90. You Will Never View Your Thyroid The Same Again: An Expert Chat With Keith Littlewood
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Hey everyone and welcome to the Boost Your Biology podcast. My name is Lucas and I am the founder of Ergogenic Health. Together in this podcast series, we will go underground to explore cutting edge health and human performance insights that you simply cannot search on Google to help you upgrade your existence. So without any further ado, let's jump into today's episode.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Boost Your Biology podcast.

Today, I have a supremely special guest. Joining me in is Keith Littlewood. Keith, welcome to the show, man. Thanks for having me. Awesome. Keith, do you want to maybe let my listeners know a little bit about maybe your journey and how you got so fascinated into, I guess, optimizing human health? Sure. I failed massively at school, but the only qualification I was good at was biology, but there's nothing really kind of pulled out of that.

I was always going to go into the army. I was actually going to go into the RAF, but the career center was too far away. So I opted for the army and working with helicopters. And I did four years with the army and I came out of there pretty lost and didn't know what I wanted to do and ended up falling into a gym induction at a leisure center because the instructor wasn't there. And they asked me to take it because I was a leisure assistant at about 23, 24. And from being in the fitness industry as a fitness instructor to personal trainer, rehab into fitness,

therapy, pain management, and then into kind of some functional medicine, nutritional-based stuff. I then kind of got interested in the works of Ray Peete,

kind of a really broad reference of kind of, you know, information he's put out based upon his work and thought process and some really solid thinking from other scientists that I think is glossed over to a degree, but that's just generally how kind of business and industry operates these days, not looking at some of the older, you know, research that's really quite potent in favour of kind of more reductionist mechanisms. And so I got interested into that

reading his stuff and many other people's stuff for years, which I kind of, I think I've developed a lot of my, I'd say, understanding. I still feel like I don't know much at the moment. I still feel like I'm scratching the surface permanently. And I decided to put some of that kind of learning to the test and did a postgrad and a master's in endocrinology. And now I'm just knocking on the door of my PhD, which I've just started looking at

the effects of pollution and hormones, particularly thyroid hormones. So it's kind of been a journey like that. And I'm kind of at the ripe old age of 50 now, but I feel I'm just getting started. So I think if you kind of take on board something like thyroid, we just mentioned off areas like thyroid takes you into many areas, all areas of function, you know, it permeates every aspect of physiology. And I think getting an understanding of something that's such a

hierarchical mechanism of the human body and understand how it gets distorted, I think feels like a worthy lifetime of what's left of my lifetime approach to develop an understanding of it. So, you know, I make my living working with people around the world, coaching them through different areas of function that are often related to hormones. But a lot of it comes back to basic nutrition, first of all, understanding your environment, understanding what tweaks we can bring in to make some change, understanding how...

All the previous kind of inputs to your system are generally creating the negative outputs that you're experiencing. So my job is really to go in and help people resolve that and give them understanding of what they can do to create change. I wouldn't say I'm a conspiracy theorist, but I'm certainly well aware of

corporate interference and quashing of data, falsification of data. And you only need to read books like kind of Ben Goldacre's Bad Science as an example to get an idea of what companies have been capable of and have been influenced by kind of other kind of

anthropologists like Joseph Dummit, Drugs for Life, Gilbert T. Welch, Overdiagnosed, and various books like that that kind of give you an idea of some of the problem that people are facing and perhaps why, you know, one of my main assertions that thyroid blood tests can be a complete waste of time if you don't know the environment or

or the stress that someone's under, how much food they're eating. And while if you go and look at a clinical trial that's assessed something related to thyroid, unless you understand what the individual in the trial is exposed to, it's really difficult to get an idea of something that's effective or not. Yeah. I mean, you've got a really interesting background and some of the work you're putting out there, man, is highly respected. And I really appreciate people like yourself who

I guess, become an expert in this particular realm when it comes to thyroid health. So it's sort of, I'd love to, you know, explore some of the, you know, the far reaching effects of thyroid hormones in the body and sort of help to explain to my listeners why it has such broad reaching effects. Sure. Well, I still don't classify myself as an expert of any sorts because when you're starting a PhD, you realize some of the level of understanding you have is probably, you

not as good as you thought it was. So as much when I was starting my master's degree, I thought I knew nothing. I feel I know even less now. And part of that is probably looking at aspects of, you know, molecular science and how small and reductionist we can get and

I kind of put a post out this week about Hans Selye, who kind of really focused on the concept of supermolecular biology, understanding life, what's functioning, what's happening to the organism as such. And I think it's quite useful to keep a keen eye on what's happening at the molecular level, but understanding the broader implications for physiology and life, blood tests, and more importantly, symptom expression. So, you know, that's kind of...

what I'm really interested in is trying to get a broader grasp of how we can understand all the problems that are related to thyroid suppression. And I think ultimately get people to understand what they're in control of. I'm a big fan of Ivan Illich's work. He's made a really good argument that, you know,

technically people can be made into patients at the checkup. They're a person, now they're a patient. And that can come from, you know, very arbitrary numbers about what constitutes good and what constitutes bad. And, you know, there are probably many things that you kind of think, well, that's not right. And, you know, I kind of see those values not meaning what they're supposed to mean in a clinical perspective. And I think it just, again, it just comes down to creating more customers over time and being a customer from cradle to grave, not being...

kind of, you know, raise your kids in the way that you want and to the juxtaposition, not being able to die in the manner that you choose to die. So, you know, I think there's some implications of industry that I think permeate into people's daily lives. I think what I'm really motivated to do is to really make people understand that they are in charge of it and perhaps with a little hand-holding, they can see the path themselves about what creates more cohesion in biology and

concept of long range order and structure and self-ordering processes about how people maintain their physiology over a long time and don't need much interventions. They don't need to be put onto statins. They don't need to go on antihypertensives. Don't get me wrong. There are probably cases where people do really need that. However, when you understand the tenets that, you know, cholesterol is a really easy one to pick on.

