This is a video I made awhile back for my Patreon members. I am no longer on Patreon, so am sharing this info for you here now.
Transcript:
Hey friends and followers, Mari McCormick, and thank you for being a patron. Today I’m going to riff on a bunch of the research I’ve been doing into iodine, and I think many of you will find this interesting, especially those of you who have a slow metabolism, slow thyroid function, and migraine is really related to thyroid disorders. I’m going to tie all of these ideas together, but perhaps you remember from my previous video about multiple enzyme deficiency that the thyroid gland regulates the temperature of the body, and the temperature of the body determines the structure of enzymes, all these enzymes that help everything in our body to work from our ability to digest and break down food to our body’s ability to create neurotransmitters, all needed for optimal brain function.
If our body temperature is off, whether either too high or too low, all of our enzyme systems will be off, even if we’re taking the nutrient cofactors that go along with that. From one angle, you could look at the key to healing migraine as being healing the thyroid gland so that the body can modulate body temperature in changing temperature conditions. Of course, the thyroid does more than that.
The thyroid also regulates our breathing, which would have an effect on our oxygen level in our blood and other things like heart rate. We know a lot of people with migraine also tend to have heart palpitations. How do we support the thyroid gland? We know that iodine is needed for the thyroid hormones for T4, T3. There’s of course many other nutrient cofactors needed alongside iodine like selenium, but there are also other minerals that are often overlooked or even vilified such as copper that are needed. Copper is needed to convert T4 to T3. I want to look at some of this information in light of copper toxicity and looking at the role that copper and iodine have to each other, also the synergistic relationship that iodine and estrogen have to each other since we know that people who are hypothyroid are often estrogen dominant and connect some of the dots here.
This is, of course, here on Patreon, I am sharing my cutting edge research. This is all fairly new information to me. This is not necessarily stuff that I have applied in my coaching practice, but I want you all to be the first to know about it. Then perhaps as I study this more and share this information with my clients and see results or not, I will do an update on that or I’ll write a blog post on it.
I already mentioned the role that thyroid plays in our body temperature and the effect this has on enzymes. I really want to talk about really broadening our view of thyroid hormone to not just being connected to the thyroid gland. The thyroid gland needs a lot of iodine, so when we’re iodine deficient, the thyroid gland will take the top priority in utilizing the iodine at the expense of other tissues in our body that also need iodine. Iodine is one of the most ancient minerals. It comes from the sea and we evolved from the sea. Thyroid hormone is also one of the first neurotransmitters that was ever made prior to us being humans in our evolutionary history. Single-celled organisms and the animals that we evolved from needed thyroid hormone, again, because thyroid hormone is so essential for just regulating basic processes like breathing. Melatonin and thyroid are some of the most ancient neurotransmitters with melatonin being all about circadian rhythm and being able to detect light and dark.
Many animals use these signaling pathways to regulate their systems. The need for iodine is so ancient and the thyroid hormone is one of those first neurotransmitters. That tells us just how essential it is to our bodily function, and yet there’s a lot of confusion around iodine and iodine is often vilified. Similar to copper, iodine and copper are probably some of the most important minerals that, again, there’s a lot of confusion around. I’ve waded through these different perspectives and I’m definitely leaning more towards this belief that copper and iodine are so incredibly essential. We need to find a way for our body to be able to utilize them so we can get the benefits of these minerals.
I’m going to go in this video into describing how and why sometimes these minerals are seen as dangerous or not health-promoting because of the way that these minerals help us to detoxify our bodies. There’s this problem that there are these toxins such as fluoride and the bromides. These are halogens. If you look at the periodic table of the elements, iodine, bromide, chloride, and fluoride are halogens. They’re right next to each other on the table of elements, so they compete for absorption. If we are exposed to a lot of halides, especially fluoride in the environment, that will block the thyroid receptor sites.
Literally every cell in our body needs access to thyroid hormones. If our body is full of fluoride, we will not be able to utilize iodine properly and our thyroid function will suffer as a result. Jason Hommel in his book, The Copper Revolution, mentions, and I haven’t looked up the citation, but he mentions that the average person has a body burden of fluoride of 2,700 milligrams as compared to about 50 milligrams of copper in the body. This is really disproportionate because fluoride also displaces copper, and vice versa. Copper helps to detoxify fluoride. Both iodine and copper are needed to help remove these halides out, and these halides interfere with all the functions that iodine and copper are used for in the body.
