Gut-Thyroid Connection

Dr. Lauren Lax

100%. Well actually I was a former broadcast news journalist, journalists and print journalist for that was my first career path. And that really was a great segue. When I started into functional health as well. I was going to be the next Katie Couric on the Today show was my goal. And then life had a different path for me. And that really came by the way of my own journey and health story as a lot of practitioners get into functional wellness in particular and I would say for most of my life I struggled with unsolved health issues. So like from the time I was six years old, I couldn’t poop. So I was told I was constipated, I. B. S. And I mean very much dietary related and very much my birth story related to just kind of came into the world with the cards stacked against my gut microbiome. So like I was a C. Section baby, a lot of antibiotics as a kid, formula fed processed foods like and that that’s just things that the research shows unless we’re like being mindful of the gut can lead to gut symptomology these um and then fast forward to age 10 and I’m standing on the playground at recess with a group of the most popular girls in school and the queen bee says oh my gosh you guys, I weighed myself last night, I’m £69 so fat and then she turns to each of us, what do you weigh? And one by one we had to go around the gossip circle and report to our drill sergeant and at a healthy £80 I was by no means a fat kid. But when that circle got to me, I gulped and I lied And said I don’t know and went home that day and decided I was going to go on a diet so I could lose £10 and just be as pretty and healthy and like this girl that I wanted to be like and popular and little did I know that that decision that I’m That day standing in the pantry looking at my Doritos Snack Pack would turn into a full blown eating disorder and just my life really dramatically changed from that point on for the next 15 years of my life where I lived in and out of hospitals and treatment centers and um the treatment for eating disorders at the time. And it may still very much be the case to I’m trying to change it but it really was the three PS and that was pop tarts pizza and PROzac. 

And I would go I spent an accumulated four years of my life in hospitals and treatment like inpatient and then would go in do what I needed to do to get out and then just really never learned and in between. So I’d go right back to my old ways and it wasn’t really until I was 23 20 almost 24 years old that I stepped on the scale the morning before my second year of grad school only to see a number I had not seen since I was that 10 year old girl. Um £1 less than that and only this time I was a full fledged adult and it was the first time in that journey that it really just scared me. It wasn’t my parents or doctors saying you’re unhealthy. I was away from them living in Nashville and I remember driving to the gym that morning and praying God help me make a change today and I thought that meant help me eat a tablespoon of almond butter more and work out 30 minutes left on my stairmaster and little did I know that when I got to that parking lot at the Y. M. C. A. Not one but nine other gym goers would come up and just say Lauren we’ve been talking and we want to help you. 

And they spoke up and stepped in and took me to the hospital. Nothing imminent had happened yet. But within 48 hours I was in the ICU at the heart rate in the near twenties and doctors saying I may not make it. And it was really in that moment I made a decision that I did not know what life was going to look like on the other side but I was not going to go back down that other path and life was going to be different. And so I spent another year in treatment actually in Miami and um it was very much the pop tarts Pizza PROzac model but something inside me had changed and and when I got out is really when I began to find a new path and found my way into functional medicine to heal a lot of what I call post recovery recovery. 

So what happens to your body just after years of chronic dieting even if you just think about chronic just eating processed foods diet like it’s just whatever we’ve been through just in our body prior to help um It was really the recovery from those things and I ended up being diagnosed with 10 different chronic conditions. Doctors did not know what was going on, but including hashimoto’s hypothyroidism and then a ton of auto immunity, Lyme disease mold illness.It was just one after another and mast cell activation syndrome, really driving a lot of that and that’s where I had to become a health detective and really just became not only a patient, a functional medicine but became a student and became a healer. And I say now hell to kill others and just really feel like I can relate to a lot of what my patients experience and just my mind just goes right there to what is the mechanism driving the symptoms or the disease, even if it’s like, you know, I’ve been hypothyroidism ever. I’ve been on hypothyroidism medication forever. I like to understand what is the mechanism that led to this for the patient to help them to just kind of unwind or really suture that fix the foundations because a lot of times with that the body is innately wired to hell. Just kind of if you break a bone and you slap a cast on it, that your bones are going to hell in 68 weeks, even if you’re eating McDonald’s um and I’m not an advocate for that, but um that helping people just get back to that optimal state of health that they were, they’re wired for the world, just has its way of working against us in some capacity. 

