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Podcast 108: Iodine and Your Health – Part 2

Iodine deficiency shows up in a wide variety of symptoms, including trigger finger, PMS, low IQ babies, miscarriages, prostate and ovarian problems. Most of us are not getting enough iodine, and it can be corrected.

Scott talks about the government regulating more natural supplements and skyrocketing heart disease, cancer and obesity.  Martin speaks out against over-regulation. Don’t take it sitting down – stand up and support businesses that believe in holistic health. They go on to say “The people should not be afraid of the government, the government should be afraid of the people.”

Martin believes the RDAs (recommended daily allowances) are ridiculously low, so how would you know if you’re iodine deficient? First the visual signs – listen in to hear more…

Podcast 108: Iodine and Your Health – Part 2

Scott: Welcome back everybody you are listening to the Life Enthusiast co-op podcast restoring vitality to you, the internet and the planet I am your co-host Scott Paton along with Martin Pytela, hi Martin how are you doing?

Martin: I am thriving and ready to take on the world. I have actually been trying to figure out if I should become militant or not you know. I am starting to think that this society needs more people who are committed to making a difference to making a change to sort of not pull back from the challenges that this society presents.

Scott: Cool and I think we need more people speaking out and I know that in many places natural foods are under attack people are saying that governments are regulating things and the small manufacturers are being squeezed and the large manufacturers are pouring a lot of money into supporting those governments I think and the results are sky rocketing heart disease and cancer and obesity it is not a good situation so I totally agree with you.

Martin: Yeah I believe that – the more I think about it, it’s the lobbying of the big business and they have figured out how to squeeze the small business out of the picture and that is through regulation when you create an administrative overhead that requires an entire employee devoted just to keep up with the bureaucracy you know the paper work that is needed to you know in the health business I am supposed to now keep track of every batch of things we send out and I am supposed to know the data base of all of my customers and all of my ingredients so just in case somebody decides to visit me and say please recall everything that contains L-tryptophan and I need to know which products it is in and I need to know who I sold it to in the last year and I need to be able to contact them and tell them oh by the way this is something that I need you to return. Well to keep that sort of thing up it is going to take so much time that I won’t have time to do anything else pretty much so it is that beautiful picture so I wanted to just put a plug in for people to not take it sitting down and to stand up and say you know what this is not what we want, this is not what we signed up for we need to support the type of businesses that are delivering foods that are healthful, that are whole and that are supporting holistic health.

Scott: You know as I am listening to you Martin I am reminded of one of my favorite movies which was V for Vendetta and it was a story about this futuristic English society which was basically a dictatorship and this one man that stood up and one of the things that he said was the people should not be afraid of the government the government should be afraid of the people and throughout the whole movie one of the themes that he talked about was you know everybody knew what was going on but nobody stood up and said anything about it and he said the situation that we have gotten ourselves into is not the fault of the government but of the people and it is incumbent upon the people to stand up and be counted and say what they think. What is interesting is just the other day in my local newspaper the government cancelled the building of a prison facility in a city because they had so many citizens show up and say that wasn’t what we wanted so oftentimes I think that they don’t listen and yet when we do stand up and let our voices be heard we can effect some of the changes that we want to hear. I really think what you are talking about is very important.

Martin: Yes we definitely need to raise our voices I want to for instance advocate for changing these RDAs we talked about in our last podcast about how pathetically low the RDA is and let’s talk about how you would know that you are iodine deficient.

Scott: How would I know if I am iodine deficient?

Martin: So first is the visual signs we had mentioned like the swollen neck you know the goiter which is to the sides of the Adams apple, that is one. The second thing is you would probably have thinning hair and probably widely spaced teeth when you were deficient from childhood on and you will probably have mental retardation or at least you won’t be as smart as you might have been there is still a chance to improve on it if you start supplementing correctly. Then something that is immediate will be fatigue you know you will start getting an under active thyroid so you will be feeling tired. So when you start supplementing the iodine if you were iodine deficient and of course ninety percent of Americans are than supplementing with iodine is probably going to get you some energy.

Scott: And we talked about one of the ways to take it aside from eating a lot of kelp and seafood type products is putting on that Lugol solution, two square inch type patches that is bright red or purple and seeing if it is absorbed into the skin over night and if it is you need to put on some more until it stops.

Martin: So that’s that you know fatigue and the next one of course is thyroid disease you either get Hashimoto’s or Grave’s disease that’s autoimmune you either have overactive or underactive thyroid depending on which that is. Of course overactive thyroid makes your eyes start bulging out and these eye balls that are sort of sticking way out in front and just being hyper active and it had a nice benefit you don’t get fat because your metabolism is all cranked up so you can eat just about anything you want.

Scott: Well that is important because in our society they keep moving up what obesity is because so many people are obese. What used to be obese in the 1950’s is now considered normal and what would have been considered gross in the 1950’s is now considered obese and hugely over weight.

