic device and Homeopathic remedies became regulated under this act.

The definition of a drug became anything intended to effect the structure and function of the body and anything intended to diagnose or treat.

In 1958 the Food Additives Amendment created a list of things that are Generally Regarded As Safe (GRAS).

In 1966 the Fair Package and Labeling Act required warning labels of supplements and banned the ability to make health claims with regard to dietary deficiency. Any supplement with more than 150% RDA were to be considered drugs.

The 1976 Proxmire Bill prohibited the FDA from regulating vitamins and minerals as prescription drugs. The 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act provided a regulatory framework for the supplement industry authorizing the FDA to come up with Good Manufacturing Practices and classified supplements and dietary ingredients as foods, not drugs.

The FDA monitors supplement safety, regulates labeling and claims on products and there is no authoritative list of supplement ingredients before October 15, 1994. The manufacturers of supplements are responsible for determining if an ingredient in their product is a new ingredient.

There was an investigation by the NY Attorney General in 2015 looking at several different supplements sold at 4 major retailers. The majority of these supplements did not even contain the herb listed on the ingredients label. They had powdered rice, asparagus and even houseplants in them but not the thing they were supposed to have.

In addition, a 2010 report found that a liquid selenium supplement had over 40,000 micrograms per dose instead of the 200mcg the label claimed.

Good Manufacturing Practices do not apply to raw materials suppliers. You may have heard me say that the higher quality supplement companies have 3rd party testers making sure the raw materials brought to their docks are free of heavy metals and other contaminants. If they are not, they are sent away for some other company to buy. There is no guideline for what contamination levels are acceptable. Good manufacturing Practices don’t address absorption, dissolution, or bioavailability. The companies that are for use by practitoners only do third party testing and voluntary quality control. Some of these certifications are USP, NSF, and Consumer Labs.

I am not saying that Nutrifol is shady at all. I want to be clear. I just think that at $79 per month for a 30 day supply is a bit much. Pure Encapsulations Hair/Skin/Nails Ultra is $43.99 for a 30 day supply which is about half the price. I’m sure Nutrifol is so expensive because they have a fabulous website and they do a lot of advertising.

You can sign up for an account at my dispensary https://us.fullscript.com/welcome/hfh and get 10% off all your supplements. But please, don’t buy a bunch of supplements hoping they will fix your problem. Supplements for the most part are either bandaids to your root cause or are needed for a time period to replenish your deficiencies and help your body heal.

If you would like to do a supplement review I’m happy to help you with that. An hour and half consult would be needed to do that. You can reach out by emailing me and I’ll send you a link to make an appointment for that. The cost is $295.

You can also schedule a discovery call at helpforhashimotos.com click on the get help and then book appointment. You will be on your way to feeling better, having more energy and getting off the sidelines of your life in no time!

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Thanks for tuning in. I so appreciate you guys. Please leave a rating and or review at apple podcasts so more people can find the show and get help.

You can also download my new ebook, The Definitive Guide to Hashimoto’s when you sign up for my email list.

Link to FDA Warning Letters Search https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-criminal-investigations/compliance-actions-and-activities/warning-letters

Does Hashimoto’s Cause Leaky Gut?

I was looking at my download statistics of my episodes and you know what the most popular episode is so far? The celery juice episode. I think it is titled Will Celery Juice Help My Thyroid. This tells me that you guys are looking for a quick fix. I get it. I would love a magic pill to just not have to take meds for the rest of my life and to not have to worry about overexercising to not put me in a state of fatigue for days. There is nothing magic about fixing this disease because it affects every system in your body. If you want to feel great, and who doesn’t, you will have to constantly be mindful of your diet and lifestyle choices. That part is simple- the mindful part because either you are mindful about what you put in your mouth and what time you go to bed or you are not. Simple. Do or do not, there is no try as Yoda says. It turns out you will always have to be mindful of leaky gut or intestinal permeability among other things.

Hashimoto’s can wreck your gut.

Remember that Hashimoto’s is an immune system problem causing hypothyroidism so your thyroid is NOT the problem. The problem is autoimmune flare ups that need to be managed. The problem is also that this disease can cause inflammation all through the body systems. Your immune system is not being regulated when hashimoto’s is active (you have antibodies) which means you can lose your gut barrier aka have leaky gut. It also affects the make up of your microbiome or the balance between the good and bad bacteria in your gut.

