Healing My Thyroid Part 3: Food to Avoid
If you’re just joining my thyroid healing journey, you might want to check out my two other posts: Healing My Thyroid Post 1: The Diagnosis and Healing My Thyroid Post 2: Discovering the Book Thyroid Healing by Anthony William. It’s not mandatory but it gives some background information.
I referred to this book on healing your thyroid, Medical Medium Thyroid Healing by Anthony William (that’s my Amazon affiliate link, by the way).
In this post, I’ll discuss the foods William’s says to avoid to help heal your thyroid or more to the point, to help heal a weak immune system in general.
Foods to Avoid for a Healthy Thyroid
In the book Thyroid Healing, William says some foods that normally are just fine to eat are not okay to eat when you’re trying to fix a thyroid issue. William says that people with thyroid problems have a thyroid virus.
To heal this thyroid virus here are the foods he says to avoid and a short explanation of why. (NOTE: these explanations are mine from what I read in the book. Please read the book yourself for the full reasons to avoid these foods.)
Avoid eggs because the thyroid virus feeds off them.
Dairy is the second food source that the virus thrives on.
Gluten should be avoided because it fuels pathogens.
Canola oil also fuels the thyroid virus.
Corn has many chemicals like pesticides and herbicides that can further damage the thyroid.
Soy, like corn, contains pesticides and herbicides that can cause damage.
Pork (yes, bacon!) is a no-no for fixing your thyroid because of its high fat content and the fact that pork fat takes longer to be released into the bloodstream so it stays around longer. This is not a good thing.
What? No Bacon?
When I read that pork was off limits I was sad.
But the more I read, the more examples I found of people who healed their thyroid symptoms through diet and other natural means that he recommended.
So, I have been cutting out some of these foods little by little. I honestly can’t eliminate dairy all the time. I love yogurt and cheese, but I’ve cut back hoping that will help along with adding foods that are considered to be healthy.
I’ve also been eating more foods on the list of foods William says help the thyroid to be healthy again. I’ll talk about some of those foods in the next post.
How Is Your Health?
If you like this series, please leave a comment and tell us about your health situation and if this might be helpful to you. And of course, an upvote is always welcome, too. Thanks for reading.
Read More About My Thyroid Healing Journey
Introducing Peggy and Mister Tom Cat
Healing My Thyroid Post 1: The Diagnosis
Healing My Thyroid Post 2: Discovering the Book Thyroid Healing by Anthony William
Wow, that is completely different from the list I would have given you. I've never heard of a thyroid virus, so must go check that out too!
Looking at those foods from another angle, though, most of them should be avoided for other reasons:
My list of foods to minimise or avoid would be mainly goitrogens. Supplemental iodine can balance some of them out a bit, but not all.
Flavonoids:
• soy
• millet
Isothiocyanates:
• cruciferous vegetables (eg. arugula, bok choy, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, collard greens, kale, kohlrabi, mustard greens, radishes, daikon, swede/rutabaga, turnips, watercress)
Cyanogenic glycosides:
• cassava
• lima beans
• flax seeds
• almonds
• fruits and fruit seeds of the Rosacea family (apricot, peach, plum, almond, strawberry, apple, pear)
And any processed foods are bad for us generally.
Thanks for that list of foods to avoid. ALL of this is new to me and I've talked to numerous others who had never heard of Anthony William's list of foods to avoid either. He is not typical but advocates natural methods so I'm giving it a try. I'm very curious to see if my changes will lower my TSH levels. I'm not sticking to it 100% (who could?!) so we'll see, I guess! I do think each body is different so what might work well for one might not be right for all.
I'm not a great advocate of sticking to restrictive diets 100%. But some people are so ill and so reactive that they have to be 100%, at least for a while, till some healing takes place. And when you have to be 100%, then you just have to. But it's quite difficult. You're probably not one of those though. Fingers crossed that what you're doing is enough.
@kiwideb, what a great contribution!
Although we disagree about eggs (I commented on that somewhere on this page), you've gone to quite an effort here to share your natural health knowledge. And for that, I'm going to upvote your comment and resteem this post. Congrats Peggy, a nice windfall.
Question. Are you saying we should avoid foods on your 3 lists? I'm surprised that those healthy greens are no-nos. I'd love it if you would comment further. What's the rationale you have in mind here?
Thanks
Gary
We don't disagree about eggs, I just wasn't clear on my comment. If you can tolerate them, eggs are a good food. But some people don't tolerate even the best free range, pasture fed eggs, so must avoid them (at least for a while). Eggs are surprisingly high on the list of common allergens.
Where we possibly disagree is that greens are healthy. Personally, I think kale is for cows and not for humans, because a lot of us can't digest it.
As for the list in general, IF you don't have a thyroid issue and IF you have plenty of iodine in your diet, no reason to avoid them. Except soy. Unless it's fermented, it's bad news. But small amounts of natto, tempeh, miso and tamari are ok.
Maybe I should do a post explaining in more detail.
Thanks for the upvote.
Yes please, Deb. That post -- if you do write it, you'd be most welcome to come back here and link to it. Same goes for anything you write about soy and greens, even the very trendy kale.
Long live EGGS... as per your comments... which I've upvoted.
Gary
PS: I see this is on Peggy's blog. Oops! What cheek I had in inviting you... like it was my blog. But I still upvoted you, so that bit's good.
My blog, for when you do write those posts, is at @garyharvey and I hope to see you there again. Thanks, Deb.
I will let both you and Peggy know when it's written. Don't hold your breath though. I have a very busy week with a choir performance coming up Friday. But will make it my next priority.
Every morning, I have bacon and eggs for breakfast. That is it. No toast or anything like that. But this month I cut it back to one slice of bacon and on egg. I can't really give that up. I did pretty much give up on dairy a couple of years ago -- except for cheese. It was the mainstay of my day but in January, I stopped buying cheese. And stopped eating it. I never thought I could do that. We only use olive oil and I rarely eat baked goods. (In spite of this, I still outweigh Mike Tyson.)
It sounds like you're on the right track! I still eat some bacon because... bacon!
@Peggy, it's great to see another post here on natural health. Thank you for writing it.
I want to comment on CANOLA, which is on the list of food ingredients to avoid. It not only has an impact on thyroid, it also is a contributor to dementia risk, as this article explains: Canola oil in the diet accelerates brain damage and increases the risk of dementia.
Originally called rapeseed until they changed the name for marketing purposes to a contracted version of "Canadian oil", canola is also implicated in weight gain as that article also mentions.
It's best avoided.
Gary
Well, I had no idea. Thanks for that information, @garyharvey! I have some in my cupboard right now and need to take out a loan and buy some olive oil. Okay, I know it's not that bad but it's so much pricier than other oils! Thanks for adding to the discussion. I appreciate the info.
Thanks, Peggy. OMG bacon and eggs no more. Well, I don't eat bacon very often, but can't see giving up eggs. Actually, everything on the 'don't eat' list are favorites of mine - except for canola oil. I guess I'll just hope my genes are good enough to combat the effects of those foods. But you've made me think about getting my thyroid checked - just to be sure.
Kate, I like most of them too so it's really hard. And I do think this list includes food that may or may not work for everyone for various reasons. This showed up in my routine annual blood work.
Eggs are good. Especially eggs from chooks that have never seen a factory farm. Yep, they're expensive. My personal compromise is "free range" eggs. Here in Australia, the labelling laws allow that term to be used quite liberally but it's better than caged hen eggs. When we were house sitting in the country last time, we bought some ultra local free range eggs that, by the look of them, came from truly free range hens. They had a richer orange yolk.
Cheers
Gary