Why Are Thyroid Issues on the Rise?
Thyroid Disorders Affect 20 Million Americans
It feels like everywhere you turn these days, someone is dealing with a thyroid issue.
Early in my practice, I might see one or two hypothyroid patients a week. Later on, I was seeing four or five a day.
Thyroid disorders now affect more than 20 million Americans. Hashimoto’s disease, an autoimmune thyroid condition, has absolutely skyrocketed over the last 20 years.
You have to ask yourself: What has changed?
I think there are two key pieces to this puzzle.
The first piece is leaky gut. This is damage to the intestinal lining that allows partially digested proteins to slip into the bloodstream.
Under normal circumstances, proteins from food get broken down into individual amino acids. But with leaky gut, chunks of partially digested protein escape into the bloodstream instead.
That leads us to the second piece. Molecular mimicry.
Take gluten, for example. The protein in wheat looks suspiciously similar to thyroid tissue. Certain sequences of amino acids in the gluten protein almost perfectly line up with the sequences found in your thyroid.
This sets the stage for something called cross-reactivity.
Your immune system is not reacting to whole gluten. It is reacting to fragments of partially digested gluten proteins that leak into the bloodstream. Those fragments look so much like thyroid tissue that the immune system builds antibodies that can attack both.
It is a classic case of mistaken identity. Molecular mimicry is the mechanism. Cross-reactivity is the outcome.
We know there is a strong overlap between celiac disease, non-celiac gluten sensitivity, and thyroid disorders. In my practice, I have seen patients with Hashimoto’s improve simply by eliminating gluten.
The science is not always black and white. But the clinical patterns are hard to ignore.
So if you have Hashimoto’s, have you ever tried eliminating gluten? Did you notice any difference at all?
Authored by Gerard Guillory, MD
Gerard Guillory, MD, is a board-certified internist who practiced for nearly four decades with a focus on functional, root-cause medicine. He is the author of three books on irritable bowel syndrome and the founder of It’s My Health, where he and his team put current health news in context and help members understand the underlying causes of chronic symptoms.
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