Help (ing) someone with Hashimoto’s

Hello everyone and welcome to episode 94. I’m so happy you are here and have stuck it out with me. I’ve been on a break for about 6 weeks to spend some time with family out of state but I am back! It feels good to be back at it and into my routine again. I’m grateful to have you all to come back to! I’m grateful to you for listening and for writing to me to say you love the podcast and to keep doing it. It really means a lot to me to have your support and to know that what I am putting out there is helpful. For this episode, I thought I would take you through what it is like to work with me. I have a real person with Hashimoto’s who has taken my nutrition assessment. So we are going to dive into what her body is doing and what my suggestions will be to her. There are some visuals for this one so you may want to follow along on my website www.outofthewoodsnutrition.com  and search episode 94. There will be a blog type post or transcript for this, and most episodes actually. 

When someone works with me my current practice is to use my nutrition assessment questionnaire or NAQ. It is extensive and covers all the body systems showing me where you, the client, have imbalances. I also get a health history and like to see a minimum of three days of food journaling. I have no judgment. My job is to help you optimize your health so I need your reality, whatever that is. Normally I would also take the time to listen to my client when we meet via Zoom or in person. For this client, that is not the case because I am keeping their information private and we are not meeting. They were willing to allow me to use their information on the podcast as an example of what to expect. So please keep in mind that the information provided in this episode specifically is a bio-individual approach. What I recommend here is for this person, NOT for everyone because there is no one sized fits all approach to health. There is no specific diet that will help heal you. In fact, as a side note, research shows that the best diet for you is one you can follow. So how about that. If AIP is too hard, there are other ways to get there. 

Ok. Let’s get started on this client’s info. I’m going to start with their health history. 

I guess I have to give away some personal information in that this is a 28-year-old female. her top health concerns are blood sugar dips with a severe symptom of feeling light-headed. She is also dealing with anxiety and overthinking along with brain fog. Her goal is to become healthy again and feel like how a 28-year-old should feel. 

She states that she sleeps well, doesn’t wake up in the night, and gets a good amount of sleep but feels like she has been hit by a train when she wakes up, sometimes feels just a little better than that when she wakes. 

She drinks around 3 liters of water a day, no caffeine. 

Her childhood eating habits were pretty good with sugary treats being a rarity while consumption of meat and veggies was standard. 

99% of her food is home-cooked while she eats out about one time per week. She cooks with mostly olive oil. She has just started AIP but had contacted me because she wasn’t feeling any different on this diet. Her current three worst foods she eats are dark chocolate rice, cakes, gluten-free and dairy-free cookies, and fried rice. Keep in mind that this is subjective information. What you think is bad for your diet is not what someone else sees as bad for them. Her three healthiest foods she eats are coconut yogurt, fruit, meat, fish, veggies. 

She often feels tired, bloated, and/or gassy after a meal and has constipation which was 7 days a week until she began the AIP diet. She craves sugar but not salt. 

She has exposure to gas fumes at work and she loves doing farm work. She walks 1-2 days a week. She spends about an hour per day in front of a screen. She perceived her stress level to be between 8-9 on a scale of 1-10. 

She is currently taking T3, zinc, magnesium, B6, selenium, and vitamin D along with a couple of other things. 

Ok- that is the health history. I don’t see anything out of the ordinary here. A few things stand out - We will find out more about the gas and bloating in a few minutes.

She reports the following items as being severe or regular: 

• Bloating within one hour after eating

• Sweat has a strong odor

• Feel like skipping breakfast

• Sleepy after meals

These are all indications that your stomach is not breaking down the food you eat due to a variety of reasons. 

• Become sick if you were to drink wine

• Easily intoxicated if you were to drink wine

• Easily hung over if you were to drink wine

• Sensitive to chemicals (perfume, cleaning agents, etc.)

• Exposure to diesel fumes

These indicate issues with liver detoxification or an issue with gallbladder health and/or function. 

I’m going to just highlight a few things from other categories since this client has so many issues. 

