Today’s episode of BioMedical Report refers to dysfunction of the thyroid gland and the influence of diet on the health of this gland so strategic in the overall balance of our organism. One of the topics that interest a huge audience of people, especially women. The column, coordinated by Mauro Minelli, clinical immunologist and head of the Foundation for Personalized Medicine for Southern Italy, opened with live images of a thyroid ultrasound performed by Mario Massa, oncology specialist and expert sonographer. “The opening – underlines Minelli – served to frame the topic linked to the functionality of the thyroid gland, small but essential with its hormones for innumerable organic functions of man from birth to senescence”.
During the episode he also intervened Andrea Fabbri, associate of endocrinology at the University of Rome Tor Vergata in Rome, who recalled “limportance of selenium supplements to improve glandular tissue and its functioning“, dispelling the myth “of weight gain linked to hypothyroidism“.
But diet is the central theme of the study, “because many foods are able to support a good functioning of the thyroid gland – explained the biologists nutritionists Dominga Maio and Ilaria Vergallo – while others can harm it. The main ally of this gland is iodine (which we cannot breathe but eat) and that is why it is necessary to avoid those foods that block the absorption of this micronutrient, such as soy “.
“Immunology is not an invasion of the field – explains Minelli – but an appropriate specification, especially when, as happens in autoimmune thyroiditis, more than just being thereprimitively sick organ, the thyroid gland is, in spite of itself, the telltale target of a disease based elsewhere. And elsewhere, in these cases, lies in an immune system rendered dysfunctional by some interferers which can also be represented by foods or their immunologically active determinants. The gluten and nickel contained in the foods we eat in our daily diet, after having contributed to making our intestine permeable, can themselves function as antigens by activating, among other things, the dynamics of autoimmunity.. This seems to happen for example in celiac disease or, more frequently, in Non Coeliac Gluten Sensitivity or in Snas, the systemic nickel allergy syndrome, very frequently related to Hashimoto’s thyroiditis “.
“So, autoimmune thyroiditis not organ pathologies, but ‘system’ diseases for which an interdisciplinary specialist management can be very profitable. This is the avant-garde point that we have been pursuing for years and that BioMedical Report will continue to deepen with new and authoritative doctors, always with the utmost scientific rigor “, concludes Minelli.