iThyroid.com

BALANCING MINERALS

Using nutritional supplements is a powerful tool to reverse disease conditions, even conditions as pernicious as thyroid disease. However, this tool has the proverbial double-edge: it's very easy to make your situation worse. I know this because I have made myself sicker many times by taking the wrong supplements.

The key to using supplements to improve your health is knowledge. We are now in the process of discovering that knowledge and hopefully we will know a lot more in the coming years about correcting thyroid and other diseases nutritionally.  From my experiences I am certain that there is a lot to know, it is very complex, and what I know is only a small part of the picture. However, I would like to share what I know with others and together we can gradually improve this knowledge base as we gain more experience.

I've always compared the problem of correcting disease through nutritional supplementation to finding your way out of a maze. You can try many things or go down many branches of the maze, but generally, without direction, you just get deeper and deeper into the maze. With hyperthyroidism, it is even worse. Down each wrong way in the maze is a demon and if you make the wrong choice and take the wrong supplement you can bring on even more hyper symptoms or even a thyroid storm. The maze of hyperthyroidism is a very dangerous world and it's easy to die if you make the wrong decisions.

A person with hypothyroidism could probably go into a health food store and select supplements at random and most would probably help some. It's doubtful if the person would would get into to much trouble, but it's possible. The person with hyperthyroidism in the same situation, however, has about a 99% chance of getting the wrong supplements and making his situation much worse.

Basically when you are trying to correct your thyroid disease, it is a lot easier to worsen your nutritional status than improve it if you don't know what you're doing. I've been using nutritional supplements for 30 years and probably know more about correcting thyroid disease than most and I still make mistakes. For this reason I want to write out the best information possible so that you can not make these same mistakes.

The most important principle to remember is that more is not always better.  The more of a supplement that you take, the more likely you are of disturbing your nutritional balance. All nutrients seem to interact with each other so the more of one that you take, the more that others get depleted.

The next most important principle is that minerals have a smaller toxic to benefit ratio than vitamins. What this means is that amount of a mineral which might be used for supplementation is not much lower than the toxic amount. For minerals the toxic level might be only 3 to 10 times the therapeutic amount. For example, selenium requirements are usually around 50 mcg per day and typical selenium supplementation amounts are 100-400 mcg per day. However, toxicity can result at around 1200-1600 mcg per day over an extended period. So if we take a safe amount of 400 mcg and a toxic amount of 1200 mcg, that is only a 3:1 ratio. It's important that you realize the importance of not taking too much.

The toxic to benefit ratio of vitamins is much higher. Our bodies have a much higher capacity to excrete unused amounts of vitamins than unused amounts of minerals. For example we might have a B vitamin requirement of 2 mgs, a supplemented amount of 100 mgs, and a toxic level of 10-50 grams. There is not the same danger of over supplementing vitamins as there is of over supplementing minerals. The one exception are the oil soluble vitamins: A, D, E, and K. These build up in the tissues and can cause problems. For example, we might take 5000 IU of vitamin A, but 100,000 IU over a period of months can cause severe headaches. In the arctic some people have died from eating the liver of animals because the vitamin A content was so high that the person's body couldn't eliminate it fast enough.

The third most important principle is to balance nutrients. Each nutrient needs to be present in just the right ratios (within a reasonable range) with the other nutrients. This is especially true of minerals and the B vitamins. You can get deficient in a mineral or vitamin even if you are supplementing it, if you are taking another mineral or vitamin which is the antagonist of the first.

In the column to the left you will see various pages dealing with balancing various nutrients. The first concerns balancing copper, zinc, and iron, which seem to me to be the three most critical minerals for balancing the thyroid.