Podcast 107: Iodine and Your Health – Part 1

According to the Director of General Health from India, iodine deficiency affects children’s mental growth. And it also creates gynecological complications in expectant mothers and women in general. Their solution – as in other countries – is to add iodine to salt – to processed salt which is refined sodium chloride – NOT whole, natural Crystal Salt. It must be noted that Iodine is the single most deficient nutrient in the world – approximately 70% of the world’s population are deficient. The normal daily requirements of the body for Iodine have never been determined.  However, Japanese people usually consume an average daily intake of 13.8 mg of Iodine, the only population in the world that gets this amount of Iodine daily. And they are the healthiest people in the world, based on cancer statistics.

Podcast 107: Iodine and Your Health – Part 1

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 feeling particularly chipper today I must say.

Scott: Awesome, we have been going through the health education section of the Life Enthusiast co-op website and we are coming up to one that I know is one of your favorite topics particularly when it comes to minerals the very important but very misunderstood minerals and before we jump into that I just wanted to let you know of a recent article that appeared in the National News because there a couple of parts to this that I want to get your opinion on. One of which underlines the importance of this particular mineral and the other is how governments react to solve these types of problems. So what the International News said was according to the director of general health this was from India, iodine deficiency affects children’s mental growth. So basically they said that this deficiency affects the mental growth of children making them dull minded and it also creates gynecological complications which result in abortions and other problems for expectant mother and I thought that was very interesting and what their solution was as it was happening in India was to take salt and add iodine to that salt so they wanted everyone to eat processed salt with added iodine. I just wanted to start us off right there so what can we tell the government of India?

Martin: Well alleluia, good idea there is nothing more frustrating than a woman who can’t carry a pregnancy to term. Before i got into this business I knew a couple who had six miscarriages some of them at three months and four months and some of them at five months of pregnancy and really it is such a stupid simple thing iodine deficiency and since that time I have found out that iodine deficiency affects women in general in the sense that the PMS symptoms that we remember so well like you know that joke what is the difference between a woman with PMS and a terrorist?

Scott: No what’s the difference.

Martin: You can negotiate with a terrorist. Oh yea, a deep one! This isn’t even funny because it actually happens like that there are so many women that suffer from these emotional run ups with their period and bloating and tender, sore breasts and fibrocystic breasts and on and on with other horrendous symptoms and yes it can be corrected with iodine and yes it could be corrected with just iodine added to salt I mean it is the chemical route it is not all that healthy but it is better than what we have.

Scott: Well the article went on to say that more than fifty percent of the population of Pakistan is at risk of iodine deficiency disorders and the survey that they did showed that malnutrition is a wide spread problem and had negative implications for development because it is an essential micro nutrient required for normal body growth and mental development and physical well being and they went on to say that 2.1 million children being born in Pakistan may have mental impairment because of this deficiency. There was a high risk of mental and physical retardation and poor school performance due to low IQ’s as well as learning disabilities and it is amazing to me because just a few drops of iodine can solve this problem that is just amazing.

Martin: That’s right it is amazing and guess what ninety percent of American children are iodine deficient. How about let’s just say a number half of all the mental retardation that children
suffer in America are caused by iodine deficiency and so we could prevent a whole lot of trouble by supplementing iodine but we have these pathetic idiotic rules set out by the American Health commission called the RDA, they set the RDA the recommended daily allowance at the elimination of symptoms I mean all the RDA’s is just an idiotic system and I every time I think of it my male fighter syndrome rises and I want to go out and punch someone. So anyway they have set the RDA for iodine at the eliminations of symptoms of goiter. Goiter is something that you will see with enlarged thyroid gland at the neck and once you start watching for it you will see people all around you like on television with this enlarged it is in the shape of a butterfly it is not at the center it’s to the sides of the Adams apple just below it on both sides and so you will see this swollen area on people, many have it. Those are in complete deficiency of iodine they need it so bad. The other symptom of deficiency of iodine is the gap between your teeth and the other one is thinning hair. Your thinning hair is caused by so many things we just don’t know where to start. The male pattern baldness that is another thing altogether. Anyway they set this at like miniscule dosage that will simply keep you from getting goiter which is a sign of real trouble, the real dosage should be like a hundred times higher than the RDA.

Scott: You know when you talk about the RDA there is this fear aspect to because you go oh I don’t want to take more than the recommended daily allowance because maybe it is going to harm me and you hear about that with vitamin C and Linus Pauling and he recommended mega doses and people were saying that if you take that much vitamin C you are going to whatever and of course the guy lives for almost forever right.

Martin: Yes it is very frustrating to me to watch all of this but what do I do huh.

