I had an unnecessary hemithyroidectomy (despite having no symptoms) about 5 years ago for a benign goiter after my second pregnancy and have felt unwell ever since. I could never find a dose of synthroid that would work well. I would need a dosage adjustment upwards in the late fall and then in the spring I would feel hyper and need to lower the dose. This went on for 3 years in a row and I finally asked my Dr. if this could be due to Vitamin D since it’s the only seasonal variation that made sense to me. She of course said that was unlikely.

I did lots of reading on the topic and found that many people that have half a thyroid don’t need supplementation, so I asked her if I could try going off the meds to see if my thyroid could make enough hormone on it’s own. Other than being tired and having heavy periods I felt not too bad. At 3 months I was iron deficient so I started consuming liver once or twice per month, and after about 3 months started feeling ill with joint pain, digestive problems, fatigue, insomnia. It took me another 6 months to figure out that people who have familial hyperlipidemia have a tendency to overdose on levels of vit A that would be fine for most people. Too much vit A leads to a relative deficiency in vit D. Here are a few of the papers that finally gave me some answers:
http://www.annals.org/cgi/content/abstract/105/6/877

http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/71/4/878#R25

And again the symptoms worsened in the fall. I developed a cold that lasted 4 months! Finally I insisted my DR. check my vitamin D level and in September it was 72 nmol/L. She was surprised and put me on 1000 IU of vit D3. Over the next year I waffled between taking synthroid or Armour and going off it because I felt so awful and didn’t know what was wrong. I think the Vitamin A was confounding the recovery process. A major breakthrough came a couple of months ago. I was on the lowest dose of synthroid (in the fall of course), my thyroid function had improved enough over the past 2 years that the lowest dose was enough, and I started taking 5000 IU of vitamin D. Within 2 weeks, I started having severe hyperthyroid symptoms. I told my Dr. that I thought the vit D was improving thyroid function and that I wanted to go off the synthroid yet again. Within 2 weeks the hyper feeling slowly subsided. I’ve upped my dose of D to 10 000 IU and I am feeling better daily. I am waiting 3 months before having my thyroid levels and vit D checked again by my Doctor. My only remaining symptoms are joint pain (less now than a year ago), and mild fatigue, even the constant hunger, despite being on a low carb diet, (which made me feel great before the surgery) has resolved. My mood is much better and my mental clarity has improved dramatically. Over the past year my TSH off medication has dropped from 12 to 4. I am hoping that in 3 months or so it will be almost normal.

Here is one of a few papers I found about low levels of Vitamin D following a hemithyroidectomy:
http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?Doi=182696

I had my iodine level tested (24 hr.urinary iodine loading test) and it was found to be normal. I wonder now if the nodule was cause by low levels of vit D during two winter pregnancies along with a prenatal supplement which was high in Vitamin A relative to Vitamin D in a Vitamin A toxicity susceptible person. I found a few papers on-line which suggest vit A can be a cause of thyroid goiter.

Bottom line, all the symptoms you mentioned can be caused by low vitamin D levels. A very simple solution to a complicated problem. So get your levels tested. Here is a link to the vitamin D council’s web site. http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/

THYROID (low with incapacitating chills – related to low carb? – how to get medical treatment with normal TSH and how to get natural desiccated prescribed) Does low thyroid relates to Diabetes type 2?

HORMONES, MIGRAINES (especially hormonal migraines, even with bioidentical)

DEPRESSION, RAGE (serotonin sources? what do you recommend when antidepressants don’t work?)

DIGESTION: does systemic Candida cause permanent digestive damage?

SUPPLEMENTS: what’s the best plan and testing for levels vitamins, minerals, iodine, iron/anemia?

PROTEIN/FAT Is a diet of all fullfat cheese ok if that’s all you can digest?

HYPERSENSITIVIES to almost everything, unable to digest most foods, supplements

CHANGING CIRCADIAN after quitting smoking: from nightowl to morning lark

INFLAMMATION, MERCURY POISONING, HYPERHISTAMINE (niacin, hives), EXCITOTOXINS/msg etc.

HOW CAN WE FIND A DOCTOR LIKE YOU (even a weak facsimile)? I’ve had a lot of “medical care” that keeps me getting sicker and sicker, and wonder if it’s possible to reverse. Lowcarb keeps blood glucose in check.

Thank you very much for all the information based on your take on medical science.
3 wise men bearing gifts of knowledge: Gary Taubes, Richard Bernstein, Michael Eades.

http://www.threebrothershealth.com/2009/07/006-health-food-diet-dr-weil.html

the site has some interesting articles that you could spin ideas off of…

What can I say? He has simply moved the grains up a notch in the pyramid. Still not what I would condider a great diet even with the fruits and vegetables on the bottom.

Slow Burn – Is there any benefit from the return stroke being slow as well? (hoping to reduce the amount of time even more!)

I think I’m correct in saying that High Carb + High Sat Fat is bad – Above what level of carbs does this apply?

