Iodine And Cancer: A Surprising Link | Is Iodine Good For You?

0:00 Hello, and welcome. I'm Annette reader from the biblical nutritionist.com. And today we're talking about iodine. You may think that iodized salt is all you need to know. Well, I'm here to challenge that today. In fact, I have a special guest with us Dr. Brown. Dr. Brownstein, who's going to also challenge your belief about well, iodized salt is all I need. That's not true. And we're going to talk about it we're going to talk about today, is Iodine good for you? And what are the risks and side effects that you really need to know? You may have just accepted what you've been told all these years, but I'm going to challenge that today and say, Hey, forget what you've been told. Listen to this. And because your health is going

0:50 to change just by listening to what we're going to say today. Well, thanks for letting me share with you God's recipe for excellent health. It always includes three ingredients. One, I forget what it was, oh, number one is being confident in the foods that God created for you. Number two is being confident in your health. And number three is being confident in how much he loves and understand you. So thanks for letting me share that with you. Now for today's video, I am interviewing Dr. David Brownstein. And Dr. David Brownstein is from West Bloomfield, Michigan, he has the Center for holistic medicine, and he has written over a dozen best sellers. And the one we're referring to today is iodine and why you need it. This is a very important topic. It's actually more important than I ever thought possible. I didn't realize how much iodine was

1:39 important. I knew Okay, there were times I was studying it and okay, oh, go grab some seaweed kelp or something like that. And maybe they'll make the difference. It didn't make a difference. But it wasn't enough of the difference that I now understand. After studying his book, again, the great importance of iodine in your diet. So whether you're dealing with cancer, whether you have young children, whether you have older adults in your home, you need to understand why iodine is so important and what are the risks if you don't have enough so today, I just want to welcome Dr. David Brownstein to our call today, it is such a delight to have you and to share with us your in your wealth of knowledge that you have on this topic of iodine, and I know it's your favorite subject. So I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say. Thanks for having me, Annette. Oh, totally our

2:25 pleasure. So get us started. Is iodine good for you? And are we getting enough? Well, I think it's an essential item for the human body. That means we can't manufacture it, we have to get it either from our diet, or somehow in our environment, breathing it or getting into our skin or something like that. We can't live without it. Every cell in the body needs and requires iodine. It's concentrated in the glandular tissue. The glandular tissue includes the thyroids, direct gland, the ovaries, the uterus, the breast, the prostate, pancreas, and we have a specialized mechanism set up to concentrate iodine in that glandular tissue. Because to maintain the normal normal architecture of the glandular tissue, you need adequate amounts of iodine that's been shown in animal test tube in human studies. And if we have normal architecture, it's normal,

3:15 how it should be. It's how we were designed by our maker to have the thyroid look or the breasts look or the ovaries look. There's no bumps and lumps and gross and things like that. It's normal tissue. Well, I call this the iodine deficiency continuum, because in our country, our iron levels have been falling over 50% over the last 50 years, according to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey that's across the entire country. And we're facing severe consequences from that. And the consequences are women in the US suffer one in seven risk, lifetime risk of developing breast cancer. So think about that. A woman lives long enough. One in seven us women, out of the hundreds of millions of women that are in our country, are going to have breast cancer

4:01 sometime diagnosed in their lifetime. One in three men. The same thing with prostate cancer, we have thyroid cancer is our fastest growing cancer. And we have epidemic increases of pancreatic, ovarian and uterine cancer. And I say that the underlying theme, the underlying thing behind all this is Iodine deficiency. Do I think it's the sole cause of all this cancer that we're facing? You know, cancer is our second major cause of death and he was next to heart disease. It's not the main it's not the sole cause, but in the pie that's causing cancer and people. Iodine is a huge piece of their pie. And the idea of deficiency continuum is that if we have enough iodine, let's call this normal architecture, the glandular tissue and iodine deficiency. The first thing that

4:47 happens is to start to get cysts growing. So you get thyroid cysts, or breast cysts, or or ovarian cysts or prostate says, if it goes on longer, those cysts become hardened nodular goes on longer. If you take a biopsy of that tissue, they become larger and it becomes hyperplastic. Under a microscope appearance, which is a precursor to cancer, in animal tested in human studies, it has been shown to halt and be able to reverse this continuum. And that's what I see in my practice that, you know, I came about iodine, about 10 years into my holistic practice, when I found that I was treating so many patients for hypothyroidism or underactive thyroid, with thyroid hormone, natural thyroid hormones. And although my patients were getting better,