Because you just go back to the Jupiter trials and know that they were cut short. The data was withheld from, you know, peer review. No one's really ever had a good chance to look at the proper trial data, but it was cut short for a reason. And there are some very obvious reasons why that was cut short. And so when you understand that cholesterol is an example of

is not necessarily related to kind of heart disease any more than, you know, anything else could be. I mean, we understand that the cholesterol accumulating in an artery is because there is damage going on in that particular area. There's calcification of the arteries, as an example. And when you bring that back, we know that thyroid hormone has a huge impact on cholesterol values, you know, whether it's receptors, whether it's cholesterol enzymes, liver function,

accumulation of issues like non-alcoholic fatty liver disease accumulation of fatty acids you know inability to use glucose efficiently and this is where i think unpackaging thyroid and looking at the problems associated with studies and um you know understanding that suppression of thyroid values or just an inaccurate thyroid value because of what's going on at the receptor what's going on metabolically this can be a problem and that's what i i'm really interested in doing

Yeah. You sort of mentioned, Keith, around the inability to utilize sugar or I guess glucose. Do you want to sort of expand upon that and sort of mention the implications in terms of thyroid function and carbohydrate metabolism? Yeah. So, I mean, if you look at some of the nutrition in the world,

I would say that current fads within nutrition is that carbohydrates are still being vilified to a degree. I think I saw a post yesterday from David Perlmutter saying, I'm sorry, honey, I was wrong about you. And it's like, I was criticizing someone and saying he was a really good scientist for admitting he's wrong. And I was like, well, you know, he's a doctor. You only need to go back to basic undergraduate studies and understand that carbohydrate is the essential source of the metabolism.

And we still get many people, I think, jumping on the bandwagon that just because they can't utilize carbohydrates, that carbohydrates the issue. And we know there are many tenets to kind of insulin, pancreatic thyroid signaling from glup transporters or glute transporters to essentially the thyroid itself. And, you know, there are dozens and dozens of studies based around metabolic syndrome that show that when you make someone new thyroid,

blood values come back to relatively normal expression. Well, why is that? Well, the pancreas, just like every other organ and every tissue in the body, is thyroid-dependent.

And when you have aspects about thyroid signaling, remember the pancreas produces many things. It produces enzymes, digestive enzymes. It produces insulin, a couple of other things in there as well. But if the energy to the pancreas is substantially decreased, the ability to respond with insulin production over time can be substantially decreased. And there's kind of an energy pathway between high insulin values based upon the glucose values. Because if you can't keep getting glucose into the cell because the thyroid is not working efficiently...

perhaps the electron transport chain or the aerobic mechanism is impaired, which means that you're not able to use carbohydrates efficiently. So if you take it perhaps to an N-range example in diabetics, we know that fatty acid oxidation in the heart

It's a primary kind of pathway, but the heart needs to be flexible. It still needs to function using carbohydrates. You know, that glucose fatty acid Randall cycle is still very prevalent for the heart. So we know that the failing heart can't utilize glucose efficiently, and we've seen an abundance of fatty acids being utilized as well. Now, when fatty acid oxidation is also impaired and we lose the ability to oxidize fats, primarily because

Carbohydrates have a higher respiratory quotient, so they produce more carbon dioxide. Fats don't. Fats also come with the negative byproduct when it's chronic of chronic lipid peroxides, increased superperoxides or superoxides. And when this gets problematic, we tend to be wasteful of enzymes that are protective like superoxide dismutase, glutathione, and nitroglycerides.

Then we start to see, you know, rampant production of, say, nitric oxide to try and vasodilate because there's issues with kind of

blood supply we can understand how the heart starts to degrade and then we see all these negative things and one of these negative things is seeing you know fatty acids being oxidized we see high glucose within the blood because it can't be used efficiently and we see high triglycerides as well particularly metabolic syndrome so this is perhaps one of the most basic failings of thyroid physiology now if you go and you're looking at someone who's stressed as an example and

And there are various tenants because some people are prone to overeating. Some people are prone to undereating. Some people eat just the right amounts of food. But if someone's stressed not eating properly, say they're prone to skipping breakfast. And we all know that, you know, one of the

first signs of stress is a loss of appetite, right? We don't like to produce hydrochloric acid, which is thyroid related. We don't feel hungry because we're permanently producing adrenaline and cortisol, you know, as well as the kind of lack of appetite, you know, the inability to sustain deep sleep is glucose related.

not being able to get to sleep, waking up chronically at multiple times, and then not feeling very hungry because you've been kind of dipping in and out of that stress state throughout the night. That, to me, is thyroid failing. And there can be other tenants with, you know, inflammation in various tissues and particularly the gastrointestinal tract. We've got to a point where we're kind of, you know, not feeling hungry, not able to digest our food. And this also comes back to pancreatic signaling as well, is that

If you can't stimulate the pancreas to produce the enzymes, you're not going to feel as hungry because you can't keep breaking down the food. The GI tract is getting problematic. And this was where everybody's kind of shifts away from glucose metabolism to kind of the microbiome and going, yeah, but the microbiome's out. We really need to replenish that. And it's like once you get the thyroid functioning and you produce enough stomach acid,

you produce enough pancreatic enzymes, you know, food gets broken down efficiently and goes into, it's sterile, goes into the rest of the digestive tract and into the intestines. And therefore metabolism is kind of, is optimal. You've got optimal breakdown of nutrients and you get optimal assimilation. So the kind of pancreatic signaling comes back to,

If the thyroid is suppressed, so digestion is suppressed. So is the ability to take up carbohydrates and use it efficiently at the cell. And then we have all the other issues that spill over and perhaps into kind of brain function. And perhaps the end range of this is where we're seeing altered physiology within the brain, diabetes to the brain, Alzheimer's or Parkinson's.

