There was a time when iodine was considered a “cure all,” but we’ve forgotten all about it and as a result, rates of cancer are skyrocketing, obesity is epidemic and our energy levels have plunged.
Before the widespread use of synthetic drugs, iodine was recommended for everything from healing wounds and disease, destroying bacteria and viruses, possibly even preventing cancer.
Iodine is found in every single one of your body’s trillions of cells?
Your hormones (especially thyroid hormones) need iodine to perform their jobs as chemical messengers in the body?
Your immune system needs iodine to function?
It is a powerful antimicrobial that can protect you from the common cold to an infected wound (yes, Mom was right!) to cancer?
Insufficient iodine levels lead to miscarriages?
It is necessary for healthy breasts?
Or for brain development in babies?
Epidemic iodine deficiency
Iodine is essential to life. Without adequate stores of iodine, eventually, you die.
Yet, approximately 2 billion people or one-third of the world’s population lives in areas defined as iodine deficient by the World Health Organization, including millions in India and China.
Just one of many daunting consequences of iodine deficiency: It is the leading cause of preventable mental retardation worldwide.
What if a few shakes of the right kind of salt or a supplement that costs pennies could protect a child’s brain? It’s heartbreaking to think how many children are growing up right now, mentally and physically crippled, never to reach their intellectual potential, just because their mothers didn’t get enough iodine themselves and didn’t get enough into their babies.
White hat and black hat halogens
Iodine is a halogen, like bromine, fluorine and chlorine. It’s the good guy wearing the white hat, while its brothers are all wearing black hats and greasy mustaches.
Let’s take a quick look at the bad guys, all of which block your body’s ability to absorb iodine:
Chlorine is now almost universally used to purify municipal water supplies instead of iodine. Fluoride is now found in almost all toothpastes and municipal drinking water and bromine, known to cause cancer, replaced iodine in commercial baked goods more than three decades ago.
Soy and gluten are also iodine blockers
Recently, we’ve also learned that foods containing soy and gluten also block the body’s ability to use iodine.
This all adds up to a conspiracy on the part of the black hat halogens and their accomplices, soy and gluten, to block your body’s ability to use iodine to complete those millions of functions every day.
Food sources of iodine
Iodine is available from foods in fairly small amounts, unless you subscribe to a Japanese-style diet rich in seafood and sea vegetables.
For most Americans, food intake of iodine is not enough to produce optimal levels of iodine—or optimal health.
The iodized salt on your dining table may play a small part in boosting your iodine levels. If you subscribe to the SAD (Standard American Diet), and you eat a great deal of processed food, you’re probably getting the sodium and chloride from the abundant salt in these nutritional wastelands, but you’re not getting any additional iodine since most food manufacturers don’t use iodized salt in their arguably “food” products. Plus, we know that even home-made baked goods contain bromine unless you are using iodine=enhancing unbrominated flour, which is hard to find.
Refined salt is the nutritional equivalent of white bread, which means the vast majority of the minerals that naturally occur in salt have been processed out, leaving it with almost no nutritional value. If you choose unrefined sea salt, (easily recognized by the dark mineral flecks and usually a slightly pink or gray color) you’ll be getting iodide as well as dozens of other minerals and trace minerals that are essential for overall health.
Falling iodine levels
While we’re on the subject, I’d like to point out that the American Thyroid Association says that Americans experienced a 50% drop in urinary iodine levels between the early 1970s and the early 1990s, making many of us iodine deficient.
My theory is that this was the time when doctors first began advising patients to limit their salt intake by cutting sodium. They also reduced their iodine intake, resulting in dramatically lower levels.
It isn’t salt or even sodium that is the problem. As you already know, table salt has all of its minerals removed, some of which, including potassium and magnesium would otherwise help to balance blood pressure. Consequently, table salt causes gross blood pressure fluctuations, instead of stabilizing them. The answer? Unrefined sea salt, which has all of the minerals you need, including iodine, in the exact proportions your body needs.
Testing
Iodine is released from the body through the urine, so the best test is usually through a urine sample taken after iodine loading. Supplementation with potassium iodine, sodium iodide and/or molecular iodine from kelp will help correct the shortfall.
The Bottom Line:
If you feel tired all the time, have gained weight, can’t tolerate cold, have dry skin and worry about breast, prostate or thyroid cancer, there is a natural solution that can make a world of difference: iodine.
You need a strong daily supplement that helps:
Prevent breast, prostate, ovarian, and thyroid cancer
