4 simple ways to support your thyroid

Quick chat Q&A about the butterfly gland and how you can support this delicate organ

Thyroid questions seem to come up over and over, and I’ve yet to find a resource I think does the topic justice… everything seems either too long and complicated, or too cursory.

In all my reading, I’ve also yet to hear anyone address the strange placement of this beautiful, butterfly-shaped organ in our vulnerable throat area.

Why is such an important organ placed in such a vulnerable place?

Most of our other endocrine organs are locked deep within our bodies, protected by bones, or at least many layers of fat and muscle.

But not so with thyroid!

How can we better understand and support this delicate part of our body, and why so many people are struggling so much with it these days?

The thyroid, located in our neck toward the front of our body, is often described as butterfly-shaped.

Think to what the thyroid’s deepest of roles is: linking the endocrine system to what is happening in the local environment so DNA signaling can be optimized for the current place and time of residence¹.

In pregnancy, this is all the more profound as the thyroid’s function is deeply involved with programming baby’s epigenetic profile via methylation pathways.

Thus, anything relating to the thyroid in pregnancy is involved in a major mechanism of communication between the current and the future generation 👵🤰👶!

But whether you are pregnant or not, you probably want to know how to better support your thyroid.

4 simple ways to support your thyroid

I think simply in terms of these four S’s for supporting the thyroid:

1. Seafood (as in fish and shellfish)

2. Seaweed

3. Sunlight

4. Sleep

Easy, right!? Seafood, seaweed, sunlight and sleep.

These give the precursors not only to thyroid, but also the all-important methylation cycles triggered by thyroid hormones. These are also cues that tell our body what time of day and season it is.

Beautiful butterfly thyroid is an important beneficiary of your circadian and quantum health habits.

If you want more detail, you may want to revisit my folate series to better understand circadian rhythms and methylation, and get more detail about the full spectrum of dietary precursors you need for healthy methylation.

Or, skip that and go do your own research. Head to your browser and search each in turn:

seafood thyroid

seaweed thyroid

sunlight thyroid

sleep thyroid

By searching these terms, you can easily validate for yourself the importance of these holistic supports for your thyroid’s function even from mainstream sources of information.

Now that you better understand thyroid’s role in taking outside information, and integrating it with inside processes, it makes more sense the thyroid is located so close to the surface. Right there, front and center, the thyroid is always looking outward with us to greet the day, resting under the shadow of our chin for protection from noontime sunlight, and equally there with us as we light the bedtime candle.

Beautiful butterfly thyroid is an important beneficiary of your circadian health habits.

For the true research buffs, check out this fascinating abstract (maybe one of the most fascinating scientific opinion pieces published so far in 2024?) 👇

Environmental conditions experienced within and across generations can impact individual phenotypes via so-called 'epigenetic' processes. Here we suggest that endocrine signalling acts as a 'sensor' linking environmental inputs to epigenetic modifications. We focus on thyroid hormone signalling and DNA methylation, but other mechanisms are likely to act in a similar manner. DNA methylation is one of the most important epigenetic mechanisms, which alters gene expression patterns by methylating cytosine bases via DNA methyltransferase enzymes. Thyroid hormone is mechanistically linked to DNA methylation, at least partly by regulating the activity of DNA methyltransferase 3a, which is the principal enzyme that mediates epigenetic responses to environmental change. Thyroid signalling is sensitive to natural and anthropogenic environmental impacts (e.g. light, temperature, endocrine-disrupting pollution), and here we propose that thyroid hormone acts as an environmental sensor to mediate epigenetic modifications. The nexus between thyroid hormone signalling and DNA methylation can integrate multiple environmental signals to modify phenotypes, and coordinate phenotypic plasticity at different time scales, such as within and across generations. These dynamics can have wide-ranging effects on health and fitness of animals, because they influence the time course of phenotypic adjustments and potentially the range of environmental stimuli that can elicit epigenetic responses.

Source: Seebacher, F., & Little, A. G. (2024)

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3. In case you missed it, I shared my research curation methods last week, and you can now catch the replay on your own time at the link below:

Have more thyroid questions? Drop them in the comments and I’ll get to them in a future post.

1. Seebacher, F., & Little, A. G. (2024). Thyroid hormone links environmental signals to DNA methylation. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 379(1898), 20220506. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0506