In my July 26th article on HTHayat, I briefly touched upon the topic of thyroid disorders. In this article, I wanted to elaborate further. I correspond and talk with many people every day, and I observe with sadness how rapidly thyroid diseases are increasing and how many people are affected. Previously, I saw that the most common chronic diseases in society were related to diabetes, but now this has visibly shifted to thyroid disorders.

I’m reaching this conclusion not from statistical data, but from my experiences and observations within society. I attribute the reasons for this increase primarily to our inability to control stress. I explained how the system works and what we can do to manage stress in the article I mentioned above. To help you visualize it, I’ve included an image below.

What should the diet be like for thyroid problems?

This is probably the most frequent question I get… In general, even if we don’t have a disease, it’s very important to eliminate the following from our diet, but they are vitally important in these types of diseases:

Refined sugar

Packaged foods (wafers, biscuits, chips)

Carbonated drinks

Foods made with white flour

High-carbohydrate foods like bagels, pastries, and pasta

After this first step, the most necessary step, especially for thyroid and other hormonal diseases, is to improve gut health. Gut health and the proper functioning of hormones are directly related. As gut health improves, hormone secretion also finds its balance.

What we can do to improve gut health…

In addition to the above points, follow a diet free of grains and wheat for a while.

Add probiotics to your diet such as homemade yogurt, kefir, probiotic vegetables, homemade pickles, and traditional vinegar.

Follow a diet high in phytonutrients, meaning making colorful vegetables and fruits of every color and variety the mainstay of your diet. Eat green, yellow, orange, white/brown, purple, red vegetables and fruits every day, almost raw. As these vegetables increase and become the main component of your diet, you will crave other things you shouldn’t eat less. We will move from a carbohydrate cycle to a rainbow cycle. What a romantic diet, right? 🙂

There are also more specific diets for thyroid disorders, such as AIP and elimination diets. However, I think it would be challenging for a beginner to jump directly to these diets. My general approach is to adapt feasible things to your life. Even applying the above points in the initial stages will create significant changes. Therefore, I recommend going step by step and first adapting these things to your life. If your values ​​still don’t improve, you can resort to the stricter diets I mentioned above. However, I have witnessed countless times in the people I work with that even applying the points I described leads to very good changes and improvements. So, I think you can take the first step without fear, anxiety, or questioning whether you can do it…

I must also mention that adopting a peaceful, positive, and stress-free lifestyle is just as important, if not more important, than nutrition. If you’re wondering how to manage stress, I included tips in last week’s article…

I wish everyone healthy, happy, and sugar-free days.

NOTE: The image is an excerpt from my IFM lecture notes, specifically the section on Stress and Thyroid.

Sema Özpekmezci

Functional Medicine and Holistic Nutrition Health Coach