Thyroid Health & Nutrition

Introduction and Doctor Kelly Haldermanu2019s mission 0:00

Hi, I'm doctor Kelly Halderman. I'm a former medical physician and author of The Thyroid Debacle. I'm now devoting my life to education, research and biotech because I realize we need educated people to bring us cutting edge information, especially when we find ourselves with a diagnosis such as hypothyroidism. When I was practicing allopathic medicine, I myself became very sick, bedridden with what would be diagnosed as Lyme and mold infections. Along my health journey, I was also diagnosed with Hashimoto's thyroiditis, a condition I was told that could only be managed with medication.

Well, I'm here to tell you that there is more than medication to help you, as you will learn through my powerful interviews with several functional medicine practitioners. There are tools that will help empower you to take charge of your health. Join me today as I interview leading doctors, naturopathic specialists to uncover the most useful health insights for you. This podcast has been launched in collaboration with Doctor Talks. Visit them today at Doctor talks.com. Backslash Calendar to learn more about their upcoming summits.

And this is Doctor Kelly Halderman, and I am joined by the fantastic doctor Brady Wyrick for another edition of Doctor Talk's Thyroid series. Welcome, doctor. Wherever. Man, it is an absolute honor and a pleasure to be here. Kelly. It's, Doctor Halderman. You and I go back a ways and, we've collaborated over the years, thrown some great ideas back and forth. And when you invited me to join you, that, that means a lot to me. So.

Doctor Brady Wyricku2019s background and practice 1:35

Thank you. Well, awesome is totally my honor, because I know you're going to drop some knowledge bombs as usual. First, before you do so, tell us about yourself. Tell us about your practice. Okay, great. So I've been in practice here. I mean, Idaho Falls, Idaho. Think salt Lake City, Utah, three hours directly north. Hey, I've been in practice now for about 16 years. I literally opened my practice here because I really like to fish. And the best fishing in Utah, where I grew up, is actually in Idaho. So here I am.

I came to Utah, or actually I came to Idaho to, to to be a lot around a lot of great outdoor stuff. And I've been here for 16 years now and I absolutely love it. My practice has many facets to it, from functional medicine to functional urology to regenerative medicine. My wife and I want to run a weight loss program. So there's there's a lot of a lot of facets to it. I've been fascinated with the whole laser concept lately, and the things that laser can do for TBI and stroke. It's been it's been a wild ride.

I like it a lot. By training, I am a chiropractor. There's very few patients that I have that I actually adjust. There's many, many more things that we have available to us that, that are very helpful. So I love to be outside. I love to teach people how to eat. And, that's that's me and a. In a nutshell. So that's awesome. Yeah. Your Instagram is full of beautiful pictures that I'm not a, you know, I'm not a person. I'm not really that outdoorsy, really person. But you inspire me, doctor. Why are you inspired me to, like, get out there and fish and all this stuff?

So it's really cool. But you also are really inspiring you and your wife. You talked about this because of what you're doing with nutrition. I mean, not only are your the people that you're interviewing that you've taken through your program, they look fantastic. They are talking about more energy. They just feel better. They feel better. And that's the most important part is we feel better. So today we're talking about thyroid. And I'm like, I'm going to bring you on because I want to talk to you about person comes in.

They have hypothyroidism most likely causes autoimmune thyroiditis. What is like what is your approach like how do you start thinking about what to even do with this person? Well, first off, we do run a weight loss, weight loss program. And if we can talk business for for two minutes, I call it a weight loss program, mainly because people don't understand what people here in Idaho don't really understand what functional medicine is. So if I call it a functional medicine program, I spent all this money on advertising.

I'm not going to get a whole lot that's coming back because they don't understand that they're overweight because they're broken. They just think that they're overweight because they're putting too much food in and not enough exercise, which has some merit.

Functional medicine approach to hypothyroidism 4:38

But it's so antiquated. It's just it's not even, it's not even funny. It's actually quite sad. I did not know how to turn my phone on or my computer on. Do not disturb. So sorry if I get little dings every now. Yeah. So, about a year and a half ago, I was introduced to a program that I actually had bought the rights to use it. And then I started looking at the fundamentals of what the program was based upon, which is basically, there's like patrol trough drops that you put underneath your tongue that, that act as an adaptogen to regulate insulin and sensible eating, you know, two meals a day, four ounces of fruit, four ounces of vegetable for us.

So protein at its core, it was brilliant. But as I started looking into this thing, I'm like, this is so close to a functional medicine program. There's just a few things that we can tweak. We've made it our own, so we've gotten rid of all the anti-inflammatory. We've gotten rid of all the inflammatory oils. We've really made some changes to this thing and really, like, dug into it, which I think we've made it awesome. So back to your question. People come in and one of the main things we want to look at is what medications are on, because we see people on thyroid medications all the time.