When there is inflammation due to a flare or high antibodies, and by the way, high antibodies can be 50 or 500 or 5000. It’s different for everyone and when there is inflammation, thyroid hormone won’t be converting. T4 won’t be converting to T3 so your cells can use the T3 or your thyroid receptor sites might not be responding well to T3.

I learned about a study from Dr. Kharrazian that showed that your thyroid hormones, T4 and T3, have a role in keeping your immune system working and bringing down inflammation.

Think about what that means for you if your meds are not optimized. Maybe your TSH is sitting at a 4 or 5 and your doctor doesn’t think you need hormone replacement for that or maybe you feel fine at a TSH of 5 and you don’t want to take medication. Well it turns out that this medication, if your body is in need of thyroid hormone (yet you feel fine without it) will help to regulate thyroid gland tissue destruction. All this to say that taking thyroid hormone replacement will calm down inflammation in your body caused by the autoimmunity.

This is why when you first go on meds you feel really good until you don’t! The thyroid hormone  replacement you are taking started the process of calming the immune attack and calming the inflammation but when you keep doing what you are doing, it isn’t enough to fix the whole problem.

This attack on your thyroid has created a lot of inflammation all over the body and created tons of free radicals and oxidative stress. Oxidative stress just means that your body’s natural abilities to deal with free radicals is overwhelmed so those free radicals are going around in the body and wreaking havoc. Oxidative stress causes damage in the body at the cellular level and remember that we need healthy cells to make a healthy body.

Thyroid hormone replacement helps to protect against those free radicals and oxidative stress causing damage to your cells. Of course anti-oxidant supplements or foods can help you with this but the best first line of defense in this case is to be sure your body has enough thyroid hormone to start with otherwise the anti-oxidant supplements and foods are a bandaid though eating anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant foods is never a bad idea.

One other thing that gets damaged when you have inflammation from poor thyroid hormone optimization is your gut. The gut lining is targeted by Hashimoto’s flares causing leaky gut and then leading to a host of problems including food sensitivities. So thyroid hormones can help in healing leaky gut. You can work on healing your gut all you want but if you need thyroid hormones and your body isn’t producing them or you are not taking them then it just causes this vicious cycle of damage and inflammation leading you to feel horrible.

Maybe you have been diagnosed and you are on thyroid hormone replacement but you have a doctor that doesn’t see the need to test your thyroid hormone levels yearly and you just keep taking the same dose for 3 or 4 years. It happens. So you might be in this subclinical hypothyroid place. Subclinical meaning your labs now look normal but there is autoimmune destruction happening that eventually causes need for more thyroid hormone.

Deficiency in thyroid hormones promotes more autoimmune destruction which produces less thyroid hormone and creates a terrible cycle of destruction in the body and one of the things destroyed or attacked is your gut lining. So now you have leaky gut which in and of itself can be a trigger for autoimmunity.

Here’s the thing though- we can’t just work on healing the gut. There is a whole host of things that need to be worked on and the gut and thyroid hormone replacement are just two of them. Healing the gut while there is a ton of inflammation happening just isn’t going to solve the problem. We have to work to get your inflammation down first with simple things like exercise, and lots of plant foods. These will increase your antioxidants naturally.

  I’ll post a list of antioxidant rich foods from the Institute of Functional Medicine along with the transcript to this episode on my website. As far as exercise goes, just start moving. If you are new to moving at all, check out my friend Andrea’s business called Autoimmune Strong. Her website is getautoimmunestrong.com  She starts at a very beginner level so you can get strong from the inside out.

The point is that we have to find your triggers- what is causing your flare ups, what is causing your antibodies to be higher. What is causing your inflammation? What is causing your immune system to be on fire?

The best places to start are diet and lifestyle which is kind of everything actually. We have to ask if there is something you are eating that is causing inflammation. How is your sleep? How are your relationships? How sedentary are you? Do you get outside? Do you have fun? All of these things matter to your health but to anyones health really.

