The Importance Of Iodine In Your Diet

The bottle of iodine in your medicine cabinet has nothing to do with sex appeal, but it’s different with the iodine you eat.

There she goes, trig and trim, tripping down the street in the manner gentlemen prefer. She has everything, including ample thyroxine.

Here she comes, plowing down the avenue, slow as a tramp steamer and approximately as majestic—Sluggish Susie, slow and fat, with mental activity no greater than the law allows, and the oomph quotient of a blimp.

Of course Susie is just an example, and anyhow maybe her name is John. She isn’t anybody you know. She is just a subject for our text on iodine, one of the big four minerals—the others are calcium, phosphorus, and iron— likely to be lacking in American diets.

Grasp the front of your neck in a choking stance and your fingers and thumb will be on opposite sides of your thyroid gland. This is a potent little twin-lobed organ that is something like a saddle on your Adam’s apple. It filters out of your bloodstream every unemployed molecule of iodine it can lay its glands on and from it manufactures a powerful secretion, thyroxine, which represents the naturally not inconsiderable margin that separates you from imbecility.

By this time you are aware that your body produces a vast amount of heat energy. The thyroid gland is the thermostat that controls the rate at which the furnace burns. Too little of it brings listlessness, loss of energy, obesity, sluggishness, lack of mental and physical pep and ginger.

 Too much of it jacks your thermostat so high that you become excitable, overheated, constantly hungry; the mind is over-active, jumps like a grasshopper instead of following through on ideas; your heart races and the eyes tend to bulge.
But ah—a perfectly adjusted thyroid and you’re a good bet for any man’s or woman’s interest!

Iodine enters this charming picture because it makes up two-thirds of the secretion of the thyroid. When you don’t get enough iodine, the gland works overtime to make up the deficiency but the best it can do is increase its own substance and then the neck swells unattractively with simple goiter. There are complex relationships between the thyroid and the sex glands and general activities involving energy, as the search for romance assuredly does.

Iodine shortage is particularly common in regions of the country once covered by glaciers. The Great Lakes and Pacific Northwest regions have soils and drinking water particularly poor in iodine. It is now common practice to include iodized table salt in the diet and in this way the incidence of simple goiter has to great degree been controlled. But there are other types of goiter (not all of them cause neck swellings) that are made worse by excess iodine. The warning of authorities is that any person over the age of thirty who has a swelling on the neck should consult a physician before taking iodized salt or other form of iodine therapy.

There is no practical danger of your getting too much iodine from foods, however. Rabbits whose foods were limited to Brussels sprouts, cabbage, or cauliflower have developed toxic goiters, the result of excess production of thyroxine. This is not the result of excess iodine, but of the richness of these foods in cyanide compounds of an organic nature. Through chemical processes the cyanide radicles tend to create a shortage of oxygen available to the body; this causes the thyroid, which controls oxidation processes, to step up production of its secretion. The possibility of your limiting your diet to Brussels sprouts is reasonably remote, although some "reducing’* diets of a faddish nature are just about as wacky, which gives us another chance to work in a plug for a reasonable variety of foods every day.

Sea foods are the most abundant sources of dietary iodine—fish, oysters, lobsters, sardines. Canned salmon is an excellent source. Vegetables may contain much or little iodine according to the nature of the soils they are grown in. This variability is characteristic of the mineral values of most plant foods, which naturally cannot be expected to abstract elements from soils that have been depleted by intensive cultivation or are naturally deficient.

Now that you see how the thyroid secretion regulates the rate at which you burn energy, it is easy to understand the functions and dangers of thyroid extract as a reducing drug. In the case of Sluggish Susie, a little thyroid  might be just what  the  doctor ordered
 

Tags: iodine, diet, foods, healthy foods, iodine therapy

Why Food With Protein Is So Good For Your Diet

Naturally you can’t eat a diet of pure protein, although protein can be considered the one indispensable food since fractions of it can be converted into fat and carbohydrate, but not vice versa.

You can see why the new slimming diets emphasize protein, because liberal allowances can be expected to cause greater loss of weight than would the same number of fat or carbohydrate calories.

When you eat proteins you really hire a Simon Legree to crack the whip on lazy calories, making them buckle down to honest toil instead of picking daisies as they drift to your fat depots.

Nor is the slimming aspect of proteins their sole claim to your respect. They stimulate the general efficiency of your body, replace worn out tissues, furnish materials for zippy gland hormones and build vigor and stamina.

Many people still have a vague impression that a high-protein diet is unhealthy. Doctors used to think so too, but the newer knowledge of nutrition has pretty generally knocked the props from under this idea. One supposedly dangerous effect of protein was its action on the kidneys.

Various ailments of these vital organs were laid to heavy eating of protein. In recent months, doctors have discarded this superstition so completely that today high-protein diets are prescribed for some—not all—kidney ailments.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the Arctic explorer, spent several years living with Eskimos on an exclusive meat diet. According to theories then current, he should have been struck down by all manner of ailments, from Bright’s disease to scurvy. He was so uncooperative with theory, however, as to thrive on his all-meat, high-protein diet.

His "unbalanced" eating habits failed even to raise his blood pressure, and he was downright stubborn in his insistence that he never felt better in his life. Later he lived on the same diet in New York, where physicians could clap stethoscopes on him.

They couldn’t find a thing wrong with him. Since then there has been abundant evidence that high-protein diets can be continued indefinitely without ill effect, except in certain cases of disease.

Experiments leading to the belief that protein was dangerous to kidneys were performed, in large part, before the all-important effects of vitamins and minerals were well understood. Another supposed danger of proteins—that they putrefy in the intestines and produce poisons absorbed by the body—is much more theoretical than real, on the basis of present conservative opinion.

An inflamed, diseased colon can conceivably absorb toxins through its walls. That a normal colon will do is extremely doubtful. The theory of poison absorption is the popularly horrifying one of "autointoxication." Curiously, no one has ever satisfactorily demonstrated the presence in the blood, or the. specific identity of, the postulated poisons that stage these Borgian Blitzkriegs. One famous experiment by Dr. Walter Alvarez of the Mayo Clinic has demonstrated that every symptom attributed to "autointoxication" can be produced by stuffing the rectum with cotton.

The symptoms are real, but the causes are more mechanical than chemical.

Meat is by no means the only excellent source of protein. Other animal products—milk, eggs, cheese—are outstanding. A protein is considered biologically complete if it furnishes liberal amounts of the amino acids needed by the body.

Tags: diet, protein food, lose of weight