Martin: I actually saw that in sizing of clothing right now size twelve is what used to be called size sixteen so you can say I am still wearing size twelve well that is thee 2010 size twelve, it used to be called size sixteen in 1980. Anyway poor digestion, stomach, salivary glands if they can’t uptake enough iodine you don’t produce enough stomach acid and you will suffer from heart burn and you will need to be eating more carefully or you will be tempted to take antacids and just nasty. You know in women it is the fibrocystic disease so you will have cysts on your breast or your skin or you will have ovarian cysts so all of that is caused by iodine deficiency so it is nasty not only do you get PMS you also get these painful cysts on top of it and then once you get pregnant you can’t carry your pregnancy to term and once you have your child if you don’t give them enough iodine you will raise your child to be way less smarter than he might have been so that is the dementia right. Here is another one Glaucoma very popular problem for aging people and you can prevent it by having sufficient iodine.

Actually here is another interesting thing your thyroid will hog or what’s the word will steal and monopolize the iodine that is in your body at the expense of your reproductive organ because your thyroid is looking after the metabolism so that’s required to keep running the engine so the sex organs that is something you can go without, you can’t go without the metabolism for more than a few hours. It will steal the iodine and cause deficiency so in twenty years time as a man you will have prostate cancer and as a woman you will have breast cancer or ovarian cancer so that is what that looks like, twenty five years of iodine deficiency. That is quite nasty couldn’t we have a little more information about it? Could we not be told this stuff? Why is it that we have to fight to be able to display this information and tell you about it?

Scott: Well that is a really good question. I suspect that it is because there is more money in trying to cure you of it than is in prevention.

Martin: Yeah that’s right the pharmaceutical industry with its distribution headed by the health insurance companies served by the doctors that are working for that is only interested in managed care. They are not really interested in healing you they are interested in treating you there is a big difference between treatment and reversal of illness right. I need you in just enough pain to keep coming back but not so much so you can keep working. So how about this, iodine has been used successfully in treating headaches, keloid formation oh hey did you know about the Peyronies contracture, have you ever heard of that?

Scott: No I have never heard of that.

Martin: Peyronie’s is a curious illness that affects the men and what that does is it causes the penis to when it is erect go to turn to one side and is hooked instead of straight and for some guys it is a relly embarrassing problem yep it is iodine deficiency you can deal with that and the other contracture is the finger have you ever heard of trigger finger?

Scott: No.

Martin: That’s the other thing that the tendons in your hand are shortened so it causes the finger to permanently stay bent. Typically it happens with the pinkie or the ring finger and they are like well the trigger finger they are always in the position as if you were wanting to fire a gun so those things are treated by iodine, imagine that. Now a friend of mine going back to 1981 had that what do you suppose they treated that with?

Scott: Surgery.

Martin: Yeah that’s right, surgery

Scott: Yeah just cut it off, stretch it out and put it back together.

Martin: But you could have prevented it with a little bit of iodine.

Scott: Yeah a friend of mine recently had surgery on one of his fingers but that was because he was snowboarding and he fell a certain way and he broke the ring finger length wise on one of the bones twice so they had to open it up and put three little pins in it to hold the bone back together and now he is going to physiotherapy to help him move his bones and everything else and I think that is a really good use of the medical system. Where you do something and you really need to go in there and actually reconstruct or reinforce it or whatever.

Martin: Absolutely when I am smashed up on the side of the road I certainly don’t want a massage therapist to try to put me back together.

Scott: Yeah that’s exactly right.

Martin: I mean I am completely grateful for the medical system because it is capable of saving people in catastrophic situations but the point is we don’t need to be in ninety percent of these catastrophic situations I mean yes they can save me from a heart attack when I am crashing somewhere and in an emergency room and they can hit me with electricity and they can pump me full of useful drugs that will prevent my untimely demise but what about the 25 or 30 years that they didn’t help me to not get that heart attack in the first place.

Scott: That’s right so if you are in a car accident that’s great but if you are having something that is life threatening because your lifestyle is such you know when you have all the advertising like people like McDonald’s do and all the marketing that goes on it has a huge impact on our behaviors and how it influences us and our decisions and everything else and I think people don’t realize that and it is kind of like you know you can no longer advertise for smoking right but there is no difference when you think about it between smoking advertising and advertising for greasy fried chicken.

Martin: No it is going to kill you just a wee bit slower but not much.

Scott: And because we all eat, well not all but a lot of people eat chicken in different ways it is a food staple and no one thinks about that and the ramifications of it.

Martin: Yes it is a serious problem so there goes my rant about iodine. There are so many areas this is involved in it is involved with your metabolism so weight management so if you are putting on too much weight you will probably need iodine as well as magnesium as well as more enzymes as well as this and that but it is the deficiencies of your food that is causing it and iodine is right up there. If you are suffering from PMS if you are suffering from miscarriages that is a sure bet. What else can we point out well if you are dying of prostate cancer you could at least start taking iodine now but maybe you should have started twenty five years back.

