1901. The Real Reasons Your Thyroid May Be Struggling – Part 1

Join Dr. Martin in today's episode of The Doctor Is In Podcast.

 

TRANSCRIPT OF TODAY'S EPISODE

Announcer:  You're listening to The Doctor Is In Podcast, brought to you by MartinClinic.com. During the episode, the doctors share a lot of information. As awesome as the info may be, it is not intended to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent any disease. It's strictly for informational purposes.

Dr. Martin:  Well, good morning, everyone. And once again, welcome to another live this morning. How you guys doing? Guys, thanks for coming.

Let me answer a question guys before we even get started this morning. Because I got to ask this question yesterday. Why is my thyroid not working properly? It's a good question.

And in most instances, okay, the thyroid is complicated. And here on the Doctor is in, we always break down the thyroid based on number one symptoms, trumps, okay, symptoms, trumps in the thyroid blood work. Because when you do blood work on the thyroid, not that I don't look at it, okay, I just got to tell you it's really important to understand what I'm saying here.

The thyroid is connected to the the thyroid is connected to a lot of other things. You know how we say, it's like a puppet, it's got a lot of strings attached to it. If you don't understand that as a physician, you're going to miss out. And medicine, God bless them.

When it comes to the thyroid, they're really not good at it. And it's because they don't see the big picture. They don't take into account generally your symptom. My dad taught me that.

If it walks like a duck, it talks like a duck. It's a duck. If they got all the symptoms of the thyroid, he said, son, listen to me. Listen, Linda.

Listen. Observe. Make them fill out a questionnaire. What are your symptoms?

Oh, I'm tired all the time. I'm gaining weight. I look at food sideways. And I put on weight.

I heard a lady tell me one time, my metabolism isn't slow. It's in a coma. I like that. She was funny.

My metabolism is in a coma. Patients used to come in. I'd look at their eyebrows. They must have wondered, this guy, can you imagine seeing me for the first time?

And guys, here's me, okay? I'm looking. I'm right up in your grill. Some people didn't like that.

I had a lady one time tell me, you're in my space. And I said, no, no, you're in my space. You're in my office. I'm observing.

I'm looking at your hair. I'm looking at your eyes. I'm looking at your eyebrows. I'm looking at your skin.

I want you to stick your tongue out at me because I look at your tongue. See, I was very observant. And when it comes to the thyroid, it's complicated. There's a lot of strings attached.

And when doctors don't yell, oh, you're tired. And the doctors, a lot of doctors would say, yeah, well, so am I. Right? So am I.

And I'm like, so am I. And then they get your numbers back on your thyroid and they go, it's normal. Or you might even have some hypothyroidism and they put you on a med, but it's not helping. Guys, I saw that a thousand times.

No, more than that. Okay? And it was amazing to me. When you broke everything down, when you did biomarker testing, okay, not just your TSH, or even a full panel of thyroid panel, because you can't isolate the thyroid.

You can't. And if you do, women especially are going to fall through the cracks. And they're slugger and they know it. They're not up to snuff.

Their skin is dry. They might even have some eczema that they never had before. They have hair growing where it shouldn't be growing. They hairs on their chinny chin chin.

I had women come in and they had a beautiful mustache. And so you had to be observant. You had to listen to them and you had to understand that there was a lot of things happening. Okay?

And now I'm going to break down to you what I saw. And what some of the causes of a sluggish thyroid were. Okay? Very important guys.

Because somebody asked me the question, I saw it yesterday. Dr. Madden. Okay?

Why is my thyroid not working? Okay. Here's some reasons. And I used to see this a lot in my office, like I said.

One of the big reasons that people don't realize this, women, remember the other day I put this on our private Facebook picture of me outside a franchise. I never thought there was such a thing. A chicken and salad franchise. I pointed to the sign.

They actually have a franchise called Chicken and Salad. You see guys, what happened? And that's why you see so much problems with thyroid today. Again, not limited to women, but especially in women.

You know why? Because they live on chicken and salad. And if you do that, you're not making an amino acid called L-tyrosine that your thyroid needs to function properly. Look, you're going to function on chicken and salad.

You will function, but you ain't gonna be at your best. You need, listen, Lindas out there, you need animal protein to make that amino acid in your body. Your thyroid will not work properly without it. And when I analyzed people's diets, especially women, because they were taught, it's not their fault, they were taught that fat makes you fat.

And that's why fat makes you fat. No, it don't. But they were taught that. That salad was better.

They used salad as vitamin S when I was telling them to use steak as vitamin S. And women, especially in North America, they bought that line, hook, line, and sinker, to eat salad over steak. Okay? Because of fat makes you fat, and animal foods give you cholesterol, and that's bad.

Bad for your heart, bad for your weight. And women across North America bought it. They bought it. Everything they ate was low fat pretty well.

Even their salad dressing, low fat salad dressing, low fat yogurt. Try and find a yogurt with fat in it. The food industry guys, they lied. And women went for it at the expense of their thyroid.