I haven't looked at the statistic lately. Last time I looked, it was like the second highest prescribed drug in the country. Second or third. Yep. So I think it goes back and forth. So we see it all the time, and I sit down with people and I say, look, I see you're on thyroid medication. And the most likely cause for that is an autoimmune reaction. So and I just explained to them that what we're going to do is put them on an anti-inflammatory diet that's going to help regulate your thyroid better.

As far as thyroid medication is concerned, I, you know, I, I'm a chiropractor. I can't tell to take drugs or not take drugs. I just how I look, it's going to be tough to regulate thyroid medication. And you're probably still gonna have to do it when you're done. But if you're feeling better and the drugs actually do is claim that it does, you're going to be better off in the long run. So we're going to get rid of some diet. And then we go into the whole, we're going to get rid of some inflammation advice. What I meant to say.

Then I explained to them that, Hashimoto's in particular is carried on the same gene is gluten sensitivity. And there's a high of high probability that you're gluten sensitive. I try to ease them into this. Right. Because if you come in full bore saying gluten is got to go if you look, if you come in and tell them the freaking truth, their brain chemistry goes, you can't handle the truth, right? They can't handle no, literally. And it's not because they're like a weak person. It's because they're neurochemistry.

So screwed up because of that on morphine that their their primitive addicted brain hates my guts sitting across from them, telling them they can't have this particular food. Yeah. So we ease them into it. Yeah. So you used a big word they're glad a morphine. Can you kind of. Sure. Layperson's definition I forgot because the last time I think we did this, we did this for doctors, didn't we? Yeah, we did, so we didn't have to do that. You basically, your brain is getting a morphine response from the food you're eating from your your donuts or you know, you're getting like this. Woo.

Like this rush. And it's, it's a it's very addictive. It's a thing. It's a thing. It's 100%. Here's what happens. Say people think wheat is about gluten and they think gluten is about celiac. There's a bunch of other proteins that are involved, which is why the testing that your doctor probably did say if you're gluten sense are not total high probability that it's garbage. You like I stop myself there. Yep. Very good. So gliadin is a protein that's found in wheat, hits your stomach as it breaks apart, and your body can actually take that gliadin and turn it into what's called gliadin morphing.

So it becomes a completely different compound. And it's called a morphing for a reason because it binds to the morphine receptors in your brain and you literally get the same woo rush that you would get from just anything, from anything that you can get a rush from. Right? In particular things like crack gives you the same type of buzz. And so taking that away from people is right. So taking that away, people look at me when I say that they want to punch me in the face. So I'd like to stay in business and keep doing what I do.

So I don't come in like both barrels like that in the very, very beginning. Because the truth hurts. And the truth is. They've got to come off of it, right, right. Now, here's a problem. When they start thinking that they want to take all of their sandwiches, pastas, donuts, all the standard American food and just replace that with gluten free products,

Gluten, cross-reactivity, and food sensitivities 9:35

which you and I both know. There's some pretty dang good gluten free products out there, right? But if you make that switch just one for one, the problem is there's a lot of those other products have other things in them that can cause the same types of reaction. They're also loaded with sugar that can cause the same type of reaction. So you may come off of gluten for you may go gluten free for two weeks, but your body doesn't change. It's still getting the same reaction because you're not doing it correctly, right?

Right. You haven't even like addressed probably the damage that has been done from, you know, the the food sensitivities and such. And so I, I've seen that over and over as I went off gluten for two weeks, I didn't notice anything. It's like, okay, well you replace that. Like just like what you said was something that's gluten free. But talk to us about cross contamination to that molecular mimicry and some gluten free things like corn and oatmeal and things. Yeah, sure. So there's other compounds that have proteins in them.

They're not gluten, but they look a lot like gluten. And you know, if the receptor on your cell is shaped like this and the protein is shaped like this, it's still going to fit into that receptor, right? So it'll cause the same type of reaction. So it's important to look at some of the cross contaminant cross reactive foods which are big. One is dairy. Yes. Like I had a conversation with someone just this week is like, well my daughter tried going gluten free and she tried dairy free. Why did you try that at the same time?

Oh, you have to do that. Yeah. You do. Okay. Because dairy is not a lactose issue. There is for some people. There's other proteins in dairy to like milk being a truffle in and casein. But you can have reactions to those particular products that look just like a gluten product. You mentioned oats. There's proteins in oats, there's proteins in rice, there's proteins in amaranth, there's proteins and in corn. And, social media has been buzzing lately because of that cute kid singing the corn song. Right.

