Thyroid Health
When we think of health we normally think of maintaining a healthy weight, having less body fat, creating healthy muscle mass, having stable blood sugar, good resting heart rate, low cholesterol levels, etc. Up until I started having thyroid issues, I never considered the state of my thyroid to be included in what a perfect picture of health looked like. Our thyroid is a butterfly-shaped gland in front of the neck that is part of the endocrine system that helps regulate hormones that control other functions in the body by producing:
Triiodothyronine, also known as T3.
Tetraiodothyronine is also called thyroxine or T4.
Iodine is one of the main building blocks of both hormones. Our bodies can’t produce iodine naturally so we need to get it from the food we eat! Once it’s processed in our system, it moved to the thyroid gland, where it is eventually used to make thyroid hormones.
After I realized I had a serious thyroid problem, I realized that the thyroid is incredibly important and how much of the body it controls and if it isn’t functioning the way it should, it can cause chaos within your body. It affects how you metabolize and utilize nutrients in food, it affects your heart rate, how your body regulates body temperature, changes in speech patterns, brain fog, memory. That’s not even scratching the surface. There are over 300+ symptoms that can be attributed to thyroid conditions. (Post on Thyroid conditions here).
Our bodies sometimes need more or fewer thyroid hormones. To make the exact right amount of hormones, the thyroid gland needs the help of another gland: the pituitary gland. The pituitary gland produces Thyroid Stimulating Hormone or also called “TSH”. The Pituitary gland then “tells” the thyroid gland whether to release more or fewer hormones into the bloodstream. Also, a certain amount of thyroid hormones are attached to transport proteins in the blood. If the body needs more hormones, T3 and T4 can be released from the proteins in the blood and do their job. There is a third hormone produced by the thyroid gland and it’s called calcitonin. Calcitonin is made by C-cells and its main job is to aid in calcium and bone metabolism.
The thyroid is such an incredible gland and even with its delicate butterfly shape and it not being super big, it is incredibly powerful and the body cannot function without it! If you feel like you may have symptoms of Thyroid issues I highly suggest you connect with your general practitioner first and have them refer you to an endocrinologist that will give you a full panel or connect with a naturopath that can also run a full panel for you.
Hope this explanation helped make sense of this fascinating gland and what it does for us. It’s truly an incredible part of the human body.
Stay Healthy!
-N