as an example. So I think understanding that if you can regulate your thyroid, you can regulate

the pancreas and insulin production efficiently. And there can be other reasons that I've been working with a young lady in Australia, actually, who's a type one diabetic, who she was actually eating pretty good anyway. She was eating regularly, eating some really good foods, including kind of carbohydrate rich foods like orange juice and things like that, which diabetics are told, you know, to stay away from. And we actually got onto some progesterone and the progesterone significantly decreased the amount of insulin that she needed to use. So

So there are kind of other tenants within, you know, thyroid physiology that permeate to kind of, you know, the gonads, sex hormone production, allowing other structures to work efficiently, which spill over into, you know, less need for the pancreas to be utilized all the time, you know, less stress on the pancreas, but there's less stress on the liver. If you have an optimal, say, aerobic system that's functioning, your ability to use carbohydrates is solid. It's there. And for me,

That's a prime example of someone who's healthy. And we know that when we lose the ability to use this aerobic mechanism and we kind of fall back on chronic glycolysis, chronic lactate production as an example, this is the pathway for sustained disease, especially cancers.

And, you know, even if it's not kind of going to cancer via mutation within the mitochondria or the cells and the aerobic function, this is where we start to see disordered systems, pancreatic signaling, tissues within the cardiovascular system, accumulation of various products within the central nervous system and the brain. So

I think, you know, it sometimes becomes hard to focus on, say, just the pancreatic signaling from the thyroid, because again, that becomes part of a systemic problem. But everyone likes to break it down and go, it's a carbohydrate issue. You need to cut carbohydrates out. You need to go keto. You need to go carnivore. And people can actually, you know, do some, create some useful changes and go, yeah, I feel really good. I've lost some weight. And, you know, for most people, that's the primary reason

symptom of success for them right that that's the marker for them and they don't really kind of look at the other things so you find a lot of people they come out of a keto carnival diet and they try to bring carbohydrates back in and might be a man that's efficient might be not and then they start going on gaining weight again or you know i'm having all these problems i'm not my sleep is still not improving and that's a thing i see from a lot of people coming from keto and carnival hair loss

sleep not improving blood sugar's not improving and all you're doing is removing glucose from the system for a lot of people that i've seen is you don't restore glucose metabolism efficiently because you haven't addressed thyroid function and if you haven't addressed thyroid function the pancreatic signaling isn't going to restore you know and all of the other mechanisms associated with some of the aerobic system you know not shifting away from glycolysis don't get me wrong this is kind of

Some of the end range stuff that you might see, unless you're going and testing lactate and things like that, perhaps it's just a guess. But we know that, you know, within cancer, as an example, that sustained glycolysis, fermentive metabolism is a cause of many problems, primarily because it shuts down thyroid as well. There's some really interesting stuff I've been looking at recently as part of my research is showing that actually cancers, they're actually the tissue is hypothyroid. Just that cancer...

tumour itself. And there's been some cases of, you know, shutting down T4 and reverse T3, but giving someone T3 still, and it's actually shrinks the tumours quite substantially. So a lot of people might think that, hang on, you just need to get thyroid working, adequate T4, making sure that's converting to T3. Truth.

That's a very potent mechanism. But sometimes there is very kind of nuances when you see kind of disease like cancer physiology as an example, that there is a very different nuance to the tissues. And this is why I think maintaining thyroid function throughout life is

is going to be the marker for longevity. And that's when you start getting into, you know, another whole discussion about a lot of people say that you see decreased thyroid hormones in people who are older. And it's like, well...

Actually, you could actually say that they're at the point now where their thyroid is even more starting to fail. The other people, you've been assessing them and saying they've been dying of cardiovascular disease. But if you don't really know how the thyroid's functioning, you're just assuming that their thyroid values were normal and they were dying in what we call a euthyroid state. So again, as we said, thyroid physiology goes through many tenets.

of discussion from society through to nutrition, through to longevity, digestion, sleep, fertility, everything. Yeah, really, really fascinating stuff. I think you did a great job at sort of breaking that down. What came up for me there, Keith, was in terms of assessing someone's thyroid hormone production, how much emphasis do you place on blood work versus external symptoms and things like that? I think any information that you can get is useful.

I've seen people who look totally normal in blood tests. And again, the clinical presentation that you would expect someone to pick up when they're going to see a clinician might be constipated, might be hair fall, might be high cholesterol values. It might be, you know,

bradycardia might be tachycardia you know there are various nuances to looking at how you might assess someone and again it comes back to understanding nutrition it comes back to understanding environment someone's living in emotional stress that they might be under so i do think the thyroid blood tests are useful i'm not saying that they're all totally useless and don't mean anything they're just

a tool that can be used to make a decision. But again, it also comes back to what you perceive as normal. And most thyroid associations will say that if it's, you know, about four to five MULs, depending on the measurement you're looking at and what area of geography you're looking at, is that that's completely normal. And I mentioned this to someone the other day in a podcast. It's like, well, if you look at some of the

suggested diagnosis now within pregnancy and also within depression, there's quite a few papers that have said, I think there are some standpoints that says you shouldn't let the TSH go above 2.5. So if you're kind of suggesting that both depression and pregnancy require lower TSH values with

what are perceived to be normal free T4 values, then you're talking about sustaining life optimally through the gestational period. Why do you think that doesn't extend to kind of normal function and life, you know, outside of pregnancy? And this is where I think the problem is.

