This “Healthy” Diet Causes Hypothyroidism

There’s no shortage of hyped diets.

But do they help with hypothyroidism?

A new study in the journal Food & Function put a specific type of diet to the test, with shocking results.

But actually… if you just tweak it a little, it’s quite good.

Plant-based diets are becoming increasingly popular, and they are usually assumed to be healthy.

But if you’ve recently visited your local bakery, you’ll know there are lots of plant-based foods that are far from healthy.

Accordingly, researchers wanted to understand whether the growing trend of plant-based eating might help protect against thyroid problems or increase risk.

To investigate this, researchers turned to the massive UK Biobank dataset.

They followed a large cohort of 199,382 participants, all free of thyroid disease at the start of the study.

Participants were asked about their dietary habits, with a particular focus on plant-based food intake.

The researchers used three plant-based diet indices (PDI) to assess diet quality:

• Overall Plant-Based Diet Index (PDI) — measures overall plant-based food intake.

• Healthy Plant-Based Diet Index (hPDI) — measures intake of healthy plant foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, and legumes.

• Unhealthy Plant-Based Diet Index (uPDI) — measures intake of less healthy plant-based foods, such as refined grains, sweets, and sugary drinks.

Participants’ risk for thyroid dysfunction, hypothyroidism, and hyperthyroidism was tracked over a median follow-up of 12 years, and researchers used advanced statistical models to analyze the data.

Over the course of the study, there were:

• 4,283 cases of thyroid dysfunction

• 4,086 cases of hypothyroidism

• 935 cases of hyperthyroidism

The data revealed some notable discoveries:

• Participants who consumed more unhealthy plant-based foods (high uPDI) had a 14% higher risk of developing hypothyroidism compared to those with the lowest scores.

• A higher hPDI score (more healthy plant foods) was associated with a 16% reduced risk of developing hyperthyroidism.

• A higher overall plant-based diet score was associated with a slight increase in hypothyroidism risk, suggesting the average person tends to eat more unhealthy than healthy plant foods.

So the key takeaway is to be cautious of hyped diet trends of any type.

Just because it’s plant-based, low-fat, sugar-free, keto — or whatever trend is blowing up that day — doesn’t mean it’s healthy.

The fact remains: it’s easy to heal hypothyroidism with the right kind of diet and lifestyle changes.

Thousands of readers have done it already.

Here are the exact steps they took to heal their hypothyroidism in weeks…