This is going to be a conversation about primarily fluoride, iodine, and copper. I think he said it was like, in order to detoxify two milligrams of fluoride, no, sorry, what was it? It was, I think it was two milligrams of fluoride displaces one milligram of copper, and you need one milligram of copper to detoxify two milligrams of fluoride. I’m pretty sure that was the ratio. I need to look it up. It could be the inverse of that. We need copper to detoxify fluoride, but unfortunately, we are exposed to a lot of fluoride, and it’s not just fluoridated water.
For example, where I lived in Milwaukee, Oregon, the water was not fluoridated, thank goodness, and now I’m on a well, and there are naturally occurring levels of fluoride in water. I have not had my well tested for fluoride yet, but I am aware that I’ve had a huge exposure to fluoride by way of anesthesia. When I got the C-section operation that catapulted me into migraine hell, 10 years later, I’m just barely piecing together many of the pieces of the puzzle of why that compromised my system so much.
It was unknown to me until recently that anesthesia contains fluoride. If I went into the C-section with deficient iodine already because of the other bromides in the flour and other exposures to fluoride just in the food supply, such as in raisins, black tea, then the extra additional hit of fluoride from the anesthesia would have further compromised my thyroid function. We know a lot of mothers end up with thyroid issues after pregnancy. If you’ve had a medicalized birth, including anesthesia, that could be one reason why. If you haven’t, and you go into pregnancy low in iodine and low in copper, and your body is prioritizing the use of those minerals for your baby, that can compromise your thyroid function further, even without the anesthesia. Like I said, every single cell in the body needs iodine and needs thyroid hormone.
This can be blocked. Sometimes the issue is not necessarily the production of thyroid hormone. You could have your thyroid levels checked and everything looks normal. As Dr. Wilson mentioned, the guy who pointed out all this information about the multiple enzyme deficiencies, sometimes the issue with thyroid dysfunction is that there’s an issue with the receptor sites of the cell, not uptaking thyroid hormone sufficiently. Then there’s also this issue of the symporter. There’s something called an iodine symporter, and that is the body’s mechanisms and way to convert the iodine into thyroid hormone. There are nutritional cofactors needed for these symporters to work, and sometimes the issue is a dysfunction on the symporter. This is all information by Dr. Jorge Flechas, and I am putting a link to his video down below so that you can watch it. It’s absolutely fascinating.
He points out that you need vitamin C, vitamin B2, and vitamin B3. There comes the beloved niacin. Again, you all know how much a fan of niacin I am. We need niacin, and we need vitamin C, and we need riboflavin for the symporter to work in concert with iodine. I’ll talk shortly here about the other nutritional cofactors needed for iodine to be utilized in the thyroid gland as well. There are many ways by which our thyroid system, not just the thyroid gland itself and not just the thyroid production, can be compromised, affecting many functions in our body.
I thought it was also interesting to learn that the ovaries produce thyroid hormone. It’s called T2 instead of T3 or T4. This can also explain why women post-menopause, when the ovaries stop producing that, can have issues with estrogen dominance and other issues.
What else? Yes, I want to talk about all the conditions that iodine deficiency can lead to, but first, just a recap on why people would be iodine deficient. It’s because of these halides in the environment. For the fluoride in the water supply, many people have said that if you have copper pipes that this is one cause of copper toxicity, but actually fluoride running through copper pipes is going to actually leach the copper out. Someone who has copper pipes in their home who is drinking from a water supply that is not fluoridated will be much less likely to get copper toxicity from those copper pipes because it’s actually the toxicity and acidity of the fluoride, the fluoridated water going through the copper pipes that causes the leaching of copper into the water. That will happen much less readily and much less intensely with non-fluoridated water. It’s really unfortunate that people are being poisoned by fluoride.
