Hashimoto S Thyroiditis Diet Hashimotos, Gluten, and The Immune System - Things Every Patient Should Know.
What does it really take to be gluten free?
This is something that I discuss with patients almost every single day in my clinic and it is surprising the misconceptions that many people have about gluten free diets.
Many thyroid patients have discovered, from various sources, that the first thing they should do after getting diagnosed with Hashimoto's Disease, an autoimmune form of hypothyroidism, is implement a completely gluten free diet.
When you talk to people that have made this discovery and have made this dietary change on their own these are the things that you will hear them say:
- "I am kind of gluten free"
- "I am almost gluten free"
Here is the problem:
If you have an immune sensitivity to gluten, a protein found in barley, wheat, rye, spelt, kamut, and processed oats, then your body is creating antibodies to that food every single time it sees it. That means you are creating inflammation in the stomach and throughout the entire body.
So even if you go two days, or even four days gluten-free, and then you have just a little bit, well, you've completely reversed everything that you've done, and you've basically gone back to square one.
Every time you eat it you elevate the antibodies and inflammation all over again and it take weeks or months to clear this out of the body. '
What happens for some patients is they get frustrated because they go a few days, they eat a little bit, they go a few days, they eat a little bit, and they never actually make any progress, and so they'll finally just say, "The gluten-free diet is not working."
The reality is that for some Hashimoto's patients, by just removing gluten they make a lot of progress without doing a lot of the other stuff that can be done to really modulate the immune system in Hashimoto's patients.
For 99 percent of Hashimoto's patients this dietary step is the first step that must be taken, and that's a step that you can do all on your own, not knowing anything else about your problem or how the immune system has malfunctioned.
Once a Hashimoto's patient has made initial dietary changes then diagnostic steps can be taken to determine all the other immune triggers and pathways that all not functioning properly.
What sort of other things does a Hashimoto's patient need to uncover to get on the fast track to recovery?
- What are the every sources of inflammation that you are unaware of but could eliminate if discovered?
- What is the extent of the damage to the GI tract from the inflammation?
- What is the ORDER of steps that must be taken to move from point A to point B?
The traditional model simply looks at some labs and concludes, "these numbers are off, let's give you some Synthroid and let those numbers come back into the normal range."
A lot of the time, on paper, the lab ranges are going to come back into the normal range, but that doesn't mean that you feel and function good. If those numbers look good and you feel horrible, what have you accomplished?
In all reality, you haven't accomplished much. They are just manipulating numbers on paper.
Not that you don't need that part of the treatment, but obviously it's not addressing the real issue.
So just to recap, if you've started a gluten-free diet, it really needs to be 100 percent gluten-free diet, or it's not a gluten-free diet at all, and you're not going to get any benefit from it.
Two, if you've had this problem for a long time and you're just making that change, it may take a while before you see any benefit from it. There's the possibility that you may start to see changes within the first week, but for other people there's so much damage done as a result that it could take months, and you just have to know that that it is something that has to be done.
hashimoto s thyroiditis diet.