Hashimoto’s and Vitamin D

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Talk about a subject that i think really requires a little bit of clarity and it's kind of an interesting one it's
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vitamin d and hashimoto's specifically and everybody everybody but everybody
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comes in here has low vitamin d so having done this for a long time there was a time when
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uh it wasn't so well understood that vitamin d low vitamin d was a problem
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or what the problem was or how it occurred so people would come in with like vitamin d
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it would be like if the range in america is 30 to 100 people come with a vitamin d of like
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like you know 20 and the doctor was going oh you know you need to get on the sun more
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i was like but as we were in the earlier stages in the group that i was involved in i would say with
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some of the earliest functional medicine practitioners yeah we just kept seeing low vitamin d
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low vitamin d low vitamin d low vitamin d and to us it just started to indicate that
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there's a connection between low vitamin d and chronic pain and ultimately realizing that hashimoto's
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was part of an awful lot of chronic conditions chronic pain conditions and that vitamin
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d had something to do maybe with immune inflammation using it up you know and and that's what i've told
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people for years and uh just recently researchers are uh positing that vitamin d
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is um low vitamin d one of the reasons is that it's secondary to an inflammatory process that takes place
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in the body and that and that this inflammation uses up vitamin d so that's pretty close
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to what we've been saying for a long time i'm guessing it's going to go one step further and they're going to say
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it's autoimmune because they're now saying that there's an association
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low vitamin d and vitamin d polymorphism so let's talk about that real quick
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people come in they have hashimoto's first thing i asked them was they have low vitamin another thing back then it
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was like yeah i low vitamin d i went to my doctor i said i'll just take some pills and at back that time it was like
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450 milligrams a day i mean now doctors are giving 50 000 units of which is like 20 times that
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okay a week to their patients when they have low vitamin d they're not quite sure why but they're giving it to them
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and so there are reasons that vitamin d goes low one of the one of the biggest reasons
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is one of the biggest reasons is what's called polymorphisms so basically a lot of times a lot a lot
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of a lot of times you have a problem with just genetically you just genetically have a problem
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with processing and absorbing vitamin d but what's interesting is is now they're finding
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that there's a big association with people who have hashimoto's and people who have
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vitamin d polymorphisms so one of the reasons that your vitamin d may be low is because
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you have hashimoto's and you have this polymorphism you take 50 000 units six weeks late a
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week six weeks later you go to your doctor and your vitamin d hasn't moved
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a bit and so uh so that's something that need that that person
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needs to be aware of whose vitamin d isn't going up and there are ways to address that but you have to basically
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figure out what the triggers are for the hashimoto's fix get the hashimoto's under control and
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then it seems to improve absorption but specifically and there's the other things are
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the other reasons by the way that you won't absorb vitamin d and this is relevant to
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hashimoto's as you're about to find out in a second um
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is maybe you don't have a gallbladder that gallbladder that for my entire lifetime has been kind of
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natural negligible kind of a throwaway organ kind of like ah you know your
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gallbladder's got some stones in it let's take it out okay no big deal turns out now
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gallbladder does a lot more than just digest your fat soluble vitamins which is vitamin d
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it does a lot of other things it has a lot to do with your immune system that's a lot to do with pancreatic function and
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so think twice about getting your gallbladder out
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so so vitamin d if you don't have a gallbladder or if you have a gallbladder it's not
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functioning well because your digestive chain is broken down you're not going to break it down
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it's a fat-soluble vitamin and maybe you have maybe you have a problem with the inside
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of your intestines that's inflamed maybe you have celiac maybe of all sort of colitis not so much because that's more
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downstream from where it's absorbed but maybe you have sibo maybe you have oral tolerance problems
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maybe there's just a number of things you can have in there we're just not you're just not going to absorb it
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it's just going to go it's going to go in it's going to go out into the toilet you're going to check your vitamin d six
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weeks later after taking 10 000 units a day and you're going to go from 45 to 46 and go what the hell is going on here
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so and and a lot of that has to do with one of the reasons that would that would cause
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that type of a situation would be uh hashimoto's thyroiditis because hashimoto's has a hypothyroid aspect to
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it and so hypothyroid means it would slow down your stomach it would soak
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down your gallbladder it might slow down your intestines ability to move you might get constipation that might
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alter your ability to to digest your vitamin d but i tell you all of that to tell you this
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so there was a study that that came out and it was um and it was about vitamin d and
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its relativity to hashimoto's now i have had varying success with giving people
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high doses of vitamin d and i'm not going to get into what that means okay uh but
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here's but if if you're but if you're the range of 30 to 100 is the range i'd like to see you like
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right around 100 and and whatever it takes to get that person there whatever dose it takes to get that
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person there that's my dose okay and while and and so and i've seen some really cool stuff happen
