Thanks LucH and Jennifer.

Yeah, I hope the prolactin comes down with improved thyroid!

@Jennifer Good to know, thank you! I'm glad you had success and that it can be done!

Do you happen to know if the goats' udders and the dairy equipment were being treated with disinfectants or not?

@LucH Thank you for the detailed info. I like this article that you posted. https://thyroidpharmacist.com/articles/iodine-hashimotos/
From that article:
Iran: 3.2% of people had TPOAb antibodies before salt iodization, 12.5% had them after.
Minnesota: "Starting with the first decade after iodine fortification, they documented a 2,500 percent increase in Hashimoto’s disease."

I guess my selenium wasn't high enough for my iodine consumption? Cronometer says I generally got 230mcg selenium, which is ~4.2x the RDA. But with high iodine, maybe I needed a lot more.

My iodine consumption a few months ago was around 982mcg, and more recently (at the time of my bloodwork) was 722mcg. Now, having removed iodized salt, my iodine is about 436mcg and things have improved a lot so far.

Thank you for your advice everyone. Much appreciated.

Stopping iodized salt is working! My temperature has increased a bit and my mental abilities are improved. I'm tracking my temperatures daily and will probably post soon when I have more data.

@NNight

Thanks! Is there anything specifically that suggests those to you?

Selenium: Cronometer says I get 230mcg, over 4x the RDA. I eat a brazil nut daily, and eggs. Should I get more?
Boron: I don't know much about boron. Quickly scanning lists of high boron foods shows a lot of plant foods like nuts that I don't eat much. So I could be low in this!

@16charactersitis Thank you! I've switched to sea salt.

I'm blown away by learning that

1. high iodine is well known to cause thyroid trouble
2. modern diets are more likely to have excess iodine than too little
3. modern dairy basically has added iodine, and is probably contaminated with sanitizer chemicals.

Is this significant?

So what causes that damage to the thyroid? I've just started researching and I've found there's a strong case against iodine. Ray was also against excessive iodine.

"iodine excess, due to extensive environmental iodine exposure in addition to poor monitoring, is currently a more frequent occurrence than iodine deficiency. Iodine excess is a precipitating environmental factor in the development of autoimmune thyroid disease. Excessive amounts of iodide have been linked to the development of autoimmune thyroiditis in humans and animals, while intrathyroidal depletion of iodine prevents disease in animal strains susceptible to severe thyroiditis. Although the mechanisms by which iodide induces thyroiditis are still unclear, several mechanisms have been proposed: (1) excess iodine induces the production of cytokines and chemokines that can recruit immunocompetent cells to the thyroid; (2) processing excess iodine in thyroid epithelial cells may result in elevated levels of oxidative stress, leading to harmful lipid oxidation and thyroid tissue injuries; and (3) iodine incorporation in the protein chain of thyroglobulin may augment the antigenicity of this molecule." "The administration of iodine can significantly enhance and accelerate, in a dose-dependent manner, the incidence of AIT, its onset, the degree of lymphocytic infiltration and the severity of damage to thyroid follicular structures"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4139880/

Apparently iodized salt is associated with an increased number of people showing elevated thyroid antibodies.

"[In Denmark] prior to iodization of salt [which started in 1998], the prevalence of anti-TPO antibody (anti-TPO-Ab) was 14.3%, but increased to 23.8% after iodization [...] In a small Italian community, voluntary iodine prophylaxis increased the incidence of anti-TPO-Ab and hypothyroidism 15 years later."
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9816468/

1 teaspoon of iodized salt (which is 2325 mg sodium) is 312 mcg iodine. The iodine RDA is 150 mcg. Restaurants and processed foods typically don't use iodized salt, but I am health conscious so I mostly eat at home, using iodized salt!

There is also a lot of iodine in dairy now, not for natural reasons, but because it is added to the cows' feed (often as ethylenediamine dihydroiodide), and because iodophor is used to disinfect milking equipment. There is iodophor in your milk!

In Denmark, 1 cup of milk has 27mcg iodine.

In Norway, 1 cup of organic milk in the summer (so the cows are probably eating pasture only) has 14 mcg iodine.

But in the US, 1 cup of normal milk has 84 mcg. (56% of the RDA)

Chickens are also given extra iodine in their feed (probably in the form of calcium iodate) and so 1 egg has 26 mcg iodine. (I don't know what the natural level for eggs is.)

Regarding iodine added to animal feed: "The iodine content of food of animal origin, if produced taking account of the currently authorised maximum content of iodine in feed, would represent a substantial risk to high consumers. The risk would originate primarily from the consumption of milk and to a minor extent from eggs. The UL for adults (600 µg/day) and for toddlers (200 µg/day) would be exceeded by a factor of 2 and 4, respectively." (Europe's upper limit is 600mcg apparently, but the USA's upper limit is 1100mcg)
https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/3100

Maybe iodine naturally present in food isn't bad even in a moderate excess and there's something especially wrong with the "unnatural" types of iodine that they add to salt, animal feed, and that they use to disinfect dairy. Maybe the body attacks the thyroid, when the thyroid takes in these "weird" types of iodine.