And also, you know, I'll quote Ray Peet, who said he never saw anyone that was actually healthy with a TSH above two. I think that's pretty spot on, to be honest. And I've always perceived the pituitary response as a stress response. It's a fallback mechanism. Not to say that, you know,

It's not important, but to the extent that we can maintain optimal peripheral conversion of thyroid hormones, particularly the liver, kidneys, muscle tissues, just an example, if that is efficient, we don't have to keep falling back on these mechanisms. And we know that a lot of the pituitary hormones, when they're produced in excess, growth hormone, prolactin, TSH even as an example, are associated with disease progression. So

And there are many doctors that have suggested it can take years before TSH gets to the point where it's over kind of hypothyroidism. Right. And you know,

clinicians wanting to see that TSH value above five, reduce T4 as an example, and really not kind of understanding what goes on with T3 and also reverse T3. So pulling those blood tests out and also comparing total T4 and T3, I think is useful as well, rather than saying, well, you know, the free T3 and T4, they're the most bioavailable. These are what we should be looking at. You know,

If you don't know what's going on with the thyroid carrier protein, transthyretin, albumin to a degree, obviously thyroid binding globulin, these are going to give us perhaps...

wayward values that really don't mean anything what's going on at the receptor how much thyroid hormone is being taken up now that's kind of you know the more gene expressing mechanisms rather than the metabolic mechanisms so if you're seeing people with you know reduced body temperature as an example low heart rate and the low heart rate can be

you know, the sign that the thyroid isn't allowing the heart tissue to get enough T3 and therefore doesn't contract and relax efficiently. Therefore it becomes slower, becomes fibrotic, you know, arteries are prone to calcification and then cholesterol being deposited there. So I think that without going meandering too far off and bring myself back in to the original question, I think the blood tests are useful, but they can't be relied upon. Yeah. Cool. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. I mean, I've been personally been, you know, taking my morning temperatures and I do quite a lot of blood testing myself to assess my own thyroid hormones and my TSH sort of sits around maybe 0.8 or 1-ish. T3 is pretty much maxed out as high as possible and then T4 is moderate within range. And, yeah, one thing that did pop up, though, is –

What are the implications of cortisol and how does cortisol fit into the whole, you hear people talk about you don't want to be relying on cortisol to bring you energy. So do you want to sort of link the cortisol there? Sure. Well, obviously there are some people I think in the functional medicine world, when I remember studying, talked about the concept of the HPAT or HPTA, the hypothyroid pituitary thyroid syndrome.

adrenal axis, which draws upon the feedback loops that we have. There is a substantial interplay between the two. We know that when people are stressed out, they're prone to producing more adrenaline and cortisol. When people are inflamed, perhaps markers that you can see, something like C-reactive protein as an example, we know that there's often more cortisol because

Cortisol is an anti-inflammatory hormone. It does a great job of kind of lowering inflammation. And to the extent that, I mean, there are various things to probably unpack with cortisol is that the adrenal glands are thyroid dependent.

So all glands are thyroid dependent. So if you're in a low thyroid state, your ability to produce cortisol can be diminished, but there might be a compensatory mechanism going on. But also when we're stressed and when we're kind of not eating enough, you produce more of the glucocorticoids like cortisol and they have an inhibitory effect on TSH. So the more kind of stress that we're under, it makes the TSH look relatively normal and indeed even low.

So that's why a lot of people, unless you understand how much stress someone's under, if you're chronically skipping meals and going through that process of liberating energy via gluconeogenesis and the production of energy by breaking down fats and sometimes proteins as a fuel, then this has a suppressive effect on thyroid hormones, particularly TSH. So it's important to understand that if you're producing a lot of these kind of

adrenal hormones, it can, again, make the blood tests look completely normal. You can get to a point, I think, where adrenals do need support as well. I used to be quite set in stone that the thyroid was the

Always the issue. And I think there can be sometimes a need for supporting the adrenals more. Might be something like progesterone or pregnenolone to make sure they're getting more of the base hormone for hormone conversion if needed. So I think that's always useful to pack and make sure, you know, you've got adequate cholesterol values, adequate B6, adequate vitamin A to support

cortisol but again yes rampant cortisol can have a negative effect on thyroid function and i think there are things to work out you know but again we could come back to things like temperature as an example pulse can also be useful because pulse rate we tend to think of low thyroid function associated with bradycardia as an example but it could can also be tachycardia if someone's thyroid is so suppressed and they're running off you know chronic adrenaline production

So that's why, you know, it's very easy sometimes to look at someone's heart rate and think, oh, God, they're hypothyroid. And it's like, well, the temperature's low. They look like they're kind of hypo, not that the visual representation is always accurate. But then when you start giving them regular meals, you notice their heart rate drop down below 100%.

And it's because they're not running off adrenaline all the time. They're not trying to liberate energy from this gluconeogenesis, which is, you know, we, we, you term it kind of perhaps the stress response, but it's like, it's a normal pathway that's there to back us up. But to the extent that it's chronically maintained and you're breaking down factors as a fuel all the time, and perhaps proteins, then this can be kind of detrimental in itself. So, but it's, you know, we,

we will switch between, like for example, females during the menstrual cycle when, you know, during the follicular phase, go through glycolysis within the uterus and the surrounding structures because estrogen's primary function is often...

stimulates glycolysis and also what's going on around the rest of the structures there to help it get through the menstrual cycle. And then progesterone comes in, has this anti-estrogen effect and switches back towards oxidative metabolism. So there are various switches that are going on and off all the time. And it's kind of

It's similar to the cortisol pathway to the extent we're kind of using that all the time and not doing enough to kind of inhibit it. We shouldn't suppress it totally. We need it to a degree, but it's like when it's rampant, it's going to have a negative effect on thyroid function. You know, you can start to see issues related to, you know, pain issues, arthritic issues, you know, the loss of anti-inflammatory hormone production, which can be problematic.

There's also something else I'd like to discuss, Keith, and that is sort of the implications and the roles of the various B vitamins in conjunction with thyroid hormones. So do you want to sort of explain their complementary roles?