All right. You may love corn, but corn does not love you back. I think it's, in fact, one of my most popular videos that I've done on, on social media was me and Kim driving across, Nebraska. And we were just kind of raging on on corn, saying a lot of the same things. But the reality is like it can still cause a cross-contamination reaction and you can be completely gluten free and getting this and not getting any results because you just didn't. You're still eating some of those, right? You didn't address that.

And so it's, it's, you know, it's very, valiant effort to, you know, go gluten free, go dairy free. But in the past, when I was practicing, I'd use Pyrex testing, because then I could see that those, those foods were causing the exact same reaction. Because it's so frustrating as a patient to to implement things, put your time in, put your money in, and then still just hit the wall and still not have any positive results. So I would sometimes have to resort to to doing that to just see like, okay, you know, a lot of people have things to resolve.

They go gluten free, dairy free, and they're like, oh my gosh, I feel so much better. Everything's good. But then there's a lot of people who get stuck. So with your approach, okay, so you you have the person they're coming in. You're if they have the, they have hypothyroidism, you're suggesting that you're perhaps using the same labs, that I am or different labs or anything else I talk to us like about about dig into that diet a little bit more like how did you refine it? So when we first got it, there were things in there like Melba toast, right?

Oh, my, that's total trash. I that was the first thing to go. But it had things like using Pam for cooking spray. And Pam is nothing but industrialize your oils and propellants, which your body still causes an inflammatory reaction. So we replace that with avocado spray and extra virgin olive oil spray, which we tell our patients to go buy it at Costco. Like, yeah, there's no propellant in it. It's still in a spray can. Still does the same thing. You know, our line that we use is we yes, we want to.

We're trying to burn fat off of you. So we want to limit the amount of exogenous fat that we bring in. Exogenous means, stuff that you bring in from the outside world. So we don't want to consume a bunch of fat while we're trying to burn fat off of you, but you still have to have healthy fat. I if you don't if you do not have healthy fat, it's going to affect, brain function for sure. And we don't want to do that. So we added in some healthy oils. But I think the biggest thing that we've done is just added the, the education component of it.

We do classes in our, in our office twice a week, twice a month. So the second, Thursday of the month, excuse me, the second Wednesday of the month and a fourth Wednesday of the month, we do classes in this very same room that I'm sitting in right now where we just teach people like, look, if you really want to be well and you really want to be healthy, do not eat anything that has a freaking label, right? I say read them and eat. Do not eat anything that has a label that's very, very you know, it's easy, right?

That's really pretty easy for people to latch on to that. Right. And to to start making choices just according to that. Like what's for breakfast? Well, it's not that packaged, you know, cereal with the additives and all that. You know, it's just something simple, like an egg. They're not allergic. Right. So we actually have people skip breakfast. We're two meals a day, so it's lunch and dinner. So there is a component of this where we are intermittent fasting, which by the way, intermittent fasting is a fancy way of saying skipping breakfast. Yep.

Hey, don't complicate it. I swear breakfast was invented by people who want to sell you pancake. The saying, you know, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. That's that was brought to you by your marketing. That's right. Making money off of you. Right. And then you'll go right. Medication with. What we should do is Kim and I should actually, like, charge people to go to for them, for us to go to the grocery store with them so we can just, like, walk around and just kind of like point out to them some of the nonsense that's, you know, I tell people all the time, if a food, if a label is making a health claim, they're hiding something or they're lying or both.

Yes, absolutely. They even in the health food section. Yep. It's like we picked up what was it, a gluten free? It was a mix of some sort. And the first ingredient was sugar. Right. You know, people with thyroid issues, they can't handle sugar, right? It causes so much inflammation. They're just you keep tipping the scale in the wrong direction, right? So we tell them food companies lie,

Diet refinement, fasting, and label reading 16:58

and if they understood how they're trying to get you addicted to their food. So you keep buying it, then I think that sets people free. You know, you look at fast food companies and they purposely put MSG in their food because monosodium glutamate is excitatory, is a excitatory neurotoxin. Like it winds your brain up and gets you excited. So you keep going back and buying their garbage. They hashtag chick fil A. They're like hashtag outlawed in Europe. Like, right. A lot of these. Yeah. Europe was like, nope, no way, no way.

But we're not really protected over here. But we're money hungry here. So. Oh yeah. Absolutely. Okay. So let's so let's say that your good patient is following all these rules, but they have a day where they slip up and, you know, like everyone does and they're paying the price. Obviously we're going to get them back on track. Like just you know like when you slip up, just get back on the horse. Is there anything else you do supplement wise? I know we're both fans of yours sometimes. Master someone, can you kind of go through that like a gut support?