I had never really looked that deeply into fluoride prior to this. I didn’t assume that it was particularly healthy, but I didn’t really understand the degree to how toxic it was. And it’s actually the most volatile mineral on the table of the elements. It has no nutritional use in the human body, and yet we have thousands of milligrams of it stored in our body blocking function. So if there’s one take home from this video, I hope it’s that if you can find a water filter, and I still need to do research on this, but a water filter that removes the or drinking spring water, if your water is fluoridated, that can be a huge help in regulating thyroid function and improving your likelihood of healing your migraines.
Okay, so the deficiency, so that would be why we would be deficient is because of the presence of fluoride and then bromide in the brominated flour. So organic flour is not brominated. So you would definitely want to switch to organic flour if you do eat gluten. And actually, I did have a client recently say that she used to have cystic breasts, and she indents breast tissue, and she would get a mammogram, and she just decided to stop eating gluten. And her cystic breast radically improved, but she didn’t know the reason why. She just assumed that gluten was inflammatory, but it was most likely that she stopped consuming bromides that were competing with the iodine that her body needed to make sure that her tissue wasn’t cystic. So iodine deficiency leads to cysts.
And I think that this is just so wonderfully interesting and important because there are so many cystic conditions that I don’t think we tend to link to iodine deficiency. Dr. Fletchers goes over this in great detail in his video, so check that out. So cystic indents, breast tissue, cystic fibrosis, interstitial cystitis, and also fibromyalgia is a condition of a small microcyst in the actual musculature of the body that leads to aching and pain. All of these things can be addressed with iodine, which is incredible. Iodine can dissolve cysts, and it can also help to dissolve scar tissue. I noticed when getting on iodine that my C-section scar started to tingle after a few days, and I’ve noticed that it’s a lot more flat and just looks to be thinner and improved there.
So iodine is incredible, and yet people have a hard time taking it. But first, before we get into that, let’s see if I missed anything. Oh, yes, thyroglossal duct cysts. So you may know that from my urine therapy experiments that my young son has a thyroglossal duct cyst. This is the congenital cyst that he has on his neck that was formed in utero when some of the tubules and tissues connected to the formation of the thyroid didn’t close off completely. So it’s been about two and a half years of us trying to find solutions to this. The urine therapy helped him greatly, but now we’re doing a combination of urine therapy and iodine, both topical and internal. And the cyst looks better than it ever has, and it’s been about four years since it first flared up. And it’s always been somewhat pussy and oozing, and this is the first time in that whole time that it’s just been flat and not pussy at all.
So we’re overjoyed about this. So this is a testament in my own life to the proof that iodine is excellent for any kind of cystic condition. But of course, iodine has other properties besides its effect on thyroid and cysts. It helps us to salivate and to tear. And so people who have really dry eyes, oh, it also helps us to sweat. People who have dry mouth and people who can’t sweat through exercise are very likely iodine deficient. That’s a really good way to tell whether someone’s iodine deficient, knowing that when you do take more iodine, you’re going to be sweating more. And this is a sign that your thyroid gland is speeding up and your metabolism is shifting from a slower to a faster metabolism. Iodine is also antifungal, antibacterial and antiviral. It’s a detoxifier of the body. It also helps to move out heavy metals. And so it’s natural that people not only would feel symptoms because of the way that when you take iodine, it would help you to dump the halides from your system, but it will also be killing off molds that were opportunistic. It will also be detoxifying heavy metals. So this can explain why some people feel bad on iodine. And it’s not just because of its effect on thyroid function.
So these cystic tissues and these dense breasts and these conditions of cystitis that exist because of iodine deficiency can also lead to cancer. So iodine is anti-cancer as well. And we know that the estrogens in the body, some of them are more carcinogenic, whereas others are more protective of cancer with the estradiol being more of the toxic form of estrogen. And then also, of course, the xenoestrogens and the environmental estrogens interfering with the receptor sites of our estrogen receptor sites. So what’s really cool about iodine is that estrogen dominance lowers and depletes iodine. If we’re starting to look at the dynamic relationship between hormones and minerals, estrogen dominance, which is also associated with copper toxicity at times and hypothyroidism, all contributes even further to iodine deficiency. Whereas when you get sufficient iodine, the iodine, it’s awesome. Not only will it lower the more toxic estrogens associated with cancer, the estradiol, but it will help convert them back into the helpful and protective forms of estrogen, the estrone, or is it estrite? Estrone, I’m pretty sure. Yeah, or maybe estriol. I’m not. I think it’s estrone. So that’s incredible. Iodine can, because we need estrogen, right? Iodine can help convert the more dangerous forms of estrogen into the form that we need that’s beneficial for our body. I already mentioned how the halogens compete with iodine and the receptor sites and which all that. The halogens are the chloride, bromide, and fluoride.
