The Halogen That Roars – Iodine

The Halogen That Roars 

The history of the thyroid catastrophe in our country

By Charles Walters

 

Listen to Dr. Siegfried talk about Iodine and the Thyroid in the recording above.

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The number 59 isn’t considered either magic or lucky, but in the pantheon of minerals it really ought to rate as Number 1. It is one of four halogens possibly the one most offended by sister halogen fluoride. There is a reason for this. Fluoride bully’s iodine aside, short-circuits its role as the element that enables the thyroid gland to function and make thyroxine, that essential stuff required to metabolize sugar.

Conventional dentists will tell you that fluoride is getting a bad rap, that its administration as sodium fluoride or stannous fluoride hardens teeth and fairly threatens to put dentists out of work. Fluoride’s assault on iodine is never mentioned or appreciated. We say that iodine dominates the Olree Standard Genetic Periodic Chart (see Trace Minerals for the Genetic Code), this with its -1 valence, but then we have to confess that a usurper takes on its role at times, creating bogus hormones. When hormones are built with fluoride instead of iodine or are made under the influence of fluorine, the body is forced into an awesome task, namely ridding itself of the garage hormone.

People who have trouble when the temperature falters are simply short of iodine. Ladies who endure breast surgery have allowed their iodine stores to dwindle too low or even vanish. Caffeine toxicity in the absence of iodine puts tumor on the other side of the equal’s sign. The baby born without iodine support in the womb will suffer mental retardation. The inventory of problems goes on, and yet the medical profession worries not about shortages, but about toxic levels beyond the capacity of homeostasis to rectify.

POST-WORLD WAR II

In 1948, the University of California at Berkeley dropped a bombshell that came to be known as the Wolf-Chaikoff Effect. Two men standing on thin air used conjectural science to remove a truly vital element from the food supply. Wolff-Chaikoff ruled that iodine at levels above 2 milligrams per liter would result in hypothyroidism and goiter. It was a profound finding, one that became most difficult to defuse because of tis credential imprimatur. The sad part is the test animals (rats) that furnished the human extrapolation did not respond as predicted. But panic has its own stern code. It closes debate, ruins careers, and delivers death or debilitation – or both.

Belatedly a silver of truth leaked out. The test rats never became hypothyroid, and thyroid hormones were never measured in their plasma. The full story of the forgery was set down in the Fall 2005 issue of The Original Internist, a report in which Guy E. Abraham, M.D., told how physicians swallowed so much pure hokum it resulted in a moratorium on the clinical use of number 59 – organic, non-radioactive iodine – in effective amounts.

The Wolff-Chaikoff falsehood did not indict forms of iodine positively deleterious to human health. More important, Wolff-Chaikoff closed down most of the valid research. The long and short of it is that FDA tends to recommend worthless levels of minerals, almost always starting with iodine.

The history of research that opened the door for Richard Olree’s genetic chart had a general beginning in 1923, when iodine entered and took a bow in the treatment of Graves disease. In 1970 Lugol’s iodine solution received a fair evaluation, which still stands as a refutation of Wolff-Chaikoff. The debate should have been put to bed in 1948, because the rat fiction did not compute for human beings anyway (and indeed, it had not even computed for rodents).

I cite the above because what Wolff-Chaikoff and fellow travelers consider excess is only 3 percent of the amount required for good health, tumor-suppressing genes and a whole raft of syndromes.

THE SEA

Any consideration of the mineral requirement for human health necessitates a return to the sea, the nutritional center of gravity for plant Earth. Those who live close to the sea are normally exempt from the iodine shortage that counsel from government agencies strives to impose on animals and human beings. Among the healthiest people on the plant are the Japanese. Their proximity to the ocean, their dietary intake of kelp, and their avoidance of fats and debilitating neurotoxins are well known.  The incidence of cancer in japan is very low; especially forms that commonly torment American women. Should Americans consider supplementary iodine (the kelp preparations of Maine’s Atlantic Laboratories and the Iodine supplements of Standard Process of Palmyra, Wisconsin, come to mind), the result would be devastating to the sad health statistics now current coin in the United States. It has been estimated that the removal of seaweed from the diet of the Japanese would diminish daily intake of iodine a hundredfold and hand Japan a sentence now endured by Americans.

For reasons that remain obscure, or for no reason at all, FDA is mightily concerned about iodine toxicity, but at the same time remains more or less indifferent to the toxicity of 2,4-D and a few thousand other toxins that bedevil our air, water and soil, and therefore our body environment.

SET ASIDE

Among literate healthcare providers, the Wolff-Chaikoff fiction has been set aside, much as the fiction that the right form of selenium is certain debilitation or death. Thus, the Wolff-Chaikoff formula that says 2 milligrams of iodine is excessive and potentially harmful fails the test of reasonability. Most people in the United States manage to get no more than 0.25 to 0.48 milligrams per day. This point is made because 50 years after the Wolf-Chaikoff fraud, the results are still quoted as fact. They have been set aside, of course, by Richard Olree’s genetic code work and the towering proofs contained in his biography of Number 59, iodine.

