Iodine: The underestimated nutrient - and yes, YOU are NOT getting it! 95% Americans estimated deficient!

Seaweed is really the only significant
dietary source of iodine.
The Japanese average 50 mg of iodine.
Lowest rate of almost all cancers
and coronary heart disease to beat!

Today's medical establishment is wary of iodine - as they are of most naturally occurring, nonpatentable, nonpharmaceutical agents. Where's the money - show me the money. It's natural? No money, we can't patent it. Not interested - no let's call it off as a quark, and load them up with drugs instead. That's how it usually goes - guilty until otherwise proven.

As far as Rx drugs go - oh well, good to go, until we have too many death counts to count. Until then - do continue to add the profit to my Amex thank you very much. I need someone to pay off my Rolex no. 10, my Mercedes Benz and my Salmon caesar - the dressing? Oh on the side; just how I like my girlfriends. Integrity covers all aspects of life... for the side-viewer to watch like a domino effect. And when we choose to earn our money taking care of other people, it's imperative that we are able to say no to the temptation of selling lives for cool cash.

If one can't say no to temptation, then one should not work with human beings. Because one thing is the choices we make that hurt our own lives: We pay. But the effects on ourselves and others are far further reaching when playing god. When you hurt others, you not only hurt them: You hurt yourself - the scars go much deeper than the pain you inflict directly upon yourself. Hurting others, hurts YOU on a soul level. And Karma is a tricky mistress - she always gets the better end, no matter how smart we think we are; covering all our tracks. She finds a way to make us slip. Ah, so is the game of what we call life.

How many lies can one tell before one suffocates. I think many in big pharma finds it tough to sleep at night, even on a bed of money. But then there's always a pill for that.

Iodine - RDI sufficient to avoid mental retardation, but NOT cancer!

Everyone agrees that a lack of iodine in the diet causes a spectrum of disorders that includes, in increasing order of severity, goiter and hypothyroidism, mental retardation, and cretinism (severe mental retardation accompanied by physical deformities). Health authorities in the U.S. and Europe have agreed upon a Reference Daily Intake (RDI), formerly called the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA), for iodine designed to prevent these disorders, which the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates afflicts 30 percent of the world's population. The RDI for iodine, first proposed in 1980, is 100—150 µg/day. Organizations advocating this amount include the American Medical Association, National Institutes of Health's National Research Council, Institute of Medicine, United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, WHO Expert Committee, and the European Union International Programme on Chemical Safety. These health authorities consider an RDI of 100—150 µg/day of iodine sufficient to meet the requirements of nearly all (97—98%) healthy individuals.

This consensus on iodine intake flies in the face of evidence justifying a higher amount. This evidence includes animal studies, in vitro studies on human cancer cell lines, clinical trials of iodine for fibrocystic breast disease, and epidemiological data. An intake of 150 µg/day of iodine will prevent goiters and the other recognized iodine deficiency disorders, but not breast disease. Prevention of breast disease requires higher doses of iodine. Indeed, a reasonable hypothesis is that, like goiters and cretinism, fibrocystic disease of the breast and breast cancer are iodine deficiency disorders (also uterine fibroids).

Case in point: The Japanese eat 12 - 200 mg of iodine. And they have the lowest rate of cancers in the world!

Of course this doesn't make for a causal relationship per se, but taken together with animal experiments where tumors have dissipated upon given high-dosage of INORGANIC iodine, one might speculate of a causal relationship here.

Dr. Guy Abraham, a former professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UCLA, mounted what he calls "The Iodine Project" in 1997. The project's hypothesis is that maintaining whole body sufficiency of iodine requires 12.5 mg a day, an amount similar to what the Japanese consume. The conventional view is that the body contains 25—50 mg of iodine, of which 70—80 percent resides in the thyroid gland. Dr. Abraham concluded that whole body sufficiency exists when a person excretes 90 percent of the iodine ingested. He devised an iodine-loading test where one takes 50 mg and measures the amount excreted in the urine over the next 24 hours. He found that the vast majority of people retain a substantial amount of the 50 mg dose. Many require 50 mg a day for several months before they will excrete 90 percent of it. His studies indicate that, given a sufficient amount, the body will retain much more iodine than originally thought, 1,500 mg, with only 3 percent of that amount held in the thyroid gland.

Iodine has other extrathyroidal functions: It removes toxic chemicals — fluoride, bromide, lead, aluminum, mercury — and biological toxins, suppresses auto-immunity, strengthens the T-cell adaptive immune system, and protects against abnormal growth of bacteria in the stomach.

What about toxicity you ask?

A critical evaluation of some review articles on iodine-induced hypothyroidism and iodine-induced hyperthyroidism reveals that in most cases, organic forms of iodine are involved. However, the titles of those articles suggest that the review is about inorganic iodine/iodide. For example, in the published review on "iodine-induce hypothyroidism" by Markou, et al in 2001, the list of iodine-containing products causing hypothyroidism consisted predominantly of organic forms of iodine, such as amiodarone and radiology contrast agents. The title of that review should have been "Drug-induced hypothyroidism." In 1984, Leger, et al. reported 85 cases of "iodine-induced thyrotoxicosis." Amiodarone alone accounted for 50% of the cases. All the patients received organic forms of iodine-containing drugs. The title of that review should have been "Drug-induced hyperthyroidism."


References
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