I just want to mention really quickly which foods, the food sources of fluoride, fluoride being one of the most toxic of the halides. So green tea, the Camellia sinensis, or actually black tea as well. Camellia sinensis tea plant readily uptakes fluoride from the soil, unlike other plants that don’t. Grapes, any kind of grapes from California, and I think it’s something like 80% of grapes are grown in California. And there’s a particular pest, I think it’s a type of moth, a parasite that tends to eat the grapes. So they do spray fluoride pesticide on grapes in this particular part of California where that pest lives. And unfortunately, it just so happens that the majority of grapes are grown in that part of California. So the likelihood that you’re going to be getting fluoride-based pesticides on your grapes or in your wine or any kind of raisins that come from that region is very high. So if you do eat raisins or drink wine or drink grape juice, you want to make sure that it’s not from that region.
Also antidepressants, I already mentioned anesthesia, but antidepressants, and there are actually many, many medications that contain fluoride, but antidepressants is one of the main ones like Prozac, one of the main sources of fluoride toxicity that’s not really readily recognized. So estrogen lowers iodine, I already mentioned that. And so we’re thinking about people with migraine who have a slow metabolism. This is usually characterized by high calcium, perhaps higher copper, and high estrogen is usually associated with a slower metabolism. And I already mentioned, we want to help convert that estrogen. But copper, I want to bring in copper here because copper has an interesting relationship both to the thyroid and to iodine and to estrogen.
So it’s often said that we see copper and estrogen levels rise together. And this is not because copper raises estrogen. I’ve actually, this is what I’ve been looking into recently, because I had heard people say without citing their point of view that estrogen raises, sorry, copper raises estrogen. Actually, it’s the opposite. So estrogen increases the absorption of copper. And that’s why we often see estrogen dominance associated with copper, which doesn’t mean that copper raises estrogen. However, because copper does lower zinc, and zinc is needed for testosterone, if the testosterone goes lower, and zinc is also needed for progesterone, if the progesterone and testosterone go lower, that alone would raise estrogen. So you could say that copper toxicity, even though elevated copper doesn’t necessarily lead directly to estrogen dominance, it indirectly affects estrogen by way of how it lowers the other hormones, testosterone and progesterone that help to keep estrogen in balance. So copper also lowers iodine and copper also helps to detoxify these other halogens like fluoride.
So we need copper. Copper is very helpful in detoxifying fluoride. Copper also helps to convert T4 to T3, like I said. So copper is also needed by the thyroid gland, but it also lowers iodine. So what we mean by this is not that we want another reason to demonize copper, we certainly don’t because it helps to detoxify these other toxic halides, but that we want to take copper and iodine together. And so one take home for me that’s new is this realization that copper and iodine are very mutually beneficial. They need the copper toxicity conditions that are also characterized by high calcium and estrogen dominance because that estrogen helps to absorb copper, and we can see why those two go together, will be balanced by iodine. This doesn’t mean copper is bad. It just means that copper and iodine need each other to stay in balance because iodine will also lower copper.
All right, so copper excess and candida, I want to talk about that a little bit because it’s very common for people who have so-called copper toxicity, which I’ve been questioning a lot. You can read my blog post on questioning copper toxicity. Copper excess leads to candida, which is strange because copper is antifungal. We know this because when they grow grapes or other fruits, they use copper sulfate as an antifungal to combat mold and fungus on plants in agriculture. So why is it that people who have elevated copper have candida? Well, first of all, we know estrogen helps to increase the absorption of copper, but we also know that estrogen feeds candida for one thing. So why is it that if copper is antifungal, that people with high copper and high estrogen would have candida? So I did some research into this and I found that the candida mold especially has an adaptive evolutionary mechanism that allows it to switch out manganese for copper. So yeast and bacteria and viruses are very sophisticated and very intelligent in their ability to respond to different conditions. And it turns out candida has evolved a way to utilize copper. So this means that the normal antifungal properties of copper, candida has found a way to bypass. Candida has found a way to hack that property of copper. I also believe that when you take copper internally, if you have candida in your gut, the likelihood that the copper is going to go directly to the candida is low. That copper is going to be utilized for other things in the body first. And when it goes into the bloodstream, and it may be that if you’re taking copper, that it won’t necessarily be able to act in an antifungal way because it’s not getting direct contact with the candida. So yeah, it’s just an interesting kind of paradox there that I think we can solve by realizing that the copper won’t make it to touch the candida directly in the gut. And again, the candida has evolved to adapt to copper.