5:32 I was puzzled. Why would so many people need thyroid hormone just to feel good, I did not think we were designed by our maker, that just because you're getting older, you need thyroid hormone to feel good. That's doesn't make sense to me. I've always felt that. And I've realized through testing 10s, if not hundreds of 1000s of chemistries, and supporting the body's nutrition and hormonal pathways, that great things can happen in the body and people can can age gracefully and be active and have good brain function until the end of their life. That iodine is part of that continuum. And so so I was treating people with thyroid hormone, and while they were getting better, I wasn't that happy with having to do that. So I started to look

6:20 at the items that make thyroid hormone work the constituents of the biochemical pathways of making the thyroid hormone, and you would, I would look at selenium and magnesium and B vitamins and vitamin C, and iodine. You need iodine to make any hormone in the body including thyroid hormone, you needed to make adrenal hormone sex hormones. So when I started to use the right form of iodine, were right about I found that I didn't need so many people taking thyroid hormone to feel good because I was treating now the underlying cause, why they're having a thyroid problem. I went from the first 10 years of my practice with three quarters of my patients taking thyroid hormone, to now less than a quarter of them needing thyroid hormone, to treat hypothyroidism. Most can be treated just fine by supplying iodine, getting the thyroid gland to work normally, just as we were

7:10 designed by our maker to do now as a consequence of that when they get the writing levels up there fibrocystic breast disease gets better fibrocystic ovary disease gets better fibroids and the uterus gets better. Their thyroid cysts and nodules get better. You know, when I when I was young, in my early in my career, I saw pancreatic cancer in patients. It was an old patients it was in dire it was in alcoholic patients or drug abusers. Now I'm diagnosing pancreatic cancer and people in their 40s I'm diagnosing breast cancer in teenage girls, late teenage girls are

7:55 getting diagnosed with breast cancer. I just went to a funeral, my 28 year old patient who died of stage four breast cancer. I didn't see this stuff 30 years ago. And I think that it's it's an iodine deficiency continuum that's gotten worse over my career and worse across the US over the last five decades. And it's leading to more glandular problems. And unless we recognize that we need to support the human body of supply with the right nutrients it needs, balance the human body and help the body detox from toxins. We're gonna keep going down the wrong health pathways and spending so much money on drugs that are working and and therapies that aren't working. And, you know, it's we spend 20% of our GNP on health care right now. What are we getting for and we're worse than

8:42 every Western country out there longevity and maternal mortality at birth and neonatal mortality and every other health indicator that's out there. And iodine is a big part of that we need to recognize iron deficiency is out there. I've my partners, and I've tested over 8000 patients over 97% are deficient in iodine in their first visit the vast majority significantly deficient in iodine. And it puts these patients at risk for glandular disease and a particularly puts them at risk for cancer of the glandular disease such as breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, thyroid cancer, ovarian cancer, uterine cancer, prostate cancer. We all know people with all these illnesses, and I don't cheap. It's, it's, it's effective. And our Maker designed us with this intricate

9:31 mechanism to concentrate iodine or plant or tissue for a reason. We need to give it iodine. And that's not happening these days. So would you suggest someone can just change their diet? Or is it some thing that we just have to step into and supplement for? So the ultimate way for every nutritional item that you're looking at to either supplement with or to optimize? Let's get it from our diet first. You know why we don't want to have to supplement things for everything. The problem is, iodine levels have gone down in our food supply every piece of our food supply. Iodine has declined over the last five decades. The large A source of iodine in the world right now. It's in the ocean. But we polluted our oceans, we polluting our oceans with toxic halogens, fluoride and bromide. Iodine is part of the halogen family and

10:21 the periodic table and group 17 And the halides on the right side of the pathway. And I mean recite of the periodic table. And those halogens include bromide, fluoride, I should say when in the order of the sizer and fluoride, fluoride, bromine, and eight and two of those halides are essential, we can't live without them. Fluoride and add fluoride is part of salt. But as a tool, the highlights are toxic, non essential items that we don't need to know died, and they poisoned 1000s of enzymes and cause problems, bromide and fluoride. The problem we've got is our exposure to bromide and fluoride is well above what our predecessors were our grandparents, our great grandparents, our great great grandparents. And that when you when you get these toxic highlights in our environment

11:09 and in our diets and in our food and drink at our consumer items that it causes it to, and chloride to get kicked out of the body. And it's a I call this the double whammy of iodine, our exposure to toxic halides is increased the same time, our food supply for iodine has gone down, and it's made us more iodine deficient. That's why we're seeing so much more breast cancer, thyroid cancer, ovarian cancer, uterine cancer, pancreatic cancer, than than our predecessors have seen. And I don't see any way out of this unless we rectify the side efficiency problem. All right, and how do you suggest we do that? Well, I mean, the first thing is, you know, the worst actor in the world is the person who's a doctor for himself or herself. So find a health care practitioner who's literate and knowledgeable

