One of the most frustrating elements of my work as a health practitioner is having to dispel misinformation. Every day, a client or EmpowerEd member tells me that they read on the Internet that soy causes breast cancer (it doesn’t), that fruit makes you fat (it doesn’t), that women need to eat more fat for hormonal health (the opposite is true), blah, blah, blah.
I don’t blame the people asking me these questions. The problem, as one of my clients succinctly put it, is Google.
Don’t get me wrong, I love being able to look up any random thing that pops into my head – from figuring out what that lyric in the song I just listened to actually said (my favourite mondegreen: ‘It’s not fair to deny me of the cross-eyed bear that you gave to me’ – is that what Alanis Morrisette sang???) to discovering whether citronella candles deter fruit flies (Google said yes, but the fruit flies in my kitchen apparently don’t agree), to getting inspiration for what to do with the collard greens that showed up in my organic fruit & veg box, I’ve googled it all.
And of course, the Internet is a godsend for my work. The latest studies, up-to-date information on drugs my clients are taking and their interactions with food and supplements, detailed food-nutrient databases – it’s all online, enabling me to serve my clients and EmpowerEd members so much more effectively than back in the day when all of this information was in books and print-only journals – many of which you had to visit a university library to obtain.
But the problem is there’s so much misinformation on the Internet, especially about health, and for people who don’t have a background in anatomy, physiology, biochemistry and nutritional science, it’s hard to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Thyroid issues are a case in point. Last week, a client expressed concern about her thyroid function, based on an article she’d read online which had led her to believe that her blood test results were abnormal. I looked at her blood test results and… there was absolutely no indicator of any thyroid problem (nor did she have an symptoms of one). Perfectly normal TSH, normal fT4 and fT3, no thyroid antibodies. I was glad to be able to dispel her concerns, but sad that she had been stressed about it in the first place.
I can’t count the number of clients I’ve seen over the years who’ve been diagnosed (or self-diagnosed, from an online checklist) with ‘subclinical hypothyroidism’ on the shakiest grounds. It’s not just the public who falls for this; doctors are increasingly willing to prescribe levothyroxine (thyroid hormone replacement) to people with only minor elevations in thyroid stimulating hormone.
And unfortunately, overtreatment of thyroid issues (or non-issues) carries serious risks. It could even shorten your life, especially if you’re 50 or over.
As I shared with EmpowerEd members in last week’s Deep Dive webinar, ‘Thyroid Health’, overtreatment of hypothyroidism raises the risk of atrial fibrillation (a disturbance in heart rhythm that can cause stroke, heart attack and heart failure) and osteoporotic bone fractures.
Furthermore, in people aged 50+, those with low-normal thyroid function lived longer overall and longer without cardiovascular disease than individuals with high-normal thyroid function. It appears to be physiologically normal for TSH to go up as people get older; it’s not a sign of disease. So following the popular advice to medicate or supplement in order to try to push your TSH down and raise your T4 and T3 levels up could lop 3.5 years off your life expectancy, or result in you dying of cardiovascular disease 3.1 years longer than you otherwise would have.
Older people are not the only ones who suffer from overtreatment of hypothyroidism. A study of over 52 000 people in the UK who had been prescribed thyroid hormone replacement found that by 5 years after they had started treatment, 5.8% had a TSH level of below mIU/L, indicating that their thyroid gland had been suppressed – that is, they were actually heading toward a hyperthyroid state. As the authors of the study pointed out,
“data for the increased risk of harm from subclinical hyperthyroidism are stronger than the data for potential benefit from treatment of subclinical hypothyroidism.”
They also found that women, and people who were suffering from depression or tiredness at the time they were prescribed thyroid hormone replacement, were at increased risk of developing a suppressed TSH level, with all its attendant harms. Yet popular websites and books often cite these symptoms as indications for commencing treatment or raising the dose.
The bottom line: if you want to take advantage of the wealth of high-quality health and nutrition resources on the web, without being led astray by hucksters, shills and well-intentioned but ill-informed bloggers and ‘wellness experts’, you need to be discerning about your sources of information.
My membership program, EmpowerEd, is focused on equipping members with the information and skills they need to navigate the deluge of health information we’re all exposed to every day… and it’s the most cost-effective way to get your nutrition questions answered by me, based on up-to-date nutritional science. Find out more about the program, and register for your 1-month free trial, here. Disappointed that you missed the ‘Thyroid Health’ webinar? No problem – you’ll get instant access to the webinar recording, as well as hundreds of hours of previous webinars on topics ranging from gluten to cancer screening to healthy aging.
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