Sure. It's not something I've looked at for some time, but my understanding is particularly with electron transport chain, aerobic metabolism, I think thiamine deficiency is implicated in a lot of aerobic metabolism dysfunctions, as can be B2 and other vitamins as well. So I think

What's quite interesting to point out is that particularly with females, probably have a higher need because when there's an abundance of oestrogen and the liver becomes impaired, if they don't get enough B vitamins, their ability to metabolize oestrogen becomes compromised.

So if you think you get a kind of a double whammy of decreased liver function, decreased aerobic metabolism, and if the estrogen is chronic, glycolysis production can be a part of that. And I think that's one of the implicated pathways

in oncogenesis and cancer. And we know that estrogen is a significant component of this pathway. And so this is where I think maintaining those B1, B2s in particular is very important for maintaining aerobic metabolism, primarily for liver function, but other tissue function as well. I think it almost kind of adds into the idea that why females are 10 times more likely to suffer from autoimmune issues or

hyperthyroidism. So we could argue that in some cases that understanding if someone's got enough B vitamins can be a useful support. And I think that's something we want to kind of tick the box for prior to kind of thinking about thyroid therapy. And that's why I'd rather go with just a B complex for most people, because it can be quite useful.

I'm not really someone who goes down the route of lots of testing. I've done that before. You know, if people have got the money, they can go in and do an organic acids test and look at the profiling there. But I've kind of got to the stage now where the way I like to work is minimal testing, feeling what's going on, looking at the basics like temperature and pulse, sleep quality, digestion, mood, sleep.

you know all of these aspects don't get me wrong i will use those tests if things i'm doing aren't working they're always a fallback but at the end of the day i think you know just you know we can get a lot of those nutrients from food to support what's going on sometimes with females there's a need to to go with that you know after that if the b vitamins are adequate then it might be that the thyroid is being suppressed whether it's high estrogen we know whether it's uh environmental pollutants whether it's stresses whether it's inheritable traits but yeah i

yeah, I think that the components of B vitamins are essential to understand that energy production can be inhibited by a lack of B vitamins for sure. Awesome. Awesome. So Keith, I'd love to get your perspective on, might be a little bit controversial, are the omega-3s from seafood? I'd love to hear about your thoughts there. Sure. So this is quite a contentious area and I've kind of

tried to unpack my level understanding with this. And a lot of people kind of go with the ideas that omega-3 is a heart protective and anti-inflammatory.

They tend to have an effect where they suppress the pathways of inflammation. One of the primary mechanisms, and still I'm happy to be proved wrong on this, and I kind of read a lot of Ray Peet's work that influenced me on this, I think omega-3 should be kept to a very bare minimum. And again, when we look at the disease states, like in the diabetic heart as an example, or

or kind of neurological issues like Parkinson's, there's often an abundance of these and an excess of these. So we have to kind of wonder why are these in excess? And I think another component of this is the supposed cardiac risk. And there's a lot of studies and suggestions and narrative that cholesterol, as an example, is lowered by increasing the omega-3s within the diet. And I think this is not perhaps always

a positive pathway. But if you're looking at the concept of cardiac risk, cardiac risk, I remember when I was a fitness instructor, we had seven things with the American College of Sports Medicine that were defined as cardiac risk. And I think that things are pretty similar now. But if your cholesterol was high,

that's a level of cardiac risk right now depending on where you sit i mean i see many blood tests coming from clients in the u.s and you've got these big red numbers in cholesterol going and it's like i'm looking at again that cholesterol value is absolutely fine and there are some huge studies there's a really big one that came out of korea showing that you know cholesterol values of 5.5 to 6.4 or 5 are absolutely pretty normal and

were associated with increased longevity, but anybody who had lower cholesterol values was dying earlier. So there's still kind of many contentious issues with kind of heart disease, longevity, and the idea of cardiac risk. And I think omega-3s,

One of the primary reasons I think they might be problematic is what they do to the cell membrane. And when there's an abundance of them, they tend to make the cell membrane quite leaky. You see a lot of people going, you need membrane fluidity. And I think membrane fluidity is a bit of a misnomer. And I won't pretend...

I'm an expert on any level of this, but again, and there's another contentious area within biology about how the cell membrane functions. So people suggest that when you kind of, it's very easy to put phospholipids, unsaturated phospholipids into the cell membrane just by increasing them in the diet. And this is supposed to make them more fluid. But there's quite a few studies that have shown that when you have an abundance of say DHA, the omega-3,

at the cell membrane, it makes it quite leaky. Now you can actually go and stab holes in cell membranes and they still don't get leaky, but you can give them omega-3s at the membrane and it does make them leaky. And there are various other kind of poisons that have this effect as well. Now omega-3 is being used within cancer therapies as well to make chemotherapy more efficient. So it makes the cell membrane leakier, chemotherapy kind of toxic agents can go into the cancer cell

and make the cell die, go through apoptosis, this kind of programmed cell death. Now, I think if you're looking at that, you're going, well, if it makes chemotherapy more toxic, what is the accumulation of these products over time? But a lot of people keep focusing on the idea that cardiac risk is going down simply just by having a lower cholesterol value.

So we don't know what the sustained effects are chronically with that. And I still don't see any studies that show that people who have omega-3s live longer. And, you know, when you're looking at studies that are just looking at kind of food questionnaires, you can't really make any assumptions. And I think this comes down to the organization and coherence of a cell. And I think an abundance of these fatty acids is causing problems. And so, you know, I'm sitting on the fence with this for now, but that's, I'm sitting on the fence when I say,

I don't think that chugging down on omega-3s is going to increase anybody's lifespan. I think keeping them to a minimum because they're an abundance of foods. If you eat a good amount of seafood like oysters or shrimp, you will get a certain amount of these foods in there. You also get an abundance of other really good thyroid-supportive nutrients like selenium and zinc as an example.