11:58 about AI. Now, there, there are few and far between, but they're out there. And if your doctor doesn't know anything about AI and find one who does. But more importantly, educate yourself on this. That's why I write my books. I've written 16 books, this is my book, and I, the books are written for everybody to understand them. And, you know, if you don't understand someone's writing something in the healthcare in the healthcare realm, either either they're hiding something from you or they don't understand it fully. So I try and write it so everyone can understand it, because I'm not the brightest fish in the sea. And I want people I can see what's happening, my practice, and I want people to understand it as I see it. So I think it's important to

12:45 work with someone. And it's also important to get these toxic highlights out of your diet and your environment. You know, you shouldn't be drinking fluoridated water, you shouldn't be ingesting bromide and food and drink bromides and vegetable oils, is brominated, vegetable oil, bromides and flour products and bakery products. But you can buy flour and bakery products that don't have bromide in them. You can drink water that doesn't have fluoride. And you can supplement with iodine after you get your levels checked. And you see that you're low. And my average dose of iodine of patients is 25 to 50 milligrams of a combination of iodine and iodide, such as legal solution or tablet a logo solution. And this is 400 to 14 2000 times the rd, right I might be off on those amounts a little bit, the numbers,

13:37 but this is the RDA for iodine was 150 micrograms per day. That RDA was set about 100 years ago, to prevent goiter of, you know, swelling of the thyroid gland. The RDA back then was adequate to prevent quarter the thyroid but it still wasn't enough to supply iodine to the breasts and the ovaries and the uterus and the prostate, in the skin and the muscles and everywhere else in the body that it needs to go. And today's world is not even close to being enough. So educating yourself as the first thing to do. And then working with a healthcare healthcare person who's knowledgeable about this stuff. And if your healthcare person isn't buying one who is because we're out there.

14:27 So yeah, so in the back of your book, I noticed you have some references to positions who can help people so they have somewhere to go without just Googling and trying to find a doctor that's going to work in your book. Look, you talk about you talk about the importance of iodine before pregnancy. Can you elaborate on that? So it's been known for over 100 years that a young woman who is a pregnancy age needs adequate amounts of iodine before she becomes pregnant, or during pregnancy, to supply enough iodine for the baby, so the baby's thyroid gland and the endocrine glands can develop normally, that has been known. That's nothing alternative there. That's just a fact in medicine. It's also known that when a woman of pregnancy age is deficient in iodine becomes pregnant, that that baby is going to have abnormal development

15:18 of their glandular tissue and is more prone to having thyroid problems, breast problems, uterine problems, prostate problems, you know, as they get older. And I mentioned earlier in our talk that, you know, I'm seeing teenage girls, I'm diagnosing teenage girls with breast cancer. Now, that wasn't the case 30 years ago, it's because their iodine deficiency problem got worse. Now, it's not only it's not only glandular problems, but it's the brain and the neurologic tissue needs iodine to form normally it is it is well known and well established in the medical literature, that iodine deficiency during pregnancy leads to lower IQ that never, never reverses itself. That has been written about through multiple different countries and multiple different populations. And so I always, you know, in the US the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey shows that

16:07 the average iodine level of a of a young woman in the United States is deficient in an iodine, according to who criteria, which is too low. They rely on the RDA for iodine as establishing their needs. And and in my book I write about the RDA is basically is to supply the minimum amount of iodine to prevent goiter. But it's not enough for the body's needs for iodine, and certainly not in our toxic world today with our exposure to those toxic halides. I mentioned earlier, exactly well, that the RDA is very similar in that way to all regards to every nutrient they have out there. It's always just the basic minimum. Alright, one more topic. What about children, you have a chapter here on children, ADHD, autism and iodine. So you mentioned just now about pregnancy,

16:53 if the mom is deficient, then the child's going to be deficient. So if a mom is deficient, and children have these issues, can iodine help. So if the mom is deficient in iodine to pregnancy, they're going to have abnormal neurological development that can lead to lower permanent lower IQs. And there have been studies correlating low iodine in in moms who are pregnant with development of ADHD and neurologic disorders as kids get older. And the the correlations are very strong with that. So if you, you know, I think about when I was a kid, I grew up in the I was born in 1963, really grew up in the late 60s and 70s, to elementary school and middle school. Where