Let’s get this figured out together. I’m taking new clients and can work with anyone from anywhere through my safe and secure health portal. Video chats are a nice time saver- you don’t have to take time from your day to travel to me. I can keep my services affordable because I don’t have an office to pay for.

What if you could stop sitting on the sidelines of your life and live more fully?

What if you could stop fatigue in its tracks and have more energy?

What if you had a plan to fix your Hashimoto’s?

What if you didn’t have to guess (and waste money) which supplements your body needed to help you move towards healing?

What if you had someone to help you who has been there, knows what it feels like and got out of the hole that is mismanaged hypothyroidism?

These are all things my clients get when they work with me.

Hand holding if you need it. An advocate. Someone who truly cares that you get better and knows how to help you.

I can help you feel better. Day by day.

Reach out today- HelpForHashimotos.com

One more thing before I go:

I try to always take a food first approach and I am happy to report that I can now offer you an Anti-inflammatory 3 day food plan to help you maximize your efforts to keep these cell damaging free radicals at bay. This plan is free on my website if you go to helpforhashimotos.com and click on the meal plans tab, then click just about anywhere on that page to be directed to the meal plan. You can sign up for a free trial to get the meal plan. No credit card required to do so. It’s totally free with no strings attached.

As always, thanks for being here. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for sharing this with people you know looking for help with their hypothyroidism or other autoimmune conditions. Please leave me a rating and review on apple podcasts so more people can find the show and get help too. If you have not already, go get my new ebook The Definitive Guide to Hashimoto’s. When you sign up for my newsletter it will be delivered to your inbox.

Until next time! Love to you all.

Why Did I Get Hashimoto's?

Thanks for tuning in. It has been 7 months since I recorded an episode and I am grateful to every one of you who is still here or who has waited for me to finish school. I graduated in December with my masters in nutrition and FM and now I am mentoring with a nutritionist and 2 naturopathic doctors to get the hours I need for my certified nutrition specialist exam and subsequent licensure to become a nutritionist in my state.  Why does all of this matter to you? There are so many practitioners in the health space these days- the market is flooded and every one of these practitioners has the perfect program or protocol for you to feel your very best. I’ve seen many of these practitioners myself from medical doctors to naturopathic doctors to chiropractors to nutrition practitioners spending thousands upon thousands of dollars and being loaded up on supplement after supplement. The failure of any and all of these people to help me feel better lead to my own certification in nutritional therapy. The problem was from the very beginning I knew I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I didn’t like reading research and I didn’t really know how which is what led me to get my masters. I knew I needed more information to be able to help the population of people I wanted to help which is you. Wonderful humans with thyroid problems who are not being served well by their doctors or who just need a little something extra to get them feeling better. 

The doctors I am mentoring with (and I paid a pretty penny to do so) are amazing. They are a husband and wife team and one of them was my professor for two of my courses in my masters program and his teaching literally changed the way I think about health and wellness. He does not teach protocols. He taught me how to critically think about WHY someone’s body is not working well and all of this starts at the cells and your biochemistry. The word biochemistry used to scare me because I never ever thought I was smart enough to learn and know the science of the body. I have taken a deep dive into biochemistry and physiology- further than I needed to go for my degree because if I can really know the inner workings of the cells of the body then I have the tools to help anyone and my passion is helping you because I have been there. I have felt like crap for years- low energy, fatigue to the max, not just cold hands and feet but cold bones. 

The sea of health coaches and people with certificates in nutrition is full and like I said, each one tells you they have the answer to your problem. Generalized protocols for chronic conditions will work for some people but they will never work for everyone. Just like diets don’t work for everyone. You are a biochemical individual and that is why a general protocol isn’t the answer. You have all this conflicting and frustrating information on google but all you want is to live your best life or you would not have tuned in. If only you could get a clear set of instructions to follow so you knew just what to do to feel better. You can but you won’t find it in a book or a program because those things know nothing about who you are and what is exactly going on with you. 

My mentors have created a short questionnaire that is based in the scientific literature called The Cell Blueprint. It tells me what is going on with you and the best part is it doesn’t tell me what you need but it does tell me where I should go looking next. Add to that the ability to really interpret your blood chemistry from a simple complete blood count with differential and I can have a really good start in understanding exactly what is going on with your body and how to start you on the road to feeling better. You likely do need some supplements but they are individualized for you! Someone recently contacted me about wanting a supplement protocol to make her feel better and I need you to know I don’t work that way because you can’t supplement your way out of a bad diet or an unhappy life and an unhappy life can definitely affect your cellular health.

