Note: The text below is a transcription from the video above. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
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Okay, we’re going to talk about Hashimoto’s and blood sugar today, because I think this is a really important subject. And I think the main reason it’s so important is because somebody just turned it off going, “I don’t have a blood sugar problem. I don’t have diabetes. And my doctor said, even though I got a little prediabetes, it’s okay.” It’s not okay.
And at the other end of the spectrum, there’s a lot of people who have hypoglycemia, but they’ve been told by their doctors that they don’t. Hypoglycemia is low blood sugar. Prediabetes is pre high blood sugar. And when you have low blood sugar, it’s a big problem. It is completely blown off in the medical community. I mean, I’m not bagging the medical community, but more and more and every day, as our patient population grows to be more chronic conditions, it’s just an outdated model of care for that particular type of person. [inaudible 00:01:07].
And a lot of people who have reactive hypoglycemia, which means that their blood sugar goes low, but it doesn’t go low enough for them to be passing out and having to take a candy bar and all that type of stuff. They’re being told they’re okay, and they’re not. So blood sugar and Hashimoto’s. So Hashimoto’s is an autoimmune thyroid disease. And I’m gathering somebody who is looking at this probably knows something about Hashimoto’s or you wouldn’t have clicked on this. So I’m not going to go really into Hashimoto’s other than it’s a thyroid problem. Okay?
So there’s a lot of reasons that a person can… And I’m going to talk about how they go together. Hashimoto’s you get an immune attack on your thyroid. And then as a clinical practitioner, you are a clinical practitioner. You’re a functional medicine practitioner. Your nutritionist, your dietician, whoever everybody’s going to today, your naturopath, your homeopath, they should be first evaluating your entire picture of all of the 40 or 41 or 42 triggers before they even start treatment. Because there’s an order in which you attack, and blood sugar way up there on the things you have to attack first. And so blood sugar is one of those 42.
Say, “My God, well it’s only one of 42. What a big deal.” But certainly these ones like gluten are way more important than the other ones. And blood sugar is up there. Blood sugar is in the top four of the triggers that have to be addressed. Otherwise you’re not going to get a lot of [inaudible 00:02:47] done.
So blood sugar, why is this an issue? You already have an autoimmune thyroid disease, which means you want to reduce the attacks on your thyroid by your immune system. Okay. So let’s go into what I was talking about. Here’s blood sugar. Blood sugar, a lot of people have diabetes type two. Okay. There’s this spectrum, okay. Here’s low. Here’s high. And so, this is diabetes type two or type one, but let’s talk about type two. That’s most people. And this is medical hypoglycemia. Meaning, here you got to have your blood sugar. It’s got to be over 125. Your A1C has to be over 5.8 or 5.9. And then they’ll tell you got diabetes type two. Here, your glucose has to be below 60 and they’ll tell you got hypoglycemia. Except all of you in here who are experiencing irritability, shakiness, fatigue after meals, relief fatigue, agitated, easily upset, nervous, your energy drops in the afternoon, you got frequent urination. You possibly have blood sugar issues in here, and nobody cares, okay.
And yeah, I was just talking to my producer here. And I was just saying I have literally had people here in the last six months, come in with bipolar disease and get their blood sugar under control and have their bipolar disease go away. Their bipolar disease didn’t go away. They didn’t have bipolar disease. They had blood sugar that’s going back and forth between low and high in this range where they were told nothing was wrong.
Why does this have something to do with Hashimoto’s? Because every time you get fatigue after meals, you eat and you go like this, okay. That’s a highly energy draining mechanism where your blood sugar that’s not getting used because you have free diabetes or insulin resistance, that blood sugar’s not being used. It’s not getting into your cells from your meals. All of your meals break down to glucose. I don’t care whether it’s proteins. I don’t care whether it’s fats. I don’t care if it’s carbohydrates, they all break down to glucose, all of them.
And then, that’s got to get into the cell. And then after a while when you’ve being eaten too much of it or other things could be happening that are causing this, other than eating like crap, okay. Then the insulin that hits the cell that opens it to let the glucose in, the cell stops opening. And now you have insulin resistance, prediabetes. This is a big deal. This is the number one cause of polycystic ovarian syndrome. This is the number one cause of small fiber neuropathy. And I could go on and on.
And polycystic ovarian syndrome is the number one cause of half the infertility in this country. Is that important? I think so. And it’s important if you’re going to try to get an immune attack under control, because every time this blood sugar, this glucose that’s a breakdown of your foods, doesn’t get in a cell, it turns into something called triglycerides, which you all thought were fats. Okay. And they kind of are, but they break into three glycerides, GLY, blood sugar. And guess what? That happens in the liver. And guess what? That is a massively energy draining chemical reaction.
So you go, when that’s happening. Okay. Well, while all that’s happening, it creates a significant amount of inflammation. What does inflammation do in a Hashimoto’s patient? It flares up their thyroid, flares up their immune antibodies against their thyroid. Jittery, shaky heart palpitations for no reason at all. This is in the active, reactive or active Hashimoto’s patient. And so it’s important.