17:40 were all the ADHD, ADHD kids back then? Were they? I don't recall them. I don't recall people going crazy in school. And, you know, we, some of us got in some trouble, but it was minor stuff. And, you know, it was, you know, where's the the mess that's going on now. And I think that it's, I think it's driven by nutritional deficiencies. I'm being part of that. And in my practice, the smartest kids that I see are the ones with a monitor, taking decent amounts of iodine going into pregnancy. And it's really something these are, these are, I see this over and over and over. And, you know, when I lecture about iodine, I quote these ADHD studies and

18:27 say that this is where I think the problem is going on. And it's not that ADHD kids are born with a riddle and Deficiency Syndrome. You know, that they're to war with nutritional deficiencies. And of the nutritional deficiencies, start with the mom is pregnant with the baby knows, that needs to be rectified before the mother becomes pregnant. So the whole, you know, my whole focus has been educating people on my patients to take care of themselves. And, you know, for women, it's a particularly important because you're gonna carry a baby in here that you know you're responsible for, and, you know, you're responsible for giving this baby the best chance they have in life. And it's your responsibility to ensure that you eat good. Take care of yourself, you're not doing drugs, you're not, you know, doing bad things while you're pregnant. You're

19:12 responsible for more than yourself, and that includes getting good nutrition. Alright, so children that already have ADHD and autism can taking iodine help. Yes, correcting nutritional imbalances detoxifying can help. We've seen kids improve and be able to get off these medications and it's a little bit of work, but it can be done and you know, a lot of it's cleaning up the diet. In getting them in the right food and getting, you know, supporting their basic nutrition, you know, we were designed with a good blueprint by our maker that if we can give the support that that blueprint that the biochemistry needs, we can body can do wonderful things. The problem becomes when we when that blueprint or that biochemistry is off kilter, and it's not being supplied with what it needs. And it's being blocked with toxins and chemicals

20:00 and drugs that are poisoning enzymes and blocking receptors. That's where the problem becomes. Yeah, that's a great. And what I love is that it's a very inexpensive supplement. And I'll put links to those supplements down below. So people can just grab that. So you know which one is the best to get. And this is all by your recommendations in your book. So we're not just like grabbing one off the Amazon shelf, we're actually using the ones that you've already studied and proven that they are the best. You know, we've been studying iodine for for over 20 years. And it's, it's, it's a really fascinating subject, for whatever reason, it resonates with people that everyone's interested in iodine. And you bring up iodine, there's a few things, a few key nutrients you bring up to people food, Keith holistic things,

20:47 I don't one of them, right, everyone's ears perked up, like, they might not know what it is, or they may not quite understand it. But as soon as you bring up the word iodine, and everyone sort of breaks up and wants to know more about it. And iodine is such an important item there there, we have this intricate mechanism to take iodine from the bloodstream to put it into the thyroid, but into the breasts or into the ovaries, the pancreas, the uterus. And it requires a two molecule, two atoms of sodium to do that. So you need adequate amounts of salt to take with the iodine. So I never prescribe iodine without salt. And you need to use the right kind of salt, which is unrefined salt, which you and I are going to talk about in another lecture. Exactly, yeah. So we'll put a link to that salt video down below so they can grab that as well. All right,

21:32 I love how it all comes together. I love how the truth of what works in our body is always going to be what God created us to live on in the first place. And none of this is a surprise to him as man keeps learning and isolates, then we lose but as we just see, okay yet but God created and his nutrients that he created for us create an exponential effect, that is life building, we always win. But anytime we're reaching for the lab experiments, we lose. And so that's why we teach the three principles so much here in everything that we teach. Number one, eat the foods that God called good for us. Number two, eat it before it's been turned into a lab experiment. And number three, don't let any food become an addiction, which I

22:17 don't see iodine become an addiction. So I know we got that uncovered. But recognizing though, that even just having an iodine deficiency also changes cravings. It also changes your how you eat and why you eat. Would you agree to that? Absolutely. You know, there was an old there was a video a few years ago on the guy who ate McDonald's every day for 30 days, you know, most of us thought he became addicted to him. Now he showed what happened, he became fat. He wasn't fat before he got he got gained, I don't know, 30 pounds or something in 30 days, he has chemistry went off kilter, became a diabetic, that wasn't a diabetic beforehand, so and he became addicted to it, he started craving it, even though made him sick when he first started eating

23:03 it. So the big food companies have figured out that they put certain chemicals in their food, or they deplete the food of basic nutrients and put these chemicals in, we start craving it, we want more of it. And as you and I talked about before this episode, you know, big pharma wants nothing more than to keep us sick. So we're dependent on drugs. And we have to buy these drugs for a long period of time. They don't want to kill us right off the bat that kills customers, they want to keep us chronically sick. And there's no better way to do that and put lousy food out there and make us nutritionally deficient. And the blueprint that we were designing pretty well with starts to fall apart, and the biochemistry falls apart. Now, if that's where you're at, that can be fixed. And, you know, we're we, we work with that every day in our practice. And we we see these,