Kelly Halderman

Well that was a beautiful story and I share a lot of similarity with you in that. I went back and you know, earned my MD. Got sick, didn’t have the tools in my tool kit to fix myself. So I went to be a student of functional medicine and I was a patient, I was my own patient and I also was was learning. So I really know what that’s like. I know that I would have never, ever left my al empathic career if my health didn’t fail. Um And it was a blessing, but it was the hardest thing I’ve ever been through in my entire life. Couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t figure out, like somebody would say their phone number and I was like, what’s a seven? Like I could I mean, my brain was so on fire. My gut was a mass. I too was a C section um you know, I really had a lot of antibiotics just really the cards were stacked against me and I and I bet you’ll agree with me Dr. Lauren that really all those, all those telepathic load of the antibiotics and all that changed our gut really probably set us up for not the best outcome moving forward. 

If if no one ever did anything about it now. Um you know, with my kids right now, I’ve tried to do everything right and with the people who um I see and I know they have these risk factors, we correct them before, they’re ever expressing right. We’re like, okay, we got we have to fix this, but you know, tell us, tell us, tell us more about again, the connection between your gut symptoms, which sounds like you’ve had had for a really long time and then connect that with the thyroid and talk to us about maybe some of the clients that you see, patients that you see and how they think that they just have thyroid disorder and that’s it. I’m sure you see this just there, but their guts a mess.

Dr. Lauren Lax

100%. And yeah, and sometimes the thyroid symptoms are just also a marker of the gut being a mess without always people having gut symptoms, although I would say constipation is quite common, like in the classic hypothyroidism space, um as is bloating, that’s going to go hand in hand with that. Um, the reason why the thyroid, I mean the gut is the gateway to health. That’s what I oftentimes will say. And just because there is an access pretty much to every organ in the body and tissue. So we’ve got the gut like immune access, You’ve got the gut brain axis, you’ve got the gut hp 80 like hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenal and thyroid axis and just thyroid, overly your gut is actually your largest endocrine organ in your body. And so it’s responsible for synthesizing and activating hormones and clearing them too. So like your liver gallbladder, which are organs that are part of your digestive system are going to help with just hormone balance in general. Um Active T. Three hormone, a vast amount of it is actually also activated in the gut. So T. Three would be what helps us be an optimal home static state. And we don’t always tested in al empathic medicine either. Like I’m sure you’ve probably address that some just when you’ve talked about thyroid on the summit, but it really is um the active thyroid hormone. So if your gut is out of whack you can imagine like your hormones are going to be somewhat suppressed. Um I think it’s so interesting to like the thyroid oftentimes we relate we call it the like the metabolic homework, my metabolism is not working, it must be the thyroid. And like just kind of like go into like well we’re going to work up the thyroid, we’re gonna treat the thyroid interestingly in the research. Um The metabolism, like the mechanism at play is often times they got those. 

So one of my favorite studies is where they take two mice or a group of mice, rather they take two twins, they take the bacteria from these twins. So one twin is overweight and one twin is lean and they give them to germ free mice. So germ free would be like they have no microbiome whatsoever. So there’s not like any they have overgrowth already or they don’t have they just don’t have anything. And then the mouse that gets the bacteria from the overweight twin gains weight the mouth, like it’s the bacteria from the lean twin like leans out that without any change in diet or exercise at all. And so like why is that? And how is that working in a mechanism could be and the gut is impacting like the thyroid hormone as is just like you know a good healthy microbiome is going to harvest your calories and your energy that you consume a lot better. So if we have dis biosystems, gut and balance things are going to move more slowly through the digestive system or we’re going to maybe have leaky gut, we’re not fully absorbing our food. 