So, you know, first off, everybody's human except for Kim. Okay, I would I have never I have never, ever seen a person more. What's the word I'm looking for? Not dedicated, but just like she. It's ridiculous how she's loyal to her. Which your she practices what she. You guys preach. She's so a phenomenal specimen of a person. All right, I'm human. I make mistakes for our patients are human. They make mistakes. But Kim's just. She's not human. So that said, what we're trying to do here with people, with people in our office is try to build up some metabolic flexibility, okay?

So that when they have those insulin and inflammation surges, they're going to spike up your body, deals with them, and then returns back to baseline very, very quickly. Okay. When they first get here, their inflammation and insulate insulin levels are through the roof. No bueno. And we got to get them back down here and then build up. So when they do have a slip it's for they're back. Great resilience I love that I love that metabolic resiliency metabolic flexibility. It's a beautiful thing okay.

Now for those people who do make mistakes, there's ways that can get them back quicker. Hey. And there's this really cool enzyme DPP for Google it. I don't even know what it stands for, and I can't even pronounce what it stands for. But there is a crap ton of research on DPP for that. Basically, when you get these food insults, when you make those mistakes, it can get you back to that baseline very, very quickly, can actually start breaking down because if you eat gluten, it'll stay in your system for up to six months.

That's right. And not even a lot. And you don't even have to consume a lot of gluten deferred to mess with you for six months. DPP four can break it down much, much quicker. Get them back, back to normal sooner rather than later. And it's found in a product that we use called Blue Design. It's a fabulous product. There's, just Google DPP four. Yeah, that's one of the things I'll use to if I go to you because I'm gluten free, I have Hashimoto's. Everyone probably listening knows that by now, but I'll use that before the meal, during the meal, and then just a couple days after, just in case, because, you know, restaurants try their best with their there can be exposures in there.

So I do I love that the blue design for that. It's a it's a fab. But you got to be big. You got to be frank though. It is not a kitchen pass. No. You cannot just say well I'm going to take some dpp4 and eat that cupcake. Please don't do that. But you can use it as a. As a, as both a prophylactic and as a. Oh, crap. I made a mistake. Before and after you go to a restaurant, that's that's a big deal. Definitely. What about keeping the gut healthier in general? What do you think about prebiotics probiotics balance.

What's your thoughts on that big fan. There is a ton of data out there about anaerobic anaerobic microbes in your gut. You know the anaerobic. So the good guys, the aerobics are the bad guys. And I've said for years that bad bacteria will eat your nutrients and poop toxins into your system. Good bacteria will eat, eat toxins and poop. Good bacteria. That's really good to do a good that that's that's nice. That's good visual. Yeah, yeah. You probably shouldn't let my, my 15 year old brain, draw said cartoon.

Gut health, probiotics, and immune support 22:08

But it's a big deal. Like, you have to. If there is a toxin in our environment, it's going to affect your gut bacteria. First. Okay. More and more people are becoming aware of the whole glyphosate problem. The glyphosate Monsanto. They claim it's safe for human consumption. And the only reason why they make that claim is because it doesn't kill you, right? When you consume it. But what it does is it kills your gut bacteria. Then you take an antibiotic, and then you're drinking diet soda, and then you're under all this stress, and then you're walking into your, you know, to your bedroom where you have a candle burning that's from Bath and Body Works and just all this, like, fragrance and just this crap in our environment, it's going to kill your gut bugs, which over time will kill you.

Right? So prebiotics are awesome. There's fabulous products out there. Like, like sun spectrum can certainly help with the prebiotic load, fermented foods. You know, that's one of the things that we encourage people to eat a lot of water on this program is fermented foods for that exact reason. There's so many. Good. You know, when when US enzymes and master supplements marry each other, you know, you want to talk about probiotics that could change the world between those two companies. There's fabulous, fabulous products available to help keep your gut inoculated with that. Good stuff.

Overuse of bacteria and antibiotics, overuse of hand sanitizer, and other stupidity that we have going on right now. Your immune system, your gut. Do them a favor. Probiotics are our key. One of the favorite things we like to use here is a product that was developed by our good friend, Doctor Ian Holloman. Great. Dude, he's got a product immunization. That's basically a I call it a multivitamin for your immune system. Oh. That's good. I love using this super. It's a fabulous I mean, it's probiotics.