Aside from this, I found a study through Dr. Bryan Walsh that talks about the season you were born and how that may play a role in your getting Hashimoto’s or Graves disease so that is what I’m talking about today. 

This was a really interesting study done in Greece looking at this idea of birth month and autoimmune thyroid disease. It is well known that 21% of the cause of Grave’s is attributed to triggers from the environment such as infections and viruses with less research being able to pinpoint this to Hashimoto’s disease. There is also a confirmed connection in the research between a Rubella infection and hyperthyroidism. In addition, there is a clear connection between viral infections and T1D and MS. The association between T1D and both Grave’s and Hashi’s and possibly MS is also high meaning that having one of these leads to you being more susceptible to having the other which is a great reason to get your thyroid condition well maintained. It is nothing to mess around with - I certainly do not want MS or T1D. 

The thought behind this is that infections occurring in utero may play a role with the fall and winter months when infection rates are generally at their highest.  All Grave’s and Hashi’s patients in this study (around 1200 people) had their month of birth compared to disease development. Grave’s was more prevalent in men who were older at diagnosis and they had high FT4 and low TSH. Hashi’s was more prevalent in women, they were not as old at diagnosis compared to those with Graves, TSH levels were higher than 10, FT4 lower than 7.0 and TPOAb were greater than 50. An ultrasound of the thyroid diagnosed Hashimoto’s autoimmunity. 

Grave’s Disease diagnosis was based on diffuse goiter (which means the whole gland is involved rather than just a nodule), ophthalmopathy (eye balls stick out, or increased levels of thyroid receptor antibodies/TRAbs). In the general population, in both sexes, the highest incidence of births was in summer and more males with Graves were born in winter while women with Graves were more likely to be born in spring and fall. 

In Hashimoto’s, patterns between birth month for the general population and both men and women the birth month patterns were different between men and women as well. Men were born in summer months and winter months and women were more often born in winter months and the birth month correlated with how high the antibodies were. Researchers even checked to see if there was a significant difference in overall viral infections when these subjects were in utero and there appeared to be no change in general viral infection rates from the norm. 

The idea behind this study was to find a similarity or not between viral infection and T1D compared to viral infections and Hashi’s or Grave’s as the two are commonly held together and T1D is more commonly associated with infections in fall and winter when more people are getting sick. This supports the idea that a viral infection could be a trigger for any one of these conditions in those who are genetically susceptible. 

The high antibody connection between birth month and high antibody titers is similar to birth month and high antibodies against B cells in T1D. Being genetically predisposed to autoimmune disease combined with the trigger of infection could be all it takes to progress into a full blown autoimmune disease. 

One thing that allows this progression is unhealthy cells which don’t need curcumin or gogi berries to run well. Let me help you figure out where your core or root cause issues are stemming from by having a look at your Cell Blueprint. This is the best time to do this while I have my mentorship. They charge $500 for a one hour consult so you are getting three minds for the price of $153 which is what I currently charge for a one hour consult. Most people only need 3-4 visits total with the subsequent visits costing $79. I don’t have any packages right now but will be eventually. My sole concentration right now is seeing as many clients as I can while I have mentors so I can be the best at what I do. If you are interested, please reach out at outofthewoodsnutrition.com and fill out my contact form. If you haven’t already, you can sign up for my newsletter as well and get your copy of Five Things Your Doctor Won’t Tell You About Hypothyroidism. I look forward to helping you get back to your old self. 

There will not be an episode next week but I do hope to be a bit more regular with getting episodes out now that I am out of school and done with my interpreting blood chemistry course. Thanks again for tuning in. I appreciate you! 

Will Selenium help my thyroid?

Hello and welcome to episode 102. Thanks for joining me. I have a couple of announcements before we get to today’s content. 