And so that would be some connection also interestingly um you know 90% of cases of hypothyroidism are actually like hashimoto’s in nature. So hashimoto’s would be the autoimmune condition of the thyroid. So the body self tacking the tissue of the thyroid under stress. And like where is stress coming from? Question mark. Well the majority like all immunity are autoimmune disorders, there’s gonna be a leaky gut happening. Um And 80% 70 to 80% of your immune system is in your gut as well. And so if we have auto immunity going on of the thyroid but it’s not traditionally always worked up an alcoholic medicine as well to be checking for antibodies. Um And sometimes antibodies can be missed like antibodies do this kind of like cortisol does that. 

And so one day you can go in uh and maybe have elevated and maybe it’s just more suppressed on the antibody panels as well, but just to kind of know know Tate that. So health is an inside job a lot of times in clinical practice um I have a total gut reset process that I’ll take my patients through. But when we focus on just like the foundations like downstream versus upstream approach, I’ve had patients that have to go to their doctor, like their prescribing physician that prescribed them their thyroid meds and either 12:10.290 –> 12:15.900 lower the dose or talk about getting off that dose because their thyroids working again and it’s and it hasn’t been working for years and um it’s not to say like all the cases, like sometimes it’s it’s also a progress stage of hypothyroidism or it’s been going on for so long and there’s definitely merit to I think medication as well for the thyroid, it just depends on the patient’s presentation, but it’s been it’s really cool to just see that cleanup happen for the in the gut and then like energy, improve cognition, improve constipation, improve all things that are oftentimes thyroid symptoms and last thing I’ll say on that is just like a lot of times I will get patients that happen on thyroid medication for years and it’s just like seemingly not working like their numbers are still that changing, They may be felt better at first but not like much better and a lot of times it’s just because that mechanism again, we were focusing on the upstream versus the downstream, which is kind of what was triggering the thyroid numbers to be off for this thyroid symptoms.

Kelly Halderman

Pretty more hormone in the system. Um, in manipulating numbers didn’t, isn’t really your problem, your problem didn’t start from a lack of Synthroid, it’s more of those root causes like the gut being one of them. So um yes, I totally agree with you. And then, you know, inflammation in of itself and the body will lower. TSH. So it’s really hard to, to chase and decipher when you’re looking that upstream instead of downstream. So um doctor, you talked about your gut reset program. Can you kind of walk us through the pillars of that or where you start with patients?

Dr. Lauren Lax

Yeah, so I have three phases or not. And so every patient begins with a kick start and I really like in that to having a car that has like pretend you have a jeep and it has mud on it and you go get a speck of dirt on that jeep, can you see the speck of dirt? No, because you already have dirt on it, but if you go through the car wash, get a speck of dirt on that car, you can see the dirt or not. And so I go through a kick start a lot of my patient population is already kind of like doing all the things are so like eating healthy, they’ve been on maybe like diets to an extreme or completely eliminated certain food groups. So a kick that doesn’t necessarily mean like a total elimination. Sometimes we’re actually just focusing on bringing food back in and building an abundance diet because a healthy microbiome thrives off an abundant diet and diversity and in the diet is going to help rebuild the biodome. 

So I actually have a philosophy, I called the okay diet and that it’s okay to eat food and um kind of wherever the patient is coming from, if they’ve been like carb avoidant or complete meat free and um just really helping them find like what are the pillars of like nutrients that they need in what very customized way and that way, but resetting the gut if there have, if things have been off out of balance in their lives a lot of time, there’s an imbalance somewhere um lifestyle nutrition wise areas that we can improve. Um I think my story is a great example of that Queen of the diets under the sun and um just all all of the rebuilding kind of approach was really helpful in my own healing. So after that or during that I’ll also talk about five gut love habits that I’ll teach them throughout that process. So really one of my favorite questions to ask my patients at the end of our work together is what helped you the most in your healing journey and very rarely is an elimination diet or is it a long list of supplements, It usually has to do with lifestyle and lack lack of stress, like losing stress um, and some capacity. So those five, but love habits are what that’s all about and really um, also helping them by the end of that kick start them began to also build their own personal five. But love habits. I calm your five baselines that just really when you noticed like I feel constipated, like what was often my day yesterday when they slept like six hours instead of my usual seven and that’s going to actually impact motility for many people. Or maybe I just like em under hydrated or I’ve been drinking out of plastic water bottles every time I visit my family in Arkansas, they just drink out of plastic water bottles. So a lot of, I just noticed that inflammation from that. So helping patients get just more aware of what are their trigger. Um, they will move into a phase two, which is customized and it really is, if we’ve done any lab work, usually lab work is back by that time, so we’ll fine tune and hit the nail on the head a little bit more and I create that customized blueprint for them. 