Scott: Well get out and we tell people get your iodine. What does iodine do in the body I mean we have talked a little bit about the results of not having it you know low IQ’s, slow development, miscarriages and abortions but how does it work?

Martin: Oh complicated thing, the iodine needs to be in the right form and it needs to be in the right quantity so we need to be getting the iodine in the most natural form possible. Iodine tends to come out as I2 same way as oxygen is an O2, two atoms of iodine will react with one another and turn it into molecular iodine from atomic and atomic iodine is readily absorbable to the human body it is in an ionic state but the molecular iodine is much less so. The better form would be something like potassium iodide which is known as the KI, K for potassium and I for iodine and there is an old, old remedy called Lugol’s solution which is I don’t know if you still remember it, it is a purple iodine tincture that in our early days was just the most common remedy for everything. You would use it on injuries, you would use it to detoxify water, and you would use it to prevent infections. not in your family huh?

Scott: No I am not familiar with it at all, my mom would put iodine on scrapes and bruises and stuff but I don’t recall any other and it was red.

Martin: Yeah, I call it purple but alright.

Scott: Alright maybe it was purple.

Martin: So anyway that sort of thing is less and less popular because no one is advertising it. I went and bought myself a four ounce bottle of it for ten dollars. Now that is probably about a
life time supply.

Scott: So just for our listeners who like me may have missed what it was called can you just repeat what that product was called again.

Martin: It is the Lugol’s solution.

Scott: And you can get that in the pharmacy section of the grocery store?

Martin: I went to my dispensing pharmacy and talked to the pharmacist and said hey I want some and he just looked at me and I said what and he said well you know this is now a controlled substance did you know iodine is used for the manufacturing of crystal meth and I said no I didn’t so it is now controlled and they want to only hand out small amount of it and want to know who you are before they give it to you. Anyway the most common application of this thing would be to paint a purple patch on your skin you know a patch about two inches by two inches and if by the next morning the patch is gone clearly your body is hungry for it and wants it so paint another one. Keep doing it until your body no longer takes it up. So that is the less than natural, the next best thing that we have is the atomic iodine which is also known as atomidine or thyrodine or nascent iodine and there is a whole lot of literature coming forward now in the alternative health field describing just how important the iodine is. So we have it in our cart as the Thyrodine and it sells for twenty dollars for a half ounce bottle and that will last for months. You only need two to four drops of this per day, so easy.

Scott: So is it possible to overdose on the iodine, what happens if you took too much?

Martin: Yes it is possible to overdose and it is very unpleasant and I wouldn’t want to do that to anyone. Well it would create some hyper thyroid function and your eyes would start bulging out of your head and you would be hyper all the time and like your metabolism would be over-revving and I think you would be feeling sort of like me right now. No just joking. Well it is definitely a concern you definitely don’t want to have too much of it.

Scott: So if you were taking too much of it would you have some indications before your eyes started bulging out?

Martin: I don’t remember I am sorry I don’t know everything about everything and this is the one that I am not too sure on. Do you have any literature on that?

Scott: No I am actually just quite curious but we are talking about a massive amount before you would be in any danger of overdosing in particularly when you talk about putting that patch on I can see when I put a two inch by two inch patch on my thigh and it is gone in the morning and I will do it again and it is gone in the morning so I do it again and then it is not gone I wouldn’t bother. That seems to me a pretty good way to do it.

Martin: Yeah easy enough or if you want to go the natural route which is what we would normally do you just get yourself some superfoods like the Exsula super foods that we so carefully make and that we talk about a lot and we put a very meaningful amount of sea plants in it you know we use kelp and dulse and these things are rich in iodine from the ocean and that’s where you get it. You can get it from seafood and you can get it from sea plants like kelp, dulse, bladderwrack you know like the nori that is wrapped around your sushi rolls and stuff like that right.

Scott: In fact one of the things that we talked about before we went on the air was that iodine deficiency was pretty well nonexistent in Japan.

Martin: That’s right a typical Japanese person consumes about a hundred times of what a typical American will consume. Not only do they eat seafood they also put sea plants into their diets and they also fertilize their gardens with kelp. I mean they get the kelp on the sea shore and they just pile it into their gardens in the fall and dig it in. A friend of mine who is in Victoria on the coastal British Columbia and she has been growing a phenomenal garden and she would just load stuff into a pickup truck and haul it into the garden and just throw it in there and I tell you the lunches there I couldn’t tell you why the stuff tasted so great but the kelp was part of it. So we also have it in the topically everything by twilight where we mix it with the magnesium so we have a product all in one. The topically everything is a phenomenal supplement, you spray on the magnesium and at the same time you get the benefits of the kelp extract and the alfalfa extract so you are getting minerals from the sea and minerals from the ground. Yeah it is a phenomenal product and we sell nowhere near enough of it because people just don’t understand it, it’s simple.