First, on a personal note, someone close to me was scammed by one of those internet gift card scams. Because they used to work for the company that the scammers pretended to be, this person, an older person, believed them. It is a scam where they get you to sign in to your online bank account and they say they are refunding you say $299.00. As you are typing, they add an extra 9 to the account so it looks like you are getting a refund of $2,999.00 and then they say they will get in big trouble with their boss and the only way to remedy this is to buy gift cards and read them off the numbers. This person bought a total of $3500 in gift cards, $1000 of which was able to be frozen but they were out $2500. So please have a conversation with the older adults in your life. I never thought this person would have been able to be scammed like this in a million years and they were. There are a lot of great YouTubers getting back at these scammers if you want to check them out Kitboga is a good one as well as Scambaiter and Jim Browning. 

Okay, the second thing I wanted to talk about is LifeTune - they sell emf-type devices and they sent me a couple for my phone. I muscle tested them and they seem to work for me. If you are interested in checking them out, they seem to have a sale going on all the time at up to 35% off. You can use the discount code GETCLEAR for 10% off at www.airestech.com. 

You can also get 10% off Meizen skincare at myzenskincare.com using the code 10% off. That is the number 10, percent sign, space, off. I love their skincare, especially the edelweiss serum and the vitamin c spray. Dr. Martha also has some nice essential oil blends and awesome body oil that smells like cinnamon. Please support local small businesses if you can. 

Okay, now on to the good stuff. I’m in a program called Practice UP from the good people at Metabolic Fitness Pro. They strive to give practitioners the latest information/science to help them put into clinical practice so they can be the best practitioners out there. That is my goal. To be the last stop for all of you fantastic Hashi’s patients out there. I am still learning and plan to continue to always be learning so I can serve my clients in the best way possible. Anyway, each month we learn about something clinically relevant and last month we learned about Selenium and the role it plays in thyroid health and in type 2 diabetes. I’ve got some great info for you guys. 

What we know: 

Autoimmune thyroid disease accounts for around 85% of people with hypothyroidism and the cause of Hashi’s has many factors involved. Our genetics and environmental triggers play a role but are not well understood. We have the highest selenium concentration per mass unit of tissue in our thyroid gland and has direct effects on the metabolism of thyroid hormone. Many of you have heard or been told to take selenium to help with reducing thyroid antibodies and many studies have shown that it is, in fact, effective at reducing TPO antibodies. There are several studies that show it has no effect as well. Many of the studies going either way here have a poor quality of evidence. That means the way the study was conducted had some problems that may have affected the outcome and results. 

Those studies that showed an improvement in antibodies could have had people in the study that were deficient in selenium in the first place but baseline levels of selenium were not measured. When people were followed for 3,6,12 months and antibodies were measured, they didn’t see much change in antibody levels after 12 months which could suggest there was a deficiency in selenium that was fixed by supplementation and could also be why there was no clinical improvement in those subjects. 

A study published in January of 2021 goes over many of these studies in detail. It is called Insufficient evidence to support the clinical efficacy of selenium supplementation for patients with chronic autoimmune thyroiditis with the lead author being a name I can’t pronounce but will have the reference in the “transcript” on this episode on my website. The bottom line is I have three studies I’ve read today that are suggesting that supplementation with selenium may not be needed. 

As I said, it can improve or lower antibodies but it really doesn’t do anything for the course of the disease. In Graves’ disease, it might lead to faster remission of hyperthyroidism and improve upon the quality of life- so keep that in mind. 

Other nutrients interact with Selenium which will affect you. For instance, Vitamin C is thought to increase the absorption of Se. If you are deficient, Vitamin E will make the selenium deficiency worse and if you are not deficient, having adequate vitamin E levels may help prevent toxicity from too much selenium. Large doses of Omega 3 fatty acids, potentially several grams of fish oil for example, my cause the need for more selenium. Large amounts of zinc and copper can cause a selenium deficiency so if you are deficient in those, you may also need selenium. Vitamin D supplementation can increase selenium. 

What I am getting at is that you may have been told to take selenium because a few studies showed that it reduced antibodies but do you know if you really need it??? 