So maybe we’re going into a gentle cleanse type of protocol or maybe we’ve worked up there figured out their living and mold and that’s a big like elephant in the room, so we’re addressing that. Um Sometimes a lot most of my patients are going through a gut brain work that will be doing coaching wise through that process as well, so rewiring the gut brain axis to de stress the brain the limbic system to be okay with healing. So sometimes we just need that in order for diet and supplements to actually work. Um and then lastly moving into Optimize, so phase three is just really like now that this weight has been lifted off of your like your body and your health, like your capacity to like what is possible is just so much wider and brighter. So this is where like a patient may have a fitness goal at this season or maybe they have a career goal now or I say like hell to heal others, that’s kind of the phase where I started to really want to start to help others. 

So optimized, looks really unique. I do some work within human design for folks to to really understand like what is your persona, what are your strengths and help them really navigate that. And I think that really comes from a lot of my occupational therapy background as well, lifestyle redesign kind of work that I do with patients in conjunction, but I see people as a whole. Um but through that process it’s just really cool to see um folks go from throwing spaghetti at the walls and thinking like it’s the protocols and the diets that are gonna like that they need to do, and those can be adjunctive. I call them the bumper lanes though, it’s kind of like if you’re bowling, bowling and you know, bumper lanes, they help keep you in balance and stay in the lanes. Um but they’re not the panaceas that I think were sometimes like the green, ala Kathy, we kind of can fall into that trap as well. It’s really like the holistic and especially with distressing and lifestyle factors. 

Kelly Halderman

So that was great. So I want to circle back to something that you said about patients and you know, when they come in and they can only tolerate three foods, you know, that’s sort of, you alluded to that, where it’s like, I’m only down to these foods and they’re just scared to death of other foods. And I see that as a twofold problem. I see that as a pro with the tolerance of the immune system and you know, everything that we can do to help reset the gut can help that. But I also see that and you alluded to this as a brain issue, right limbic system issue where we’re in this cell danger response and everything is going straight to our limbic system and it’s being on high alert, talk to us, how about some tools that you use to bring the limbic system down back to a reasonable level and to say like you know you can tolerate more than your three suits. 

Dr. Lauren Lax

Oh yeah 100%. I’m glad you mentioned that because that definitely is a trap I fell into. Like I mean not only through the eating disorder but on the post and the post recovery it was like I was eating 5 to 10 foods at the most and reacting to everything low histamine diet um A lot of times that is related to like lots of oral tolerance is what we call it. So and really the diversity of the gut is pretty low um at that point so we just don’t have enough gut bugs to actually digest a variety of foods, so rebuilding it there and the leaky gut as well as symptomology or metabolic into talk mia which should be a toxic leaky gut, just a second progress. But yes gut brain huge intolerances and it’s really fascinating to me um Like you know the number two intolerance is probably in the U.S. Like gluten and dairy quite common, like we already know that. And then then we get questions like well why does a person react to like broccoli and almonds are like whatever just like healthy foods as well. 

