Is eating right enough to get all the iodine I need?

 

Perhaps, even with a balanced diet, it’s not possible to get all the essential nutrition you need to have a healthy body. Many Americans, caught up in a hectic, busy life style, feel that they simply don’t have the time to eat a balanced diet. Opting for fast, processed, or prepackaged foods. These types of foods can be addictive, bending our sense of taste in preference to particular products and are striped of essential nutrients needed to activate your metabolism. Iodine is characteristically deficient from this type of diet. More over, eating for taste, instead of nourishment is one of the steps to an obese body, and is an addictive cycle played upon by the food industry to get you to eat more.

 

Dietary research also indicates that regions around the world, like Japan, that consume high amounts of iodine in their diet, have some of the lowest per capita rates for obesity, hypothyroid, fibrocystic breast disease, polycystic ovarian disease, and cancer. These cultures routinely consume amounts of iodine in their diet of around 13.8mg daily. Which is about 100 times the amount recommended by the RDA. A significant portion of this dietary iodine comes in the form of iodine/iodide from sea vegetables consumed in significant quantities every day. Kelp and similar iodine containing seaweeds when grown and harvested properly contain an approximate average of 1/2mg of iodine per gram of dried sea vegetable. This would amount to 27.6 grams of seaweed, or a daily serving of an average sized salad all in sea vegetables. Culturally in Japan, seaweed and other iodine rich seafood, are daily main dishes where most Americans would consider the same foods only a rare garnish or treat.

 

Iodized salt, implemented as an initial solution for the prevention of goiter in the US, only provides a fraction of the amount suggested by the research for whole body sufficiency, even before the low sodium campaign began to encourage Americans to eat less salt, and therefore even less iodine. At about the same time, iodine was replaced by bromide in bread manufacturing. Bromide competes for iodine's place in the body and can diminish or inhibit thyroid function. These two, primary sources of iodine in the typical American diet have been virtually eliminated from today’s food supply, leaving you in the void. Diet is no longer enough.