Scott: You just spray it on your skin and the skin absorbs it.

Martin: I actually use it as a deodorant as well so when I get out of the shower one spray into each arm pit and four sprays on my belly and I rub it in and there I go ready to take on the world. Yeah so it calms me down which is good because I need calming and it feeds me with minerals and the other one that we have is the Transderma magnesium gel which is thickened with the seaweed extract so again you are getting the iodine supplementation there and finally for people who are in really serious trouble we have run into some you know some people have problems with their thyroid and it wouldn’t matter how much iodine you supplement them it wouldn’t work because the signalling mechanism is broken and that happens when you end up with bromine you know when you ingest bromine it gets into the receptor sites in the thyroid and blocks them and causes the thyroid to not hear the signalling from the iodine. That becomes a real mess and then again comes with the industrial food processing industry is the cause of this trouble because they started using bromine as an additive to the flour in the making of the bread and pasta because the industrial sized kneading machines they function better or get better results when they add bromine to the flour and bromine is bad news in our bodies. So if you are eating commercially made bread than ouch, you are putting yourself at risk. But we already talked about that, that anything commercially made in the middle of the store is bad news.

Scott: How to shop?

Martin: Yeah how to shop, go to your farmers market and if you can’t go to the farmers market go to the organic counters or specialty grocer and if you can’t go there okay take regular produce.

Scott: Only as a last resort.

Martin: Yeah I saw a clip from the Oprah show with some fellow who is famous for promoting healthy living and the two of them were shopping at Costco and I am thinking yep perfect. The Mexican strawberries they are for sure guaranteed organic and you know there are a few vegetables and a few pieces of produce that are bad news it is like grapes, the berries like strawberries, green peppers and carrots, carrots are famous for the diazinon, so those are the things that you better be buying organic.

Scott: That’s all good to know because I didn’t realize about the carrots.

Martin: Yeah that’s diazinon for you that is the same thing that is known for stripping the jungle in the agent orange right. They actually use it to inhibit the worms. I certainly hope that I didn’t say something that was not true but this is what I read out there on the internet. I better go and double check my sources so but anyway the truth of the carrots and diazinon that is a fact. So you got me pretty excited about iodine. [Apparently it has been taken off the market]

Scott: Right well you know when you look at a comparison between the United States and Japan particularly with something like breast cancer where in the United States it is the highest in the world and Japan until recently was the lowest in the world and you look at the Japanese women who come from Japan and adopt the western lifestyle and it should be no surprise to anyone that they have a higher rate of breast cancer as opposed to staying in Japan and consume seaweed. In the United States the life expectancy is 77.48 in the 226 countries and it is 81.25 years in Japan the highest of all industrial countries and pretty close to the top of the list and infant mortality is the lowest in the world which comes back to what we were saying in the beginning the impact that iodine has on child bearing.

Martin: Right the pregnancy and the early child development especially the mental aspect of it. Well anyway I could probably talk for another hour but I think we have used up our twenty minute time slot haven’t we?

Scott: Yeah we are well into twenty five minutes.

Martin: Well I think we need to do another show on it because I am going to be telling you all the reasons why you want to have it.

Scott: Awesome and I think it is a very important topic and we need to delve into it in more detail so Martin for those people who are listening that want to head over to the Life Enthusiast website and check out some of these iodine products that you have mentioned do you have any incentive for them? Sort of a little something we can offer to our podcast listeners.

Martin: Oh absolutely we have the well liked and expected code of ten percent off of all iodine products and the code is IOD27 so folks that is IOD for iodine 27 and that gets you ten percent off all iodine products and that will be the Topically Everything and the Sea Aloe Gold and even the Exsula Premium so you will find that at www.life-enthusiast.com or call us at 1-866-543-3388 or if you want a direct number it is 775-299-4661.

Scott: Great and if you want to listen to previous episodes of our online radio show you can head over to LifeEnthusiast.podomatic.com and all the shows are archived there and we look forward to hearing your comments so leave some comments and let us know what you think and if you have any questions we will address them in an upcoming podcast episode so Martin I want to thank you for taking time out of your busy day to share this amazing information about iodine and I look forward to learning more about it in our next show.

Martin: Thank you Scott this is Life Enthusiast co-op restoring vitality to you and to the planet, thanks for listening.

Scott: Bye-bye.

Author: Martin Pytela