Small intestine imbalance: hives, wheat or dairy sensitivity, bloating within 1 hour of eating

Large intestine imbalance: cramping in lower abdominal area, yeast symptoms increase with sugar, starch, alcohol such as fatigue, poor memory, feeling spacey, muscle aches, joint pain

Essential Fatty Acids are out of balance: headaches in the sun, sunburn easily, dry flaky skin

Blood sugar dysregulation: excessive appetite, crave coffee/sugar in afternoon, sleepy in afternoon, fatigue relieved by eating. 

Now let’s take a look  at her food journal: 

Day 1

• Breakfast: (I sometimes fast until 10am) coconut yoghurt with some fruit

• Morning tea - coconut wrap with leg ham (unprocessed) salad

• Lunch: meat and veggies including sweet potato plus more fruit (I get sugar cravings and migraines until I bring my blood sugar back)

• Dinner: coconut chicken and broccoli soup

Day 2:

• Breakfast: coconut yoghurt fruit and carrot/bacon fritters topped with avo

• Morning tea: same again

• Lunch: chicken, veggies and sweet potato

• Dinner: coconut chicken soup with broccoli 

Day 3:

• Breakfast: same as day 2 just no Avocado on fritters

• Morning tea: lamb chop with veggies

• Lunch: soup with chicken

• Snack: watermelon and mango

• Dinner: steak with veggies

“I get a bad slump at 2pm just after my lunch at 1pm and I get dizzy, light headed and bad anxiety. My thoughts lately have been all over the place as well since starting AIP. It’s like everything has been disrupted.”

This diet looks good at first glance. When you take in to consideration that she has a potential issue with digesting fat, the AIP diet may not be ideal since it is pretty high in fat. She is consuming quite a bit of fruit and since she is having blood sugar issues, those snacks of fruit would be better served by switching them to veggies and doing less fruit. That said, for the constipation- blackberries and kiwi can be very helpful in getting your bowels moving. If I were to discuss her food journal with her I would want more details about how much animal protein at each meal and how much veggies. The average healthy person should be consuming around 1 to 1.5g/kg/day in protein and ¾ of a plate of veggies at each meal. This person needs some help with digesting their food so a recommendation of some digestive enzymes and potentially  some stomach acid supplementation will be the first step. This might also help the constipation. If we are not digesting our food, we are not extracting the nutrients from it which can cause all kinds of imbalances. I might also recommend something to aid in fat digestion such as TUDCA which is a water based bile support. 

As far as the slump in the afternoon- after lunch- it could be due to waiting too long between the morning tea and lunch, it could be that the lunch meal is too heavy, it could be that it isn’t enough food, it could be a food sensitivity. These are all things we would normally  hash out on the phone. 

The sugar cravings could be a blood sugar issue or they could be a yeast overgrowth or a vitamin or mineral imbalance. 

Since you feel horrible on AIP, I would back off of the restrictions, keeping off gluten and making sure you are eating a ton of veggies, moderate protein and even less fat until you get your body back in to better balance. I would do this for 3 months and then revisit your progress on the NAQ and then make adjustments. 

As far as supplementation goes, I would have you take something to help with fat digestion such as bile salts or TUDCA. This will also help with sugar cravings. You may also need some kind of blood sugar regulation support and I will not give the specific product name here because it isn’t supposed to be sold on Amazon and it is being sold there. It is a practitioner only product. Next, you probably need some digestion support. Likely low dose Betaine HCl- look for 150mg betaine in a product. I would suggest electrolytes in your water or a pinch of salt and if you like fish, consume fatty fish 1-2 times per week. I don’t like to throw supplements at a problem so I won’t recommend anything more. You definitely need some help via supplementation but as I always say, you should be able to get what you need from food most of the time. There are exceptions to that of course, as there always are. 

So, this is a short version of my process. I have had people come to me for help and then not follow a single bit of my suggestions and then wonder why they don’t see any changes. You really have to be willing to trust the process, make yourself a little vulnerable, be willing to change a bit and know that healing your body takes time. It didn’t all the sudden break down and it won’t all the sudden be well again either. Give yourself some credit and compassion. You deserve it. 