You've got to kind of unpack some of the assumptions made from food questionnaires simply by just saying, OK, the omega three to six ratio needs to be improved for cardiac health and that will restore longevity. And it's like, well, let's see all the other factors that perhaps lead to making somebody more robust or kind of fragile over time. So my belief system is

that omega-3s, as an example, shouldn't be taken in abundance. I think even the polyunsaturated fatty acids, you know, some are quite protective. I mean, you know, olive oil, quite protective. And in fact, some of these kind of monounsaturated fatty acids as well seem to be quite protective, particularly with cell function. It's when we get an abundance of fats that I think in the diet that can be problematic. They can

also kind of bind to, in fact, you know, there's some really interesting studies that show that DHA has a quite a high capacity to bind to transthyretin, which is a thyroid carrier protein, and displaced T4. Now, saturated fatty acids can do this at a higher level, but they're more prone to kind of hijacking by the unsaturated fatty acids. And transthyretin

is not the most abundant thyroid carrier protein, thyroid binding protein is, but trans-thyretin is the kind of primary carrier within the brain. So if you're getting displacement of, you know,

trans-thyretin with fatty acids, particularly unsaturated fatty acids, then you're going to get relative or local states of hypothyroidism, as an example, within the brain. And I think this is where there's some really interesting areas to look at with regards to Alzheimer's, because a lot of people seem to think that there are low levels of DHA, and this might be the reason that people get Alzheimer's. But actually, you know,

We come back to the kind of the cell membrane as an example. The unsaturated phospholipids are the first fatty acids that can be removed from the cell to be used as a fuel.

So if you've got a diabetes of the brain and it can't use glucose efficiently, then you're going to see the fats being utilized at a faster rate because glucose can't be used. And you'll see an abundance of perhaps glucose in these areas. So I think, you know, there's a correlation between low omega-3s in the central nervous system in Alzheimer's, specifically in dementia, not Parkinson's. In fact, with Parkinson's in certain areas,

particularly around the substantia nigra, you're seeing an accumulation of fatty acids like you are in the heart, particularly DHA. And this is where there are quite a few studies that when you make someone new thyroid, the Parkinson's and Alzheimer's symptoms seem to drastically decrease. So again, I think the capacity of

omega-3s to distort thyroid function and how to look at that appropriately within a broad range of kind of studies and tests is what we should be looking at rather than just you know going down the cardiac risk i know i wasn't really succinct about that but i think there's there's quite a lot to talk about with it oh that's that's cool i'd like to yeah share my experience with omega-3 supplement

When I was younger, you know, like at the end of sort of high school, I was using quite a lot of omega-3 supplements. Then one day I sort of decided, well, what would happen if I just stopped taking them? And then I remember like an alleviation of this like heaviness and dullness and brain fog. I'm like, you know, this is weird because like, you know, after years of using omega-3s, I thought they were helping with

cognition and things like that but i no longer use any omega-3 supplements i might use you know have some seafood two to three times a week yeah primarily my main protein source is you know red meat so yeah the studies on cognition is like there are several studies that

I think mothers being exposed to higher levels of unsaturated fatty acids and fish oils in particular, and also in baby formula. And actually they've fared worse in cognition and developmental tests. Now, there are plenty of studies that show that perhaps there might be useful, but there are certainly no clear-cut studies that say, yes, this has a very good effect. And we know that actually the brain...

in utero and when it's first born has very low levels of unsaturated fatty acids. And I think that's the reason behind that. So it's like, if there are studies showing that the development's getting worse, I think these are the studies that we need to look at and kind of pay attention to. Yeah. What I'd love to touch on, Keith, is how do you go about sort of calculating or estimating how many grams of carbohydrates one needs to support thyroid function? Like, how do you sort of go about that?

Yeah. I mean, it depends how you want to be specific. When I coach clients, I'm not saying here you need 200 grams of carbohydrate a day. I'm not really into that. I'm not into body composition. That's not really what I'm interested in. I'm interested around getting rid of people's energy, digestion, improving sleep issues, making them more fertile. So I encourage the clients to play around with that themselves. So it might be someone needs

50% carbohydrates might be 60 or 70 within the diet. And I kind of just get them to play around with that. You know, there's certainly a minimum value. I don't think people do very well under 100 grams of carbohydrate a day. And you specifically see people coming in thinking just throwing loads of carbohydrates after they've kind of been restricting them for a long period of time is going to do wonderful things. It's like your body's probably not going to be quite used to that. So I kind of look at trying to avoid kind of weight gain with clients.

You know, I kind of do go through the process of getting people to eat five or six smaller meals a day to start with and playing around with that. And then I might get them going back to three square meals a day because that's what they're good with, getting a bit of hunger in between. But some people, you know, I'm just playing around with kind of sensations of hunger and just...

managing to maintain sleep through the night, avoiding weight gain if kind of they've had a hard time utilizing carbs before. But yeah, you know, getting people up somewhere between 100 and 200 grams of carbohydrate, depending on their need. Some people need even a bit more if they're super athletic. So

I don't have too much specifics and nuance with that as a value. And certainly if you're kind of more interested in kind of body comp, then there are people more skilled at that who can do that.