23:52 you know, we see these results happen. I didn't start off that way. As a doctor, I started off, conventional doctor, I bought into everything I was taught in med school. I didn't think people ever needed to take a supplement for anything. And I cringe when I think about what I used to tell people back then. But it took me six months into practicing medicine to realize, Hey, I was wrong. And you know, I made 180 return and it was the best thing I did. Medicine went from being intolerable to practice and it's not, I can't do this for the next 30 years to now 30 years later. That was my calling. I would do it again. I would do it exactly again as I did it except that would it become holistic in med school a little bit earlier than I did but you know, supporting the heat biochemistry supporting a blueprint, we were designed just to have, can can

24:41 yield wonderful results into old age into very old age, I see patients live very productive, useful, happy lives into old age. And they should be able to do that because we have a perfect design if we just given its basic raw materials. That is so true. So our doctor did us a favor. When we questioned him about some medications. This was just in our early 40s. And he said, we asked the usual question, well, how long do I need to take this and he said, for the rest of your life? Well, we took that phrase and decided we are going to do something for the rest of our life. But what we did was we switched to just all natural foods, and exercising a little bit better, handling our stress better and totally changed our life. And within 30 days, we went back showed him

25:29 our lab values. And he said, Well, you still need to take the medications, you won't be able to keep this up. And we said yes, we will just watch us. And here we are. 20 years later, still, without all those medications that he was like it was going to be what gives us enough to make wallpaper in your room. And so but I knew the words for the rest of your life, we're not meant to be directed by a physician, they were directed, they should be directed by our God who created us. And so He promised us He is the one who heals. And he is that's an exodus. But he also takes it all the way to the ending of the Scripture, where he is also the one who provides for our healing. So I knew when we changed our perspective to eating real food, the way God created it, we were going to win. And that would be for the rest of our life. So this has been very informative,

26:17 there is so much more we could talk about, I think the books that I've seen on your, this is probably one of your thicker ones. So but highly great information everyone can take take away from this book, you can just put notes in the front of your book, like, Okay, where am I going to start his great references, and no matter what health challenge you're in, he's going to address it in one way or another. So thank you so much for being a part of this today. And just the simplicity of iodine, very inexpensive, everyone can change make changes in their health by just evaluating where they are with their iodine status, get your blood work done work with a physician that is trained in it. And and I like the way that that is very much specified that it needs to be someone who's trained in iodine. And both you and other authors are very strict about that.

27:06 Because it's not just a result on a lab. There's more to it than just seeing results on the lab. Let me let me mention, I've been criticized by my whole list of colleagues. And I don't, there are many people that say to holistic doctors, they hang a shingle up that says that and you know, these are the people who say, Well, here's your co Q 10 With your statin drug, and I'm always the doctor, because or they say I'm, I carry vaccines in my office, and you can have vaccines, your choice, even though they know some of these vaccines are causing a lot of problems. I don't consider them holistic doctors, if something's causing a problem, you don't give it period, no matter how much flak you take. And if something is necessary, you tell them as necessary. And if a drug is a problem, you don't just prescribe the drug

27:55 because you're taking insurance. And the insurance company dictates that you better have this amount of percentage of patients on this drug or you're not getting your bonus. So you got to be careful out there. And there are many holistic people who don't understand it, and they they suffer from medical Iota phobia. And it's important to work with an iodine literate doctor, and they are out there. And I'm on the board of directors for the International College of integrative medicine. You can Google them, they have doctors around the country. Now not all of them. All right, I literate, but at least they've heard me lecture on iodine. And, you know, there's doctors out there and then becoming more and more out there. But um, you know, if you're not happy with your health care, if you're not happy with what your doctor is telling you if your doctor is not working with

28:40 you, and if your doctor didn't stay open during COVID My suggestion is find a new doctor. Doctor should have stayed open during COVID. And taking care of sick people face to face like just like we took the oath to do when we graduated from medical school. And those who didn't. Well, I say find someone who did. And, you know, if you're if you're not happy, keep searching for someone who will make you or be your advocate. Be your support system and be your partner. I always tell my patients, you're driving the car medically, I'm just on the sidewalk, right? I'm running along with you yelling at you turn right turn left go straight. And you decide which way the wheels turning. So if I tell them to turn right and they turn left, I said I'll catch up

29:25 to you and keep telling you, you know, go straight or turn left now because it's still your choice. But I said I'm not giving up the run with you but you're in charge of things and I'm gonna work with you on So your your doctor should talk to you the same way and should feel the same way about