I will definitely stop using iodized salt and see what happens on my next bloodwork. I'm considering stopping dairy (and eggs?) too.

What do you think? I've never heard anyone, mainstream or alt-health, talk about this! (aside from Ray being against too much iodine, but he must not have known about the milk)

I got some bloodwork done. I'm male.

The thyroid antibody TPOAb is elevated, which indicates the autoimmune condition Hashimoto's disease apparently.

Ray said that elevated thyroid antibodies are just the body responding helpfully and intelligently to some damage occurring to the thyroid, and there doesn't have to be a lifelong "autoimmune" condition. (as opposed to the mainstream view which seems to state that the antibodies are what is causing the damage. Supposedly the body has inexplicably gone crazy and started attacking itself.)

My oral temperature in the morning averages ~96.5, rising through the day to ~98. My pulse is usually around 66 bpm during the day, I measured it once on waking up and it was 52 bpm. I tried doing the ankle relaxation test and my "half relaxation time" was 260ms as accurately as I could measure from taking a video. It appears that's actually very good. Perhaps I measured wrong!

My diet has been mostly clean from additives and seed oils for 10 years, and it has been semi-Peaty for some time except that I eat a lot of bread (sourdough) and pasta. (no iron added in either) For the last few years I haven't taken any supplements very often.

I have bloodwork from 2017 which shows my TSH was 3.29, free T3 was 3.0, free T4 (direct) was 1.48, Prolactin was 10.8, Testosterone was 581, LH was 7.2 and FSH was 10.1.

If anyone has any input I'd appreciate it

@insufferable said in Drone Activity: December 2024:

I don't know if there may have been a real drone or two at first, but every video I've seen appears to be just a normal airplane now, or a helicopter with a searchlight (deployed in the search for the drones). I spent hours a few days ago watching videos. I assume I've seen the most compelling ones.

At night, a six foot wingspan replica of an airplane two hundred feet away slowly moving over your neighborhood is pretty much indistinguishable from a full size airplane 10 miles away - there's no way for the eye to tell which is which.

People are saying they "saw nothing on the flight radar app" because they don't realize how far away you can see a plane. If they zoomed the radar out, they would see it there.

The authorities can't find the drones (using real radar I assume) because they aren't there. From the ground, the mysterious light in the sky looks like it's right in front of the state police helicopter "chasing it," but in reality the light is miles off to the side, not in front of the helicopter.

You can apparently see the lights of a plane up to 70 miles away, at least. The sky of northern new jersey is full of planes due to the airports. You would certainly see hundreds of lights in the sky, but they're not over your neighborhood, they're miles away.

A plane 50 miles away, flying in your direction with its landing lights on will appear to be a motionless, hovering bright light for several minutes.

Here's some good discussion and debunking of each video:
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/drones-over-new-jersey.13770/

I've seen zero evidence of anything out of the ordinary in the sky.

"I spent several hours in the evening on this past Saturday and Sunday in Warren County and Morris County and there is a huge number of normal aircraft visible all over the sky, in every direction. I did not see a single moving light in the sky that could not be correlated to the flight tracker." From https://www.metabunk.org/threads/drones-over-new-jersey.13770/page-4#post-329692

I don't know if there may have been a real drone or two at first, but every video I've seen appears to be just a normal airplane now, or a helicopter with a searchlight (deployed in the search for the drones). I spent hours a few days ago watching videos. I assume I've seen the most compelling ones.

At night, a six foot wingspan replica of an airplane two hundred feet away slowly moving over your neighborhood is pretty much indistinguishable from a full size airplane 10 miles away - there's no way for the eye to tell which is which.

People are saying they "saw nothing on the flight radar app" because they don't realize how far away you can see a plane. If they zoomed the radar out, they would see it there.

The authorities can't find the drones (using real radar I assume) because they aren't there. From the ground, the mysterious light in the sky looks like it's right in front of the state police helicopter "chasing it," but in reality the light is miles off to the side, not in front of the helicopter.

You can apparently see the lights of a plane up to 70 miles away, at least. The sky of northern new jersey is full of planes due to the airports. You would certainly see hundreds of lights in the sky, but they're not over your neighborhood, they're miles away.

A plane 50 miles away, flying in your direction with its landing lights on will appear to be a motionless, hovering bright light for several minutes.

Here's some good discussion and debunking of each video:
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/drones-over-new-jersey.13770/

I've seen zero evidence of anything out of the ordinary in the sky.

What I ended up doing: https://bioenergetic.forum/topic/470/testosterone-worldwide/12?_=1732586762298