So that’s what happens in prediabetes, but now you got the people down here. And in our world, prediabetes, the functional world is over 99. So the range of 99 to 127 is prediabetes. A lot of you go in, “Hey, it’s great. You’re not near it. You’re only 110. You got a long way to go.” We’ll just wait until you become diabetic. In the meantime, you’re having all these symptoms. You’re getting small fiber neuropathy. You got PCOS. You got too much testosterone if you’re a woman. No problem. What’s the problem? Why should we do anything about that?
You go to the other side of the coin, which is the lower blood sugar. And if you’re not under 60, they’re going to tell you you’re fine, even though they’re going to be like, every time you go, maybe you’re to the point where you got to get up and you get lightheaded. And maybe you get headaches and you get irritable and shaky if you don’t eat and you get inward tremors. Because I have this, right, and if you’re like me, you’re sitting there at lunch, waiting for lunch to come because you’re yawning and you’re falling asleep. And then as soon as you eat lunch, everything’s wonderful. I’m better. I take care of myself by eating multiple meals through the day. So that doesn’t happen very often, but it happens if I don’t eat my little meal in between.
And when that happens, that’s inflammatory. You’re going like this. Your blood sugar is dumping. Your blood pressure’s going down. Your heart’s starting to beat faster. Your brain needs blood sugar, so your brain’s starting to get inflamed. And so, here you go. The range for that type of low blood sugar is 85 to 99, that’s it. Here’s the range in the medical field for hypoglycemia, 60 to 99. It’s a humongous difference. Humongous, okay. And so when that happens, you get irritable. You get shaky, you get lightheaded, you get agitated, easily upset because your blood sugar’s dropping and that’s affecting your brain.
Remember I talked about the bipolar people. This stuff affects your brain. Boy, your brain needs proper blood sugar to work properly. Not high blood sugar, not low blood sugar, not blood sugar that’s going like this, which both of these conditions do. The insulin resistant guy, the blood sugar goes high, then it dumps, and then it comes back to normal. So you get all these symptoms. The low blood sugar guy, the reactive, it’s called reactive hypoglycemia. You’re not hypo down below 60, but you’re in here where your doctor’s telling you you’re okay. Okay, you get that blood sugar drop right before lunch, then you eat and it goes up like this and down. Guess what? You get all those symptoms too.
So which one is it? There’s tests for that. You can use them, or if you have experience, you can probably tell by interviewing the patient. But the bottom line is massive inflammation when you go like this. Massive inflammation when you’re getting a little anxiety. People come in with anxiety. What am I looking for if somebody comes in with anxiety? Am I looking for a mental disorder? Never, I’m never looking for a mental disorder. I’m looking for poor blood sugar. I’m looking for poor thyroid functioning. Because now when all of this hits your thyroid, you get the inflammation from all of the blood sugar, and that hits your thyroid. And your thyroid starts getting too much thyroid hormone. Now you start getting anxiety and maybe panic attacks even, but anxiety, shaky, jitteriness, tremors, insomnia, inward tremors, maybe hot flashes and these types of things.
And that’s from the blood sugar. I cannot tell you how many people come in here from other functional medicine practitioners and they had done… I had one yesterday. I had one yesterday and they had done so many of the right things, yet this person clearly had severe functional dysglycemia, meaning her blood sugar was going up and down and morphing more towards low blood sugar. I said, “Do you want to choke your husband every day?” And she goes, “But I love my husband.” I go, “I know, I know. It’s your blood sugar, it’s your blood sugar.”
And I mean, it’s so funny because it’s so ignored. It’s so ignored in the medicine. You get your test, you come in and you tell me how great they are. And I’m looking at a tests and I’m going, “Your blood sugar is 70.” And people are going, “Yeah, it’s normal. The test says it’s normal.” Well, the test is the medical model. The test is the medical ranges, okay. And so there’s no flag. The doctor does his typical, looks at the whole page, there’s no flags. Go the next page, there’s no flags. There’s no looking deeper than that.
I don’t mean to feel like I’m banging on these guys because they’re doing what they’re taught, okay. The medical guys are doing what they’re taught, but what they’re being taught is wrong. I don’t know what to tell you. I mean, I was trying to figure out the day approximately how many functional medicine patients we might have seen in this clinic since I started doing this. And I think it’s probably somewhere around 5,000. So we’ve had enough of an observation to know that what I’m saying is correct over and over and over again.
A good place for most people to start with the Hashimoto’s case is diet and a good place to start is diet and blood sugar. You get those two things under control. And there’s a lot of reasons why you may not other than crappy diet, but we’ll get into that on another video. And you’re going to feel a lot better, even if you don’t fix the gut, which are ultimately going to have to fix. But even if you do diet and blood sugar, your Hashimoto’s inflaming flares are going to improve because I put it in the top 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I put it in the top six of the 42 triggers. I put it in the top six of the 42 triggers, meaning that when you get these six under control, those are this many percentage and the rest of them are this many percentage of what’s going to aggravate your Hashimoto’s. Hashimoto’s and blood sugar fluctuation, I think that’s it. I think that’s enough.