The average adult’s selenium levels are said to be optimal at around 80-120 mcg/mL and at that level are said to be good. It does act as an antioxidant at this level in the body but anything more than that can mess with insulin signaling and eventually causing insulin resistance. Too much selenium causes insulin resistance, higher HBA1C, and metabolic syndrome. Hashi’s patients are already at risk for developing these things and adding selenium supplements to your regimen could almost guarantee these things in your future. 

There is also an association between serum selenium levels and all-cause mortality and cancer deaths when selenium in your blood is measured at over 150 ng/mL. Below 130 ng/mL is more protective. Another study showed a direct relationship between exposure to selenium and odds of type 2 diabetes with the higher plasma or serum levels of selenium at around 140 ng/mL. 

Another study called Effects of Long Term Selenium Supplementation on the Incidence of Type 2 Diabetes that was almost 8 years long found that long term supplementation with selenium may increase the risk for type 2 diabetes. The group in this study with the most type 2 diabetes while supplementing with 200mcg per day was the group that had the highest Se levels at the beginning of the study which was around 121 ng/mL or higher. That is not a lot- that is within the normal range. 

If you are deficient, you may need to supplement with it for a bit but it is likely once you are absorbing nutrients with some gut healing you will get enough from food. You can go to whofoods.com and type in selenium in the search bar, scroll down and click on selenium and it will tell you all about this mineral and which foods are highest in selenium. Here is a shortlist in order from the highest amount of selenium per serving to lower but all have good amounts: 

• tuna

• Shrimp

• Sardines

• Salmon

• Cod

• Crimini & shiitake mushrooms

• Asparagus

• Mustard seeds

• Turkey

• Chicken

• Lamb

• Scallops

• Beef

• Tofu

• Eggs

• Brown rice

• Sunflower and sesame seeds

• Cows milk

• Cabbage

• Spinach

• Garlic

• Broccoli

The RDA for selenium is around 55 ug/mL day with the tolerable upper limit at 400 ug/mL but remember what I said earlier- at 121 ug/mL in the blood- long-term supplementation can cause type 2 diabetes. 

Use an app like Cronometer to see what you are getting in nutrients, not just selenium but all nutrients. 

Take out all your supplements. If you are really anal or organized, make a spreadsheet of all the nutrients in everything you are getting from supplements so you can see if you are getting not only too much selenium but maybe you are getting too much or not enough of something else. For this very reason, I don’t recommend just Willy Nilly taking a supplement because you read it was good for you! 

Dr. Walsh in Practice Up gave the example of a supplement company which he didn’t mention that has a thyroid protocol. All the supplements in this protocol that would be given to a practitioner from the supplement rep because the bottles all say 1 cap per day because then the FDA doesn’t get involved in their business and then the practitioner passes the protocol on to the client—- The bottle of a thyroid conversion supplement says take one cap per day but the rep says to take 3, three times a day..... see what I’m doing here??

This protocol amounted to almost 1400 mcg/day of selenium and I just told you that 200mcg per day over 7 years caused type 2 diabetes. Granted, you would not be on this type of protocol for 7 years but maybe 3-6 months? Do you need that much selenium over even that time period?? 

This type of thing can happen with any nutrient- so go through all your supplements and really look at what you are getting in. In addition, you can ask your doctor to test selenium levels in your blood but if they won’t do it, you can order your own lab test from a direct to consumer lab company like Ulta Labs or Any Lab Test Now and it should be around 110ug/dL - 120 ug/dL

You may or may not need selenium, it may lower antibodies but it probably isn’t going to fix the problem, and remember there is plenty of selenium in food. 

Where you live matters, some middle eastern countries are lower in selenium status than China which is really high. The US tends to have plenty of selenium in general. Remember to calculate your intake of food and in supplements. Are you deficient in any other nutrients? This is why I try to hammer home that you need to work with someone to figure this stuff out. 

Okay, that is it for today. I hope you guys enjoyed this and that it wasn’t too much science or too technical. I get requests from people about 1x per month to be on the show that is really what feels like trying to promote their own business or programs. I try to only have people on that I feel have something to offer and are not just one big commercial for their business. I don’t want to do that so I hope you like what I’ve done here today. I think it is good stuff. 

Remember you can get 10% off at AiresTech.com using the code GETCLEAR and 10% off at myzenskincare.com using the code 10% off.  You can learn more about Practice Up here.

Until next time.