It's vitamin D, it's, What's the one I can't think of right now? I mean, a and K2, I believe similar to that. Yeah. Yeah. So just a wonderful product. If you don't like taking a lot of pills, that's a great way to go because you can just do 1 or 2 a day and actually do yourself a lot of good. Definitely. Yeah. That's it's obviously in this day and age super important to have our immune system healthy. You know immune system in the gut you know. So you think gut health then you tie it all back to your diet.

So it'd be really really so powerful what we can do for our health by changing what we put in our into our mouth and into our bodies. I don't think there's anything that can supplant that. I really don't, you know, obviously exercise is very important. But like you said in the beginning, when your brain's on fire because your gut seems, you know, you're inflamed all you don't really have the the capability, really that neurological capability, your dopamine pathways are all the, you know, in shambles to really get up and move.

So it's almost a process where you you start, you start changing your diet, start buying foods that don't have labels, getting off food that can be inflammatory. I love how you said that. You know, the hypothyroidism is is autoimmune. And those genes they there on the same area for gluten sensitivity because not that long ago Brady you'll agree with me it was people thought that gluten sensitivity was a joke. They're like, oh, you know, I mean they're celiac. See, it's real. But now we know that, you know, gluten sensitivity is a diagnosable condition and that we've gotten better with our lab testing.

We've gotten better, with the research that we've been doing. So I really I really enjoyed everything that you brought to the table because I think that just that reminder, like it starts with nutrition in it and it really you have to get that right. You really do have to get that right. So, do you have any parting thoughts before I give everyone your information on where to find you? You know, we could really launch into a, traumatic brain injury thing right here. I don't know if you want to open that can of worms yet or not.

Or if we want to do this on another time, but there are studies that show that post traumatic brain injury, there are elevated levels of protein in your bloodstream after you hit your head. That only come from the gut. So immediate effects. So there's there's an immediate effect. And that there is a correlation between developing food sensitivities and leaky gut syndrome from traumatic brain injury. Wow. So let's let's that's our teaser right. Our teaser that's from two. That's great for you. Let's have a conversation about that very very soon.

Yeah. The point that I'm trying to make is our genes are the gun. The environment pulls the trigger right. Okay. You can't just blame your genetics for where you're at right now.

Traumatic brain injury, environment, and closing thoughts 27:28

Something has happened. Something stressful in your life. For you. Med school was stressful, and that's when the crap hit the fan for you. Absolutely. For other people, it may have been a brain injury, for other people may have been some other sort of stress. When at the end of the day, you cannot control that crap, you will literally have to put an expletive. I keep saying crap, you will literally cry. You will literally drive yourself crazy trying to control the outside environment like that. You're going to be exposed to chemicals.

You're going to expose to fragrances, you're going to be exposed to this big joke we have called 5G. All this stuff is here and it's not going away. Right? But what you can control 100% is what you put in your mouth. So every bite that you take is either killing you or healing you. You get to decide what it's doing. That's awesome, because a lot of the the messages we hear are gloom and doom, and it just feels like we're we have no choice and we're just going to be, you know, drowning in this toxic sludge.

But you that you nailed it with that. Like, you really have the choice to decide, your health and with what you put in your mouth. So, Doctor Brodie, where do we find you and your lovely wife for all these programs? And name your Instagram, too, because it's very, very fascinating. Some of your videos on Instagram where you guys go in the grocery store. Amazing. So tell us where we can find you. So on Facebook, I'm Doctor Brady Weirich Rick. You can find me there. You can find me on Instagram on the same with the same, you know, with some underscores I think is doctor underscore Brady underscore why?

Anyway, I'm on there. You may come across my personal stuff. My personal stuff is me having a good time. And it's not always professional. Just so you know, but you can find us on Facebook. On Instagram. My wife is living with lupus on Instagram. Intermountain region, our our our practice is called Intermountain Center for Well-Being. Intermountain center for well-being is going to be Intermountain center for Well-Being. Dot com is coming very soon I hope I hope I can just give you a bunch of links and you can link all this back. Yep.

I think that the next step for us, Kelly, is, we need to get the three of us in the same room. So you and you and Kim can tell your auto immune stories and how you both have just managed to absolutely thrive and be the glowing individuals that you are now. Yeah, and definitely me. Mean, it's like friends. Like you. Like, I'll text you when I have questions and stuff. I mean, like, I didn't get here, like, got an island. Like, I have really smart friends like you who, you know, you're you're always you're always really involved and and you're really in the trenches and helping people.

Like I said when I started, like, look at your Instagram. These people that you are working with, you guys are nailing it. And it's because you put in the work and it's because, you know, you're nonstop quest for knowledge and application. So I, I really enjoyed this conversation, doctor. Really. This is definitely part one. And we'll see you back for part two. All right guys sounds awesome.