Because you need that amino acid for your thyroid to function properly. Why is your thyroid not functioning properly? Because your diet, it's upside down. The food pyramid that they have taught us was wrong.

Animal protein, put that over here and don't eat much of it. You need grains. You need grains. You need fiber.

You don't need fat. And I'm telling you, I see it every day, guys. I see young girls walking around, young ladies, and they're either skinny as a rake or they're packing on the fat big time in obesity. And they have no idea their diet is wrong.

It's wrong for the thyroid. Your thyroid needs eggs, meat, and cheese. And it needs red meat. It needs steak or hamburger.

Because otherwise you're not getting that amino acid. It's not found in the plant kingdom. And I'm not saying you can't have anything. You want to have a salad?

Have it beside your steak a little bit. And then, okay, let me keep on. When you don't have B12, when you don't have enough B12, and if you're not eating red meat, you don't have enough B12. Oh, Dr.

Martin, my B12 is normal. Well, normal ain't good. Normal is bad math. You need optimized B12 for your thyroid to work properly.

Yep. And you need to eat it. And nobody told you. Nobody told you.

So what do you know? Right? That's why your thyroid's not working properly. Because without B12, your thyroid doesn't work properly.

When you're eating the wrong foods, again, you don't think about this or the world doesn't. My audience knows this. Okay? Listen, when you're a carboholic, and women don't realize this, they are carboholics.

They pack up their liver with fat. When you pack up your liver with fat, you're going to have a hard time converting T4 to T3. See, T3 is the hormone, the thyroid hormone, that your thyroid needs to work properly. Okay?

T4 to T3 gets converted mostly in the liver. When your liver is empty, not packed, gummed up like the Costco parking lot, full of fat. You can't get there, guys, on the plant kingdom. You can have plants.

You want to have fruits and vegetables? Go for it. But that ain't feeding your thyroid. The other one is vitamin D.

I talk to him every day. Sun, steak, and steel. Your thyroid needs vitamin D. It needs vitamin D.

You can't go wrong with B12 and vitamin D. You just can't. It's for everything. And people are extremely low.

It always shocked me. Always shocked me in my office. How low people were in B12 and vitamin D. It shocked me.

I shouldn't have been shocked. I shouldn't have been. There's a verse in the Bible, I've got to tell you where it is. It's in Galatians 4 and 16.

Have I become your enemy because I told you the truth? I used to tell that to my patients. I'm the bad guy here? Whoa.

Whoa. You're telling me I'm not normal? No, you're not. Have I become your enemy because I told you the truth?

I told you the truth on how to eat? I don't care what's popular. It might be popular, but it's wrong. And I give the classic statistic.

I didn't make up this statistic. 93% of the population have metabolic syndrome. That means you're unhealthy. That means you're on your way to a heart attack.

You're on your way to Alzheimer's. You're on your way to diabetes. You're already a diabetic. But like Dr.

Kraft says, you're already a diabetic. There's no such thing as pre. When the thyroid's not working properly, guys, that's your metabolism. It's such a big part of your gas pedal in your car.

It's sluggish. It's not working properly. And guys, you know what I used to do in my office. So unless you're new on this program, you know what I did.

I used to take out, I'm not kidding you, I took out a pyramid because I had it. I wish I would have kept it from my office. I actually had it on the wall. In my office.

The pyramid with all your hormones in it. Thyroid at the top, ovaries at the bottom, testes in the middle, okay. Adrenals on the way up, halfway up. Let me see.

Did I draw it, not draw it? Okay, I'm going to do it. And remember, I flunked art. Okay, I'm going to show you this.

Okay, and then I had that. Okay, here's my pyramid. You see it? Okay, if you're listening to this on the podcast, visualize a pyramid.

With how many circles in it, Dr. Martin? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Seven circles.

Okay, I used to draw this for my patients. I don't know about you, but I learned visually. This is why I write everything out. I write.

A lot of people use their iPad or their phone or a computer, their laptop to make notes. Not me, I write it out. I just find for me, that's how I learned in school. Okay?

All the way through high school, all the way till I finished high school, I majored in recess. The only class I liked was gym. Okay? Then you get to university.

Yeah, I had to learn to study. And when I learned to study, you know what I learned? I got to write things out. And then I make bullet points.

And then I, I mean, it's just the way my brain operates. And I actually encourage a lot of people to do that. Write it out. Do diagrams.

Make them yourself. And so this is what I did with patients. Okay? So here I am with patients and I go, listen, see your thyroid up here at the top?

It's attached to every other thing here in this pyramid. If you don't get that, you're never going to be able to fix the thyroid properly. Okay? And here's what I would do.

Okay? Thyroid is connected to, ladies, your estrogen and progesterone. They need to be balanced. Because when estrogen is dominant, oh, Dr.

Martin, I'm getting older. Yeah, my estrogen, I don't have a lot of estrogen. Yeah. But I compare it to your progesterone.