BREAST CANCER

The world has turned over a few times in half a century and some few hard facts have chipped away at the edifice of settled science. The literature reports that 92 to 96 percent of breast cancer cures are sporadic, yet there is a single cause for most cases.  “The causative agent is deficiency of a micronutrient that is depleted by a high-fat diet,” wrote Guy E. Abraham, cited earlier, “and if such an agent is detected, intervention…with supplementation should lead to a decline in the incidence of breast cancer.” As Olree points out in Minerals for Genetic Code, such supplementation must include iodine and selenium. Both Japan and Iceland have few breast cancer cases, and both rely on iodine from ocean plants and air for their essential protection. The reverse is true in Mexico and Thailand.

LET’S GET CLINICAL

No writer wants to glaze over the eyes of the reader, yet a few hidden lessons in unopened books need to be revealed. Next to the thyroid gland, the ovaries are the locus for the largest payload of iodine. This ovarian site is often blocked by goitergens. Iodine just happens to be the active ingredient of natural antigoitergens. Still, the Wolff-Chaikoff concept is alive and well, for which reason the babble of voices proclaiming iodine toxicity and the reaching-for-straws research that hunts for elusive causes and effects when the observed facts about iodine are plainly in sight.

The clinic tells us that appropriate iodine levels in the diet should be considered a nation’s greatest asset. Conversely,  removal of iodine in compliance with obsolete studies is a blunder of staggering proportions, this when supplementation at between 100 and 400 times the RDA (Recommendation Dietary Allowance, now renamed the “Reference Daily Intake”) protects against goitergens and radioactive iodine/iodine fallout. Add to the above inventory of benefits improved immune function, defense against infection, and decreases in singlet oxygen formation – the chief cause of oxidative damage to the DNA.

We note the anticarcinogenic effect everywhere in the human terrain. In those hidden lessons we learn of the detoxifying effect of increased urinary excretion of mercury, cadmium and aluminum, as well as the goitergens fluoride and bromide. According to the evidence, the iodine level of which we speak normalizes receptor functions that improve the response to thyroid-hormone interdiction. An improved control of sugar by diabetics is a recorded result. Normalization of blood pressure without medication has also been reported. Bluntly stated, iodine deficiency is usually implicated in cases of flattering cognitive function.

A CODICIL

        I have inserted the above in my desk copy of Minerals for the Genetic Code and now present it to our readers because of the excellent feedback the book has enjoyed, and because that feedback often includes additional questions, which ask where are we going? And how fast?

For those who have not read the book, we will quote a passage that we feel deserves universal circulation: “We are now a second, third generation nurtured on phosphoric acid from soda pop. We are into the second generation on sweets, within ten years we will be in our second generation on aspartame, which assures diabetes, and a fifth generation of DNA being scrambled before reproduction, better genetic selection first being ruled from the field.”

        Iodine shows near or at the top of many sequences. Iodine and glutamine touch everything in the human body. Iodine constructs the most abundant amino acids in the bloodstream. This much stated, the reader can come to the appropriate conclusions, one of which should be to enlarge a general knowledge of the genetic code and the ability to “see to it yourself,” this business of health maintenance.

The ramifications are many. The preceding codicil must be amended because of advice received from Ed Fashing, a former professor of chemistry at the University of Missouri, DePaul University and other republics of higher learning, and currently the good right arm of the American Ag Movement. He warns that we must never be satisfied with single-factor analysis. Iodine has enemies both within and without.

One food contaminant affecting the health of U.S. citizens is perchlorate. Salts of perchlorate are found in groundwater aquifers and irrigation water from the Colorado River that is used for growing vegetables. When perchlorate is taken into a human body, it oxidizes iodine necessary for healthy function, especially of the thyroid gland. Thus, hormones produced by the thyroid for various purposes, such as metabolism of sugars, are not produced in adequate levels. Many affected people become hypothyroid, and hypothyroidism magnifies diabetes.

        Pregnant women in their first trimester supply most of the fetus’s iodine, and in the last two trimesters over one-fourth of the iodine is supplied by the mother. A developing fetus that lacks this important trace mineral may not develop a healthy brain. Why isn’t something being done about the problem? Perchlorate compounds are used in fireworks, munitions, rockets and metal plating. The Department of Defense doesn’t want to quit testing munitions on testing grounds. NASA wants to continue making rockets using perchlorate. Fireworks manufacturers and metal plating companies want to continue production. Thus, the contamination continues.

NASA, the Department of Defense, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the EPA, the Government Accounting Office, the FDA, the Pentagon and other agencies are aware of the perchlorate contamination problem. Several reports concerning perchlorate contamination have been written but not released. Clearly, however, none of the agencies want to incur the anger of the contaminators and their lobbyists.

        Meanwhile, babies are born with poorly developed brains, people suffer from hypothyroidism, and as usual little is done by the executive and congressional oversight people except talk. The perchlorate contamination of our food supply could easily exceed the melamine food scandal and dietheylene glycol contamination of toothpaste.

Thus rests the case for iodine.