Scott: Well I would just like to mention some of the comments that people on the life enthusiast website have written in and told us about the impact of iodine and one was from Lonnie from Tallahassee Florida and she said iodine is my drug of choice, I use it for everything. I have raised my kids and now my grandkids on iodine. My son was due to have his tonsils removed and I decided to paint his tonsils and he has never had any more problems with his throat. I took a spray bottle and poured some iodine in it and then sprayed his tonsils and as you may know iodine dries quickly so he didn’t really swallow any and I have done it for me if I have a sore throat it clears up right away.

There was another one I wanted to because we talked in our last podcast and very briefly this time of Lugol’s iodine and this Micheal from Arizona wrote us and said I use Lugol’s internally for years and my wife had a major bladder infection and had two biopsies performed and all kinds of drugs prescribed including a doctor stating that we were passing a virus back and forth through sex and I refused to take the chemicals and finally she decided to take the Lugol’s and within two weeks began to walk with no pain. I placed it in the water containers of my two dogs and my three pound ten year old dog became alive again I feel it killed all the worms in her that were bleeding her of energy and I believe in Lugol’s for everything and he said I give it away to people who are really ill or sick. So we don’t want to say it is a cure all, but when everyone is really deficient in it it’s like if you are in the Sahara dessert for three weeks and you haven’t had a drop of water and some guy comes along and gives you a bucket like you know it is going to have a huge impact on how you are feeling right.

Martin: So there was this other story that I had, are you still there Scott?

Scott: I am.

Martin: Sorry I was just watching my computer across the room shut itself off and I am thinking uh oh is this a room wide shut down.

Scott: We are still on the air Martin while they are trying to close us down and they can’t get us.

Martin: They want to come and get me for the ranting I put out. There was this other story of this 90 plus year old man who had an enlarged prostate and high PSA counts and what not and we put him on the sea plant minerals you know the super nutrient sea plant minerals just seventeen dollars a month in supplementation and the numbers started going down pretty quick and he started to have a much better peeing experience because for many men that is very frustrating. It is actually about a third of the population forty five plus or fifty year plus that have an enlarged prostate and cannot really urinate successfully or at least satisfactorily.

Scott: Yeah I remember once going into the men’s room and my dad came in with me and my son went in all at the same time and we are all standing there oh that is now true my dad and my son went in and when my dad comes out and he looks at me and says oh to be able to pee like that again.

Martin: Yeah wouldn’t that be nice.

Scott: Yeah a sixteen year old kid and an eighty year old guy it just runs out of him just like a fire hose.

Martin: So obviously your dad has an enlarged prostate and taking iodine, maybe we will be calling him right after and telling him that he should get some iodine.

Scott: Yeah so Martin what about some of the autoimmune disorders like Lupus or fibromyalgia or maybe rheumatoid arthritis or those sort of things. Would painting where you have aches and
pains do any good or just making sure that you have enough iodine would that help?

Martin: Well I do prefer the natural stuff and I do recommend people go get themselves something like the Exsula superfoods or at least on the topically everything spray on magnesium with iodine. I would rather see that then just painting it with Lugol’s but even that is better than nothing so yes it absolutely will help.

Scott: Okay the reason I am stuck on Lugol’s because it is such a visual thing and it is just like you can see and there is so much that we do that it seems like it has to be on faith like you have to be very aware to see the differences and that is such a visual thing.

Martin: Well heck yeah it works, yes, go tell everyone.

Scott: Take the iodine to the mountain tops right.

Martin: Go tell it on the mountain. So anyway the code to get all the discounts on these products at Life Enthusiast’s co-op’s website is IOD27 and folks you get ten percent off of that whole category.

Scott: Awesome well Martin thank you for taking time out of your busy day to share this exciting information with our listeners I know they really appreciate it and if they wanted to talk to you in more detail about any of the issues that they may have how could they get a hold of you.

Martin: Oh please do call us at 1-866-543-3388 or directly on my desk there is a phone line at 775-299-4661 or just go online and read at www.life-enthusiast.com we are making our way through the Health Blogs about Iodine. There are about many pages about iodine if you want some serious well researched information that you might want to take to your doctor because he might want to argue that he needs to cut your hand open to straighten it rather than just adding iodine to your diet it is all there.

Scott: Nice and there is lots of information and everything we talk about you can see more facts and figures and everything else you can see in way more detail because in the short time that we have we can just really expose everybody to this wonderful information and it is a great resource and I really recommend that you head over there and if you enjoyed this particular episode and you want to hear more go to LifeEnthusiast.podomatic.com and there is well over a hundred shows there that are archived and we are working on our second hundred and we are having a great time doing it and you are along for the ride and if you want to leave comments give us some feedback and any questions that you may have and we will address them in future podcasts episodes for sure.

Martin: Exactly so there we are at the end of another episode this is Martin for Life Enthusiast co-op restoring vitality to you and to the planet thanks for listening.

Scott: Bye-bye everybody.