Exactly and that’s to like where this gut brain like just being really curious about what is happening there. So I’ll give an example just from a gluten perspective and then move into those. Um So say little johnny loves to eat PB and J he eats it every single day, he’s been eating it since he was like three years old, now he’s eight years old. Um then all of a sudden out of the blue, he starts to develop these weird intolerances to it, so he gets itchy skin, maybe his stomach starts hurting so that the parents take him to the doctor and sure enough he’s got some gluten sensitivity and um peanut sensitivity, peanut allergy would be one as well, It’s quite common. Um Well when we do the work and understanding his timeline, well when he became intolerant to these foods turns out little johnny was eating his PB and J sandwich was he witnessed his parents having an all out fight that led to his dad walking out and eventually filing for a divorce. Now the way that the brain works is it says game set match and it begins to correlate stress with what was happening. Um I’ve seen this with bacon and tolerance. 

Becky as well. Became intolerant of bacon. What what was happening around the time, what turns out she was cooking bacon when she found out her husband was having an affair on her and again, game set match and that just kind of so I’ll fast forward to, well, what about with healthy foods and I’ll use me as an example. So when I was going through my post recovery years um and through the mold illness actually at that time I became intolerant to almonds. I became intolerant to broccoli. I mentioned a lot of cruciferous vegetables. Actually, salads bothered me. Sweet potatoes would make my blood sugar go from like 80 to 1, 82 80 and like 20 minutes, which is like you’re riding a roller coaster inside. So for whatever reason, my body was saying mayday, mayday, I can’t tolerate these foods. Um Well later on, I didn’t really understand what was going on at the time, but when I did the understanding of the limbic system, those were foods. I, I really abused in my eating disorder. Like I ate a lot of those. Um, those were my safe foods are also carefully counted. My almonds for example. Um very just strict around those. Um, but my body, my limbic brain, the part that holds on to memories just really remembered and correlated stress. So when I’m living in mold and made a stress going on in my life, the brain attaches and looks to attach. And so that’s where that those intolerances really, I believe stemmed from, on its on top of it. Like that parallel there’s the physical and then there’s the, the subconscious or what is going on internal. We have 100 and 26 million bytes of information every second Our brain is processing and the body doesn’t, or the brain doesn’t know the difference in running from a bear versus oh my gosh, I’m 10 g of carbs over my limit. It sees all sources of stress the same. Even if we’re sitting on a beach in Tahiti, we think we don’t have a care in the world. The brain can be processing and intercepting like an email that we’re reading on that beach. Uh similarly to again, running from that bear. 

And so same thing can happen with food. It’s really fascinating to me to how many like um I guess just like upper middle class folks tend to be sicker. It seems sometimes like with these, all these intolerances. Um And whereas like those may be living in a food desert where there’s like just daily survival and there’s just different problems that they’re having no No recognition of intolerance is that they’re having the foods at all. And it’s kind of like, well what stressors like, I mean, are we stressed about our diet? Um I absolutely love the milkshake study too. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that study, but where they gave two groups a milkshake that was 300 calories. Um But they told the groups that were getting different amounts. So one group got 140, the sensor shake, one got a 600 calorie indulgent milkshake. 

Well at the end of the city, they wanted to just see what happened to their metabolism digestion. Their cortisol levels. Those that thought they were eating. The sensor shake the diet, shake their cortisol was much higher. They were three times hungrier meaning like their metabolism like they were not absorbing and digesting these nutrients and they were just in that diet mentality mode, they wanted the next thing to eat. Whereas the those that got the 600 calorie milkshake, their metabolism, it was just a super leveled off. So their leptin levels were just like their fullness hormones were normal and their cortisol, they just like enjoyed it. They were like, okay, this is a one off study. We’re going to just enjoy that and how that just goes to show how belief can change physiology without again anything physical different in there.

Kelly Halderman

So yeah, the biology of belief by Bruce Lipton is one of my favorite books. It was a game changer for me and our mindset. So yes, our mindset in our stress level and perceived stress. It can it can trump every good thing that we can do for our body, every dietary intervention supplement exercise. I mean we really have to really tackle that and I’m a big component of emotional work and making sure that we do, we manage that that stress stress isn’t going away right? We’re really not going to get out of that, but when it starts to really reek havoc on our bodies, that’s when we have to really pay attention to it because the body keeps score right?