Ok. That is it for today. I hope that was helpful for you guys. Please sign up for my newsletter at outofthewoodsnutrition.com and if you could leave me a rating and review on iTunes/apple podcasts I would be so grateful. It helps more people find the show! 

Until next time. Peace.

Can Probiotics Help Hashimoto’s

The short answer is no. The long answer is it depends. There is so much more to probiotics than I have ever imagined. They are not one size fits all and the strain that you take is everything. Let me explain. 

Probiotics in general are defined as live microorganisms that when given in sufficient amounts should produce a health benefit to the host organism (i.e. us). The caveat here is that there is no one sized fits all probiotic for everyone and every situation and that probiotic you can get at your big box store or even at a more health centered store may be a big old waste of your money. 

I’ve given out pretty general information on this topic before and what I have recently learned about them has changed and it is information you should have in your took kit. 

There are two major probiotics that you often hear about are lactobacillus and bifidobacteria. These are the two that we are exposed to at birth through the birth canal and our mothers fecal bacteria and the environment around us. If you are breast fed the bifidobacteria is able to grow quite strong. Breast milk has around 1 billion bacteria per liter which include lactobacilli and bifidobacteria and is a good reason to encourage breast feeding. It is natures way of protecting infants. 

I grew up in a time when it was not encouraged to breast feed and I was also born to a mother who had been on penicillin for 10 years so I got the short end of the stick when it came to being inoculated with bacteria. If you were formula fed your flora as a baby will have looked more like that of an adult with less bifidobacteria and more of other kinds of bacteria. When we were fed solid food the flora will have changed again. 

The important part here is that we feed our gut the proper things to allow for the beneficial microorganisms to grow in numbers and not allow the less beneficial ones to take over. This is where you will see a decline in health and feel symptoms. Whatever those symptoms may be for you. It is all bioindividual. 

One thing that is extremely important for you to understand is these are micro organisms we are talking about. They have a genus (for example lactobacillus is a genus), a species (acidophilus, plantarum, rhamnosus etc) and a strain is even more specific (lactobacillus rhamnosus GG or L. rhamnosus HN001). Each strain does something different in the body and those strains - the rhamnosus strains are not interchangeable for healing or supporting the body. It is a very specific thing. 

Some very important properties for probiotics are that they can make it through the upper GI unharmed. So they can pass through stomach acid without being destroyed, they make it past the bile salts without being destroyed and they can get to their destination and set up shop. An important property of probiotics is that they stick around in the mucus membrane and cells of the large intestine. This allows them to take up space where the pathogenic bugs would want to go- so the bad guys don’t stick around- they just move on through and you maintain your health. 

Lactobacillus bacteria are a very diverse group of microorganisms that produce lactic acid as an end product of carbohydrate fermentation. We can find these bacteria in fermented veggies, fermented dairy, in our GI tract and for women in the vagina. These bacteria help stimulate a proper immune response by helping prevent pathogens from getting in to our circulatory system. They increase the white blood cells that destroy cells infected with viruses and help our immune system remember which viruses and pathogens we have seen before so they can be attacked again. They also enhance the ability of cells to destroy pathogenic bacteria and viruses. The lactobacillus bacteria also eat the same nutrients as the pathogenic bacteria so if there are enough lactobacilli eating all the food there isn’t enough for the pathogens and they die off keeping you healthier. 

Bifidobacteria are part of our GI tract naturally, the end product of their fermentation is acetic acid. They help prevent the growth of the harmful bacteria and keep our small intestinal environment in top shape. It is more potent than other acids at stopping the growth of E. Coli. It is also an important acid in the health of the colon. 

You can get lactobacillus bacteria from some foods like yogurt, sauerkraut, kimchi or other fermented vegetables. This would be where I would go first unless you need to supplement for a specific health issue like intestinal permeability. Not all yogurts are going to be worthy of buying and eating. I checked out a few brands and if you can tolerate dairy (questionable if anyone with Hashimoto’s should consume dairy at all) you can look at brands like Maple Hill Creamery and Wallaby Organic are two brands that have live active cultures added to them. This is what you want to look for- the live and active cultures on the label and of course keep the sugar content to a minimum. When consumed with dairy, the amount of bacteria can be much lower than when taken as a supplement. For some reason dairy is the perfect way to get the bugs in. 