And what about in terms of the source of the carbohydrates? There's something we haven't discussed, and that is fructose. Yeah, I don't think fructose is bad. I think like anything, you can consume too much of it. I think also coming back to the idea of the pancreatic insulin signaling, a lot of people blame fructose. But for an example, you can activate something called the polyol pathway,

And that's kind of implicated in diabetes progression because the end product of that is fructose accumulation via, you get a blockage, I think it's succinate dehydrogenase, and this starts accumulating kind of more fructose. And I think that that's just when there's an abundance of glucose, this tends to take place. And everyone blames it, go, oh, it's the fructose accumulating. But if the liver, if the pancreas isn't functioning again because of the thyroid,

not working efficiently. And if the liver is accumulating kind of glucose into triglycerides, as an example, and other fatty acids, the liver's not functioning, the liver's sluggish, the liver's not converting enough T4 to T3, then this can end up blaming the amount of

carbohydrates and particularly fructose, but it might be this polyol pathway that's driving that response. So I think it's important not to keep blaming fructose. I think it's good to kind of, you know, have a different source, you know, glucose rich foods, you know, fructose, which I don't think is demanding on the liver as people make out, but it's just this, this kind of activation of the polyol pathway. Magnesium deficiency can be implicated in that.

But I think it's just kind of the accumulation of the glucose when thyroid signaling isn't optimal, when the electron or the aerobic metabolism isn't working efficiently. You know, it might be some cofactors that aren't in there, might be some thyroid cofactors, might be going back to B vitamins and energy production again. This might be just one of the reasons why we're seeing these kind of high values.

or it might just come back to some of the signaling mechanisms between the glute transporters. But I still think that can be substantially related to thyroid function. Awesome. Awesome. Hey, I'd love to dive into, I guess, some situations and unusual cases where you've corrected thyroid

thyroid hormone production or you've added in thyroid and some unrelated or unknown health issue just goes away. I'd love to hear about some stories there. Gosh, there are so many. But it's important to say I'm not a doctor. I can't diagnose. I never give people thyroid hormone. I furnish them enough information for them to make decisions. So they educate themselves. I don't think, don't get me wrong, if you're

very fragile and immediate risk of a heart attack. It's not even something you should be thinking about, but taking thyroid is very safe for most people. And they, they're quite capable of making their decisions once they've read enough research around it. So I encourage people to do the reading, to make decisions themselves. If there are permanently low temperatures, things aren't improving sleep, you know, blood glucose values, cholesterol, it's something that you should be considering. But, you know, I've seen kind of clients, you know, sometimes it

It's the weight issue. Sometimes it's totally unrelated to weight. I've certainly seen clients, you know, sleep through the night when they have adequate thyroid hormone.

You know, sometimes you can argue the idea is that you don't need thyroid hormone because there are a certain amount of people like 65, 70% of clients I work with, their thyroid is suppressed because they're not getting enough carbs in or they're not eating enough food. Therefore, the thyroid doesn't get a chance to function properly. But then there are a certain number of clients that do need that response. And I've seen anything from cholesterol values improve. I've seen clients get pregnant. I've seen constipation resolve.

It's pretty the full gamut of thyroid symptoms. People get warmer, brain fog lift. I've seen clients who are damaged by a vaccine historically improve their thyroid function. The brain fog's lifted substantially.

There are just many things that I think that thyroid can resolve. And it doesn't necessarily always need to be thyroid hormone. There are thyroid supporting things. We talk about the cofactors like selenium and zinc. Bear in mind the thyroid receptors are zinc fingers.

and that may have an impact but you know there are aspects from supplements or compounds like taurine which can be pro-thyroid which i think is really really good i think seeing my sleep kind of improves reasonably well by starting touring which i think has been quite nice certainly a deeper sleep and i also think methylene blue which kind of tends to increase thyroid hormones as well i've seen some do some wonderful things so as much as i'm kind of pro-thyroid i

I think there are a number of things that people can consider. And going back to the B vitamins again, it might seem like it's a thyroid deficiency, but it might be a simple B vitamin deficiency that's driving that. But I think the more that we're seeing kind of rampant pollution and stress and malnutrition, abundance of pollution in foods, kind of highly oxidized foods that tend to cause problems with the aerobic metabolism. And, you know, we go back to that.

point with cancer tumours that are very low in thyroid and the aerobic system doesn't work very well. You know, there are clear cases there where adequate T3 has done some wonderful things, not in my work, but in these kind of advanced kind of cancer cases where I think that's very potent and very impressive. So I think that there can be

Like I said, I can't think specifically right now, putting me on the spot, but I was in clients' digestion, mood, fertility, sleep, cholesterol values, blood glucose values, HbA1c values improve, menstrual cycle. It can be something that restores as well. Usually there's some interplay between higher estrogen levels, lower progesterone levels, nutrition.

that could play a big part in that as well. So it doesn't necessarily mean that they need thyroid, but again, I have seen some substantial changes with it for sure. Yeah. I think the clear cut takeaway there is the amazing adaptogenic potential of thyroid in the body. You just sort of mentioned some of those things that's corrected. Yeah.

And, I mean, I've seen that happen, you know, with other people as well. Like you see them correcting a lot of things. There was one stealth marker we didn't really get a chance to discuss, but I'd like to quickly touch on it is reverse T3. It's one of those markers that rarely gets assessed. Yeah. Let's talk about maybe why it's neglected and what's its function in the body.

Well, if you go to, again, if you go to, I've got some big classic endocrine textbooks there that don't even mention it. It's like they don't even mention premenstrual syndrome in there. Like it doesn't exist in your kind of classic endocrine textbooks. And reverse T3 sometimes get a very small mention or it's just totally ignored. Some clinicians, a lot of clinicians tend to think it's totally pointless. It's not metabolically active. It's primary kind of consideration is,

And again, used by integrative practitioners is the role that it might be acting as a metabolic break. T4 should convert to T3.

when the outer ring is deiodinated. So T4 is kind of an iodine molecule is removed to give us this kind of nice kind of, you know, very functional metabolic kind of health restoring action of T3. Now, if there's an excess of T4, it might be deiodinated to the inner ring, which is reverse T3. So you can unpack this in a couple of different values. If you think there's rampant inflammation going on,

then you might come to the conclusion that T4 is being converted to reverse T3 because T3 can't be used efficiently. Why might that be happening? Could it be an issue with the thyroid receptor? We get certain pollutants that act as something called a ligand binding where it kind of fits into the thyroid receptor. That might be an issue. And therefore, we might assume that if there are higher values of reverse T3, it might be because T3 is not being used.