Okay? You're comparing it to a young lady. Don't do that. Compare your estrogen to progesterone because that's how it works.

You need balance there. And when your estrogen is dominant, your thyroid slows to a crawl. Now, go up the pyramid. Okay?

So we dealt with the estrogen and progesterone at the bottom of the pyramid. And then halfway up on that pyramid were your adrenal glands. Adrenal on top of kidneys. Dr.

Martin, my doctor never talked to me about adrenal glands. Well, he should have because those are your stress glands. If you have stress in your life, okay, cortisol, cortisol is on your side until it becomes your enemy. It never gets turned off.

It robs your progesterone. What does that do? Well, now estrogen becomes dominant. Cortisol pours gasoline on the fire of inflammation.

Thyroid slows to a crawl when the adrenals are not right. Stress. And stress can come from different things. You can have family dynamics, finances.

You took care of a loved one. You know, your husband's a jerk. Ladies, I saw a lot of that. Okay?

So the adrenals really affect the thyroid. And this is and then one of the most important thing is right in the middle of the pyramid. You see it there? Your pancreas, your insulin, that's food.

That's food. And when you've been lied to about food and you think, well, you know, I got to cut back on the fat. I got to cut back on my cholesterol that's what my doctor said. Well, your your your thyroid needs cholesterol.

How do you like that? Because you're not even going to deliver. Listen, listen, Linda, again, you can not deliver your hormones properly without TSH. You need the carriers.

Your HDL cholesterol is a carrier and so is LDL. And you want to hammer those down? Why? They carry your thyroid hormones.

You want cholesterol. Like people, they don't even look at the blood. All they can think of is bad cholesterol and they've been lied to for so long. It makes me puke.

And when insulin, when your cells at the cellular level are resisting insulin, it can mess up your thyroid. And so with my patients, I always started with a diet. You like eggs? Here's me again.

Sorry, guys, this ain't for you. You got thyroid problems as a guy? You're weird. I didn't mean to say.

Yes, I did. Okay. Men are weird anyway. Okay.

Now listen, ladies, you got thyroid problems? You got trouble with your diet. That's a rule of thumb. Okay.

You got trouble with your diet. And I already talked to you about B12. You just don't get enough of it. And your thyroid is so insistent on getting a full dose of amino acids from steak.

You don't eat it. Like you can have plant protein. Nothing wrong with that. You want to have plant protein?

You want to eat beans and nuts and seeds and get protein from plants? Okay. But I'm telling you, they're not complete proteins. And your thyroid needs a complete protein.

It needs that amino acid to make the proper thyroid hormones. You need delivery and you need to eat it. So you start with food. And that's what I used to do.

I'm going to put you on a, call it what you want, the reset. I called it the reset, a metabolic reset. Yeah, it fixes your insulin, but what a difference it makes in the thyroid. I said to some women, have a steak every day.

Every day? Every day. And roast beef on the seventh. And you can have a hamburger too.

You like bacon? Yeah, Dr. Martin, I like bacon. Well, have it every day in the morning.

With eggs and no toast. That was me guys. I started with food. And I get back to the pyramid.

Okay. So right in the middle is your insulin. That's food guys. That's food.

Your thyroid is very insistent on it. It's finicky. It's got a lot of strings attached. And over here, with that little wee circle that I drew, your liver, the Rodney Dangerfield.

Nobody thinks about their liver until it don't work anymore. Oh, but inside that liver, it's not only making your cholesterol, it's making your HDL, which you need for your thyroid. You need your LDL for your thyroid, but also the conversion of T4 to T3. And you need T3 for your thyroid to be optimized.

Yeah. And, you know, people talk to me about iodine. I said, yep, I like iodine. I really do.

Okay. You eat a steak, you get iodine. Okay. You do.

You get traces of it. But you know what you really need for your thyroid that nobody talks to you about? You need selenium. And oh, I can eat Brazilian nuts.

Yeah. But you know what's a better source of selenium? Steak. Eggs.

Cheese. Butter. That's what your thyroid wants. Okay.

That's what your thyroid wants. So that's, guys, I didn't know I was going to do a whole program on it. Why is my thyroid not working properly? Why are my eyebrows spinning?

My hair is spinning. I got hair in the wrong places. I got hair on my chinny, chin, chin. That's normal.

Not ladies. Why you got hair there? You're not supposed to have hair there. Your body's telling you something.

Okay. I got excited, guys, because I drew my pyramid again. Here I go again. Okay.

Okay, guys, announcements. Friday's Q&A. I remind you of that because it's one of our most popular time. Don't be shy, guys.

Ask your questions. Don't be shy. I mean that. Okay.

Because sometimes you'll ask your questions now. Sometimes I see it, then I'll remember the next day to answer the question if I see it. Okay. But guys, ask your questions.

I'll answer them. Okay. I'll answer them. You know me.

I ain't shy. Okay. Okay. Guys, we love you most sincerely and dearly. Talk to you soon. 

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