Dr. Lauren Lax

100% and I can I can share one tip if you do that for for helping with overcoming food intolerances because I just like gave information of like how they stem from. But um if you can imagine like standing in a beach and like you’re in the ocean and your back is to the wave, what happens when you’re the wave hits you when you’re standing with your back to it 

Kelly Halderman

move forward? 

Dr. Lauren Lax

Yeah. Typically you move forward so you just don’t see it, you just keep going. But if you turn around and you face that wave, what happens?

Kelly Halderman

It just hits you.

Dr. Lauren Lax

Yeah, you’re able to like brace yourself better. So a lot of the work with the gut brain a lot of times just stems from initially awareness. Like understanding where did this intolerant stem from? So if little johnny is understanding of like what was going on in my life prior because I’ve always eaten this PB and J. Um and he recognizes, recognizes and with food intolerances overtly a Sometimes it’s related to an indigestible conflict. So something we cannot swallow or digest and it manifests same thing with gut issues and the gut. So like if you develop all of a sudden these like intolerances at a season in your life, what was preceding that? That was hard to swallow digest in a figurative sense and the way the psyche and processes that is completely different for every person. So like in my mold journey like what I could not digest was like a walking away from everything as if a fire had happened twice. Like getting rid of all my stuff and just really being stripped of that. And then being feeling like doctors couldn’t also figure it out. I had a doctor tell me to my face, Lauren, there’s times conventional medicine will fail you. 

This is one of them and this is when I’m in the er having a mast cell activation syndrome issued during that time and there was a lot of indigestible stresses going on and so just adding that fuel to the fire, like therefore my gut, the body, the body does keep the score and a lot of times are symptoms or our reactions are just metaphors. The body’s saying not, not listen, I’m trying to tell you something this is what’s going on and we take back that power by just doing some of that awareness work to start and then is where we can get creative. So it’s like I now see where that stressor is coming from. It’s like what can I say to myself mentally when I am going to sit down and like have a smoothie with some almond butter in it. And that was something I had to coach myself through it. Like I’m just in a different place right now. This is nourishing to my body and to begin to see it as nourishing kind of like our milkshake, study subjects dead as well. And that belief can change physiology right?

Kelly Halderman

Words of wisdom there from from Dr. Lauren, that was beautiful really? Um Opened my eyes to something I actually never heard of. But it makes complete sense of of that the trigger and then what was going on and then facing it and then talking yourself through it. I mean we we can be such powerful advocates for ourselves. We need direction, right? We need someone to come in like yourself and say, you know, tell us about the that connection for our ourselves. But does does make a lot of sense, you know, to to really move your patients through that and to help eliminate the the the food intolerances are huge and they’re getting worse and we’re running out of options. And uh you know, even the the food allergy testing is is not the best. It’s not really, you know, I mean you can get a good picture of sort of what’s going on, but then, you know like they can also be reacting to something that doesn’t even look like that on food allergy testing. So you did mention the elimination diet, but then again it’s like well now what you know, now now what do we do with this? So you just gave us an extra tool for addressing that. So I’m so thankful that you were so generous with your time today, Dr. Lauren um you know, I always like to ask the guests um if there’s one powerful thing that you do other than everything. We just talked about on yourself on a daily basis that you could share that with us as our parting thoughts 

Dr. Lauren Lax

just for help my health and yeah, I mean my secret to feeling energetic just throughout the day, I have so much energy but I do shove asana sometimes twice a day which would be like through yoga and just kind of finding a mind body practice. Like I was very poo poo on yoga for so long just because I am a high performer and I didn’t have time to to do that. But I found like power yoga, I love the power flow and then rest of asana is just like regenerating to me, my brain and so that would be I guess a hack I have from an energy perspective.

Kelly Halderman

Nice yeah. Getting in touch with the body is very very important.

Well thank you so much, Dr. Lauren. I really appreciate your time and take care and have a great weekend.

Dr. Lauren Lax

Thank you so much.