There's another point to that, and I'll just kind of quickly suggest that, is that if you have a high reverse T3 and you compare that with a ratio of, say, free T3 or total T3, you can get an idea of where, if that needs to be a certain value. So, for example, some people suggest that a free T3 to reverse T3 ratio should be higher than 20.

Now, depending on what values you're looking at, you need to kind of add a couple of zeros on them, divide it by the reverse T3. Then there's the component that some people look at doing a total T3 test and dividing that by the reverse T3 to come up with a ratio. And some suggest that should be between 10 and 15 with an upper reference range of free T3 above 20%.

So I kind of like that one because that's quite useful because you're comparing the total T4 with the reverse T3 and kind of making the distinction that free T3 should be upper range. And I think that upper range of free T3 is where we should always be at because it's constantly being turned over and it should be being turned over. Now, bringing it back to the disease state again, a tumor often has high levels of T4, high levels of reverse T3, high levels of deodinase 3,

which also ends up degrading T3 down further and also sends it down its kind of degradation pathway at the liver. So you get kind of upregulation of the, you know, sulfation and glucuronidation of T3. The problem is, again, it suggested that T4 and reverse T3, when they're elevated, could be implicated in tumor formation.

Now T4 and reverse T3 have a specific non-genomic effect that are associated with fibrosis. So I think, again, it's kind of not sitting on the fence, but understanding that yes, reverse T3 could be higher when there's rampant inflammation going on, which may suggest that T3 is not being utilized or assimilated, taken up at the appropriate sites.

but in cancer cells as an example is that reverse t3 can be very elevated because the tumor itself has a specific microenvironment that doesn't allow t3 to be used it maintains glycolysis and this fermentive or the walberg effect maintains wasteful use of glucose and some of the studies what they can suggest is that as i said if you kind of

make someone hypothyroxinemic, i.e. restrict their ability to use T4, so give them a thyroid kind of a slowing medication, that stops them producing T4, which then stops them producing reverse T3. And that seems to have a very protective effect on tumours and shrinks tumours quite substantially. However, what they found is that you need to give someone T3 to have this effect. So it's restoring...

the tumor status to euthyroid, which stops glycolysis, which stops this kind of increased lactate production, switches to kind of aerobic metabolism and allows cells around it to go through this kind of usual program cell death. And, you know, with cancer cells, they kind of, you know,

the concept of increased telomeres and what they call replicative immortality. Cancer cells want to keep going on and on forever, and they don't care what's going on around them. They just keep breaking tissues and fuel sources around them. And that's in a relative state of hypothyroidism. So just without rambling too much, just to understand that

There are cases when perhaps reverse T3 combined with other thyroid hormones can be useful to get an idea of if there's a problem metabolically, but also a high reverse T3 without looking at the T3 and perhaps TSH levels will always generally look normal within this. But the T3 within that specific area might be kind of very, very low. So it's important to understand that there are various nuances to looking at reverse T3.

Amazing, amazing. My final question for you, Keith, is are there any areas of research that you're really, I know you sort of said the pollution, the implications there on thyroid health, but any areas of research you're really excited to see more of? I think there's so much thyroid research still not done yet.

My idea with my study is to look at how, you know, different hormones might elicit different responses. And it may be that we get to look at some of these markers. There are some studies on this role of T4 with reverse T3 and something called the integrin AVB3 receptor, which is like this non-genomic pathway. So it's metabolic. And T4, when it's high, can be implicated in fibrosis and tumor formation and also in

you know, angiogenesis and metastasis. So I think the concept of understanding the metabolic effects of

Perhaps when people are prescribed the standard thyroid hormone, levothyroxine, there are implications with that and shifting away to more appropriate mechanisms like T3 or T4, T3 combos. And that's the kind of research I'm kind of trying to diagnose, which is going to take place over the next six years. So that's something I'm really personally interested in. I do think that there's a kind of...

not a purposeful suppression of thyroid physiology, but when you think it ties into statin medication production, glucophage, metformin profit and industry, I think you can perhaps see why there's not as many studies on this as there should be. So that's what I'm interested in personally. I think anything I'm really interested in, because I don't understand it enough, is the concept of

membrane of the cell. And, you know, if you come across Gerald Pollack's work and Gilbert Ling's and how the idea that the cell membrane, that the lipid bilayer isn't as important as we think it is. And there are more complex proteins and ordered water structures that perhaps are more responsible for ions being absorbed into the cell rather than these complex pump pathways. And, you know, the questions of whether you have up to 400 pumps

in a perceived cell membrane. It's like, where do all these pumps go and where's the land space for them? So I think if that turns out to be kind of getting more research by certainly cleverer people than myself and looking at the idea of kind of Gilbert Lings and Trochan and Vladimir Metviv works and Gerald Pollack's work and the idea of structured water and interfaces between the cell and other structures, I think that's something that could be groundbreaking.

That's something I'd really like to see more of. Amazing. All right. Well, Keith, I want to let my listeners know, like if they want to connect with you and learn more about some of the things you spoke about today, you know, where can they find you? Sure. My website is balancedbodymind.com. It's kind of also reflecting my kind of therapy stuff, which I stopped doing last year. So I don't tend to do that much anymore. Instagram, Tomo Littlewood. People need to email Keith at balancedbodymind.com. So I appreciate the shout out. Thank you.

Awesome. So I'll make sure to leave those linked in the show notes for those listening in. But Keith, thank you so much for coming on the show. Pleasure. Thank you everyone for joining in to today's episode. For in-depth show notes and lessons learned, visit nofilter.media forward slash boost your biology. This has been a No Filter Media production. Say what you want.

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