It’s better to have a blow out once per week than to have one daily. Better yet to have one every two weeks. But, better to not have one at all.

The high-carb + high-sat fat diet is bad, but only because of the carbs. I would suspect that the sat fats are actually somewhat protective. It’s the carbs that do the damage, not the fat.

-Flax? Are the phytoestrogens a concern? I avoid soy but do use flax sometimes for LC baked goods. But then I cringe about whether this is a good idea. Perhaps you could address soy isoflavones, etc. as well for those who do use soy.

-More on PCOS…d-chiro-inositol? Interplay of vitamin D (there have been some studies showing upping vitamin D helped restore cycles), calcium and magnesium? A cluster of different “syndromes” related to fertility but all under the blanket of PCOS? I’m not overweight, not too many external pcos symptoms. Acquired genetically in utero? My parents do have symptoms of IR (are now LCing though). Xenobiotics exposure in utero? What supplements for PCOS? I’m thinking of adding bioidentical progesterone for half my cycle. I’m on metformin currently (2000mg). I low carb but don’t really need to lose weight, but obviously believe it is important for my health. I”m working on upping my vitamin D intake (have done CLO in the past but am now wondering about some stuff I’ve read about vitamin A competing for binding sites? I use a CLO that isn’t super high in A though). ALA? D-chiro-inositol?
I have two children, one conceived through infertility treatments, one “surprise” while on metformin. I still don’t have regular cycles and am stumped on what else I can do (besides metformin + diet + maybe upping D…maybe adding d-chiro and magnesium?)

-cut out dairy for PCOS?

-My mom has been LCing for a year. Tris have dropped to well under 100. She went off her statins about the same time. Her total cholesterol is still hovering close to 300. Her HDL isn’t super high but I think around 60ish. Just genetic predisposition? SHe was using south beach initially (despite my urging to not go low fat) and her cholesterol was lower during that time…but she had only recently come off her statins at that point. She switched over to a more high fat way of eating, and added in coconut oil. Her cholesterol went up. We thought maybe it was the coconut oil but even w/ cutting that out, it has still been high, and she’s now been LCing for a year or so. SHe is down about 30 lbs though to about 140ish at 5’3″ and maintaining okay.

Could you discuss meeting this increased need through non-traditional food sources such as Omega-3 enriched eggs? As an example, we have eggs available which claim to contain 660 mg of Omega-3 per egg.

The cost premium over regular eggs is minimal and intuitively, the bioavailibility seems like it would be good.

Thanks
Jim Gray
Michigan

My GP retired last year (he wasn’t pro-low-carb but I did have a long history with him). I am yet to find a new one that I feel comfortable with. I went to a new doctor for a check up and part of that was the usual cholesterol test. My LDL came in high (175) but my trigs (53) and HDL (117) were fantastic (as were all the other standard test results). The doctor was fixated on the LDL and not at all interested in the other values. I was quite upset when I left her office after being told to go “low-fat” and decided not to return.

This is my question: “should I lie to my doctor about the way I eat?”

If I have any health issues in the future (last time I was sick was 2001 with the flu), I’m worried that based on the doctor’s knowledge of my LC diet, they’ll fixate on IT rather than look at the real problem.

……also what happens in the event that someone who is well adapted to a VLC diet (6 years for me) ends up in hospital on a drip? Aren’t those things glucose? Could it be dangerous?

You should definitely be straight with your doctor about your diet – if you can’t without a lot of hassle, then you need to find another doctor. Any doctor fixated on an elevated LDL level in the face of a 117 HDL level should have his/her lipid treatment privileges suspended.

The glucose drip – should you ever need one – shouldn’t cause a problem. I doubt that you would get one, however, unless you were unable to eat. Typically doctors put patients on a normal saline drip (a salt solution that is similar to the salt level in blood0.

Actually, it’s been shown that repeated frying at high temperatures doesn’t create trans fats. Trans fat creation requires heat, pressure and a nickel catalyst. What repeated frying does is oxidizes the oils, if they are unsaturated oils to begin with, which most are now days.

I wouldn’t worry too much about breaking a yolk every now and then. I don’t think the occasional dose of oxidized cholesterol is all that harmful.

What has changed in your thinking since the book was released (in addition to exercise)?

On another topic……Like all organisms, the human body’s biggest concern is survival. It adapts itself to great changes from our Paleolithic wiring. The setpoint point theory is quite interesting to me. One of your past blogs dealt with fasting and timing of meals to try to “fool” the body into positive changes. Your conclusion was that the effort was just not worth it. Would the PP diet, if rotated or modified every once in a while (i.e. 1X per week/month/etc.), ensure that the body’s systems never becomes complacent. For instance, what would happen if we stayed strict to the PP plan but purposely pigged out on a boatload of carbs every 10 days (as an example) and then returned to a strict PP protocol the day after?

Have you looking at this and other food intake variations (i.e. new ketogenic diets) for weight loss or muscle development? Anything look promising?

Again thanks for all of your selfless health information!