So to sort of summarize, migraine is characterized by thyroid disorders. It can come from either hyper and hypothyroidism. But traditionally and usually, it’s more of a hypothyroid condition that is associated with a slow metabolism and elevated estrogen and sometimes elevated copper. And these conditions of not being able to modulate your body temperature because of the hypothyroidism can be coming from these halides stuck in the thyroid that are compromising the uptake of iodine and then leading conditions in which the enzyme systems in the body don’t work because the temperature of the body is off. So this increased estrogen leads to iodine deficiency along with these other factors I mentioned. Estrogen dominance leads to copper absorption, which in turn leads to iodine loss.
So in order to fix this situation, my conclusions are based off of this research that people who have elevated estrogen, hypothyroidism, and possibly elevated copper, they need to dump the halides, dump the fluoride, and the bromide. You can do this with salt loading. So it’s taking concentrated salt in water for a few weeks before you try to start doing iodine therapy, which will then probably cause some exacerbation of symptoms through the dumping of the halides. And then eventually over time, your body will become more and more replete with iodine and the thyroid will work better. But you also do need those cofactors for thyroid hormone to work, the selenium, the copper, the zinc, the B vitamins. Yeah, so there are solutions to this.
Again, I just want to say that I think the toxicity that people feel from taking iodine is probably from dumping of halides. There’s something called a bromide rash, and it’s these little red marks that often show up on the lower legs, sometimes as late as three months into iodine, high-dose iodine therapy, where we can start to see the bromides come out of the skin. I saw a few of these little red marks on my legs when I first started the iodine.
I want to mention before I end this video, because I feel like I’m kind of repeating myself on some of this information, but this is important, which is this is Lugol’s iodine. This is iosol iodine, which is a water-based iodine. It’s not potassium iodide. And then there’s, of course, kelp. And of course, you want to get things from food most of the time, but I think it seems as though there’s some question about just kelp, how pure it is, given the conditions of the ocean. Actually, this iosol iodine is created from kelp, but it’s a purified version of it. And then the potassium iodide, the Lugol solution, is one of the most common ways that people have tried to up their intake of iodine. So in the past, I have not been able to tolerate either iodine from kelp or potassium iodide, but for some reason, I was able to tolerate the iosol iodine. And I’ll provide a link to this. This is not a very popular or well-known form of iodine, but I guess historically, it was used in the 30s and 40s very commonly. So it’s an ammonia iodide. And supposedly, it doesn’t stick in or clog the thyroid. I have heard some criticism that the potassium iodide can get stuck in thyroid glands, and I want to look into that further. So I’ll share with you if I find anything more on that. But interestingly, it seems as though this iosol iodine either allowed me to tolerate potassium iodide better, or it could be that I just detoxified some of the bromides with this iosol iodide, and therefore, less symptomatic now with the J. Crow’s. It used to give me horrible headaches. So it was kind of this paradox of like, how can I get iodine if it makes me feel crappy? And so that seems to have changed. You can put it on topically, of course, and there are groups that are doing high-dose iodine therapy. I am fairly new to this, so I wouldn’t be promoting high-dose iodine therapy quite yet. But I will say that the women in Japan or people in Japan who eat a lot of seaweed have an average of 12 milligrams of iodine a day. So while some people are taking 50 milligrams, 1,000 milligrams, extremely high doses of iodine, in terms of what people who eat a lot of iodine-rich foods get in their diet, 12 milligrams a day is the amount that seems like a reasonable amount.
Thanks for watching.
