Latest / Health with Hashimoto’s - Thyroid or Immune Education for Autoimmune Thyroid Disease / 143 // I ate gluten curious if freshly milled flour helps Hashimoto’s

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143 // I ate gluten curious if freshly milled flour helps Hashimoto’s · Health with Hashimoto’s - Thyroid or Immune Education for Autoimmune Thyroid Disease

• 0:00
  I did an experiment to myself. I'm going to tell you what I did,
• 0:03
  why I did it, and how you can do it too if you want.
• 0:05
  First, welcome to the Health with Hashimoto's podcast. My name is Esther,
• 0:09
  and I am a registered nurse.
• 0:12
  I have been gluten-free for about 11 years, and the experiment I did was to
• 0:18
  see if I could tolerate heritage wheat that was freshly milled and sourdough.
• 0:24
  I want to tell you why each of those things matter.
• 0:27
  But first, so we've talked about gluten-free before.
• 0:31
  I've shared with you, if you've listened to a bunch of episodes.
• 0:34
  This statistic from Dr. Isabella Wentz. She is a thyroid pharmacist.
• 0:39
  She did a study once and found about 80% of people who have Hashimoto's are
• 0:44
  better off gluten-free.
• 0:46
  But how do you know if you're in that 80%? you have to dry it.
• 0:49
  There's no test to say you are in the 80% or you're not. You're in that 20% who can tolerate it.
• 0:58
  So I went gluten-free actually because my infant at the time was covered head to toe with eczema.
• 1:06
  Now eczema is usually something that's related to an allergy and it's a gut condition.
• 1:12
  He was only a couple weeks old at the time, maybe a couple months.
• 1:16
  And so I knew it was from something that I was eating or something in our environment
• 1:21
  because he was exclusively breastfed.
• 1:23
  And, you know, we were at home. This was 11 years ago. You know,
• 1:26
  I was still on maternity leave.
• 1:28
  I knew that whatever was causing his eczema, I was directly responsible for
• 1:33
  either from my diet or from, you know, the detergent or the smells or things in our house.
• 1:39
  So I went on a quest at that time to heal his eczema.
• 1:43
  And part of that was going on a huge elimination diet. His eczema was so bad.
• 1:49
  I had to put socks on his hands to keep him from scratching himself bloody every day.
• 1:55
  It was head to toe. His forehead was just a patch of red, inflamed,
• 2:01
  itchy, nasty skin, and it was on his chest, his back, his belly,
• 2:06
  like all the way down to his toes.
• 2:07
  I felt so bad. And of course, as a mom, you'll do anything. I wouldn't do it
• 2:11
  for myself. I'm not going to go gluten-free for myself, but for my