DR. ANTHONY CHAFFEE: black beans block out up to 75% of zinc absorption, and that corn tortillas can block out 100% of zinc absorption.

toxic levels of vitamin A can reduce your thyroid function as well, so this is a potential issue if someone is eating liver in high enough quantities.  --Dr. Anthony Chaffee

 

There's a study showing that black beans block out up to 75% of zinc absorption, and that corn tortillas can block out 100% of zinc absorption. So zinc is required for the conversion of T4 into T3, and people are saying, "Oh my, God, T3 is going down."  Okay, well what about your zinc.  People know about selenium but they never they never think about zinc. 

Thyroid issues with Carnivore?

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I regularly see influential Carnivore advocates (former, maybe?) stating that a pure carnivore diet without fructose from honey or fruit will cause hypothyroidism. To combat this they recommend eating fruit or honey, and one advises people to get 40% of their calories from things like orange juice and to "sun their genitals" to help their thyroid...

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I've been strict carnivore for 10 of the last 20 years, and close to otherwise, and my thyroid function is perfectly normal, if not optimal. And I have yet to have a patient go on carnivore and not improve their thyroid function, let alone damage it. Although I don't generally eat organs, and I don't tell my patients to either, just if they want to, these same advocates of not-quite Carnivore strongly recommend them, especially liver. I don't know if that affects this, but toxic levels of vitamin A can reduce your thyroid function as well, so this is a potential issue if someone is eating liver in high enough quantities. And I definitely don't sun my balls, so that's not what's holding me together. The other thing to point out is that the Inuits and native Australians and others who traditionally don't eat anything except a carnivorous diet, and certainly don't have access to fructose up in the North Pole, don't have issues with their thyroid. If they did they would die out because congenital hypothyroidism, called cretinism, and is a serious congenital developmental disorder. And if this were the case, we never would have made it through any of the past ice ages over the course of the past 2.5 million years. Having studied biochemistry, and speaking to other biochemists on this subject, I'm not aware of any biochemical process in the body that cannot function without fructose. As far as I know, there aren't any that can only be driven by fructose. And seeing as there is more and more biochemical evidence and studies showing causation between fructose and metabolic syndrome, among other issues, for me it's best to be avoided.

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