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sometimes just getting the vitamin d up i've seen i've seen the thing like inflammatory
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hashimoto's symptoms get under control our palpitations go down inflammation and throw code now it turns
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out that um that when you get vitamin and vitamin d is a
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steroid by the way they call it a suck steroid suc okay steroid you can look that up and
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that's not as you see it's as you see steroid and so but you got to get it to a certain spot
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where it seems like it takes on this steroidal uh effect so what they have found
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that i was reading a study out of uh out of a a bunch of notes that i got at a seminar on hashimoto's and
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the study showed that once you got vitamin d up into a high normal range
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that it could if so your tsh your thyroid stimulating hormone if it goes high
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yeah hypothyroid right it has shown one of the things that it will do is it it can at at high doses
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in not everybody but in a in a percentage of hashimoto's patients it can work to bring that
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thyroid stimulating hormone down to normal it's complex situation to explain the whole thing but
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basically the person has inflammation it's damaging their thyroid the thyroid's vomiting out uh t3 and t4
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which are which are thyroid hormones while while the destruction is taking place and the person's
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and and then that's affecting all of their numbers in different ways and and the vitamin d brings down the
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inflammation that helps to uh that helps to normalize that situation
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so vitamin d can can do that now there's two markers that tell us whether you have
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hashimoto's or not one's called the thyroid peroxidase antibody marker tpo a lot more people are familiar with that
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today most people are not as familiar with the anti-thyroid globulin marker
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usually they run both if a person has hashimoto's about 90 percent of the time they're going to
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find out more from the tpo that thyroid products says it's just more sensitive
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it's an enzyme the anti-thyroglobulin marker is uh it's a whole different animal
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you're it's in and it only shows up um a small percentage of time i would say
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three seven i don't even think it reaches ten percent of the time that it shows up somewhere but when it
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shows up it's like well okay we have hashimoto's okay um so high doses of vitamin d have been also
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shown to lower the antibodies against anti-thyroglobulin
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marcus thyroglobulin so those are thyroid those are thyroid proteins okay those are like the
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matrix those are like what your thyroid is made up now you're that's uh whereas the other
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one is an attack against enzymes that make the hormone this is like an attack against
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your actual thyroid and so high doses of vitamin d have also been shown to alter
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the anti-thyroglobulin but not the other one but not but not the thyroid one the tpo which is
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the immune system attacking your your enzymes that make your t4 and t3
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and make it jittery and stuff like that so uh so so vitamin d
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is is a very we we recognized early on that vitamin d was low in everybody the group that i know i was involved
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with and then um and then and then started really dosing it up
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and started seeing some dramatic changes in not everybody but certain patients enough to go whoa
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okay there's a connection here started to realize that maybe the vitamin d was low
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for uh because they had autoimmunity indeed i think that's what i think it's where the research is
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probably leading they're going to probably because researchers they don't just
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put that in their research they have to go into another research project and establish it and so on and so forth
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i think that's probably coming when i look at somebody and their vitamin d is 16 and it should
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be really way up in the upper range closer to like 85 to 100 or something like that
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i i automatically am like okay you have autoimmunity until proven innocent so so vitamin d and i don't here's what
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i wanted to do i want to dispel the myth i'm not getting enough sun all right you don't need that much sun
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to get you know enough vitamin d to kind of make things happen vitamin d is it has
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a lot to do with calcium uh metabolism and then people say oh you've got to get out more that's why you're
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getting osteoporosis that's right calcium it's it's it's it's not that i have
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people that come in here who are they're horse trainers they're outside all day long they're they're
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they're um uh they call them uh the uh uh lifeguards they're lifeguards i have people coming here lifeguards and
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they're coming in or tan and their vitamin d is like 10. you know so they're either having these
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polymorphisms they're bad they have a bad gut they have a bad thyroid they have autoimmunity
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it's one of these other things and and so that but i see that pretty much across the
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board so it's it's it's easy to have a good laugh and explain that
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to the uh lifeguard okay but a lot of times people are just like no we're not on the right parallel and i
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need to get out there more sun let me tell you with with you if you're hashimoto's new watches it's not about
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that it is about either the inflammation that they're talking about or it's about the
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polymorphism that seems to be now related heavily to hashimoto's himself is that causing
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hashimoto's is hashimoto's causing that it's probably a vicious cycle they're they're working on which one causes the
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other but you don't you don't need to know in that much detail to be able to help people to
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understand that they need to get their vitamin d up and and then if it doesn't get up kind of
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figure out why and and fix that so that's i think those are the salient points
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about vitamin d that i wanted to bring to you today those are ones that i still keep
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getting a lot of confusion from the people that i treat and consult with on that topic and it's so common
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that i just thought it would be a good one to do so so that's it for today vitamin d and