Sauerkraut or kimchi is another good way to get a good dose of probiotics and is really really cheap to make if you are in to that. Personally I love making sauerkraut so that is something I eat frequently. The bacterial strains in the end product are usually Lactobacillus plantarum at around 100 million per ¼ teaspoon (I think I did the math right on that) and is enough to give you a therapeutic effect. So very inexpensive and easy to do. There is not a lot of research on the efficacy of the bacterial strains in fermented veggies so the health effects are not for sure but we do know that it keeps the bad bacteria in check. 

Other things that probiotics are good for is to make B vitamins and Vitamin K. They keep things moving along through the digestive tract which you know is important so we don’t reabsorb toxic compounds through the colon. They help make your digestion work better, help you absorb nutrients better, improve gas and bloating and more. One of the things that is important is the creation of short chain fatty acids. This product of fermentation and provides energy for the cells that line the colon.  Eating resistant starches like cold potatoes or cold rice is a good food for the bacteria that produce short chain fatty acids. 

When taking a probiotic supplement- quality matters. You have to make sure you know which specific strain you are taking- if your supplement label doesn’t list a strain, be leery of taking it. Many probiotics do not survive the manufacturing process of freeze drying, spray drying or frozen storage. Some companies will put a coating on them to help get them past the upper GI or stomach which helps survival and allows them to go to work where needed. I recommend you get probiotics from a practitioner and only take them if you need them. There are very specific strains for specific health conditions. Some strains have been well researched and will be helpful in giving you a specific outcome. There are strains used to help with airborne allergies, eczema, stomach flu, diarrhea, colitis, chronic fatigue syndrome, constipation, Crohn’s disease, candida overgrowth and more. 

The more fiber you eat from a variety of plants, the more food you provide for your gut bacteria to thrive. These are called prebiotics. The non digestible fiber from plants makes it past the stomach or small intestine and is used as a food source by some of the beneficial organisms in the large intestine. 

You can buy supplements that contain fructooligosaccharides, galactooligosaccharides  or lactulose- all of these will provide food for your colon, increase short chain fatty acids, and provide overall health benefit. Microbiome Labs has a good product called Megaprebiotic and Biotics Research has a product called IAG. These are good general prebiotic fibers you can take daily but they are expensive. The cheapest way is to consume a wide variety of vegetables and fruits each week so your gut gets a variety of different fibers. If you want to try either of these products mentioned contact me via my website contact form and I will set you up with an account at my dispensary. Everyone gets 10% off MSRP.

I hope you found that helpful and maybe a little interesting too. I am such a nerd for this stuff I find it fascinating. 

How would you like to have the disappearance of symptoms like reflux, stomach pains, bloating, night sweats, hot flashes, headaches, joint pain, constipation, diarrhea, cold hands and feet? Sounds pretty good doesn’t it? 

Right now, because we are all dealing with some major stress and many of us financial issues including my own household which has seen a reduction in income by about 35-40%, I am offering my very awesome and accurate Nutritional Assessment Questionnaire with supplement recommendations, a plan and a 15 minute call with me to answer any questions for $37. This is for people who can take what I give them and run with it. If you need more guidance or hand holding to navigate diet and lifestyle changes, you may need more support. If not, this is a great way to kickstart your health when it is more important than ever to have a strong immune system and healthy gut to fight off viruses and bugs. This is a super affordable option and honestly a really really good deal. Email me at STephanie@outofthewoodsnutrition.com or fill out the contact form on my website with subject DEAL and I will get you all set up. 

Thanks for listening. I am so grateful for all of you. Please leave me a rating or review on Apple Podcasts so more people with Hashimoto’s can be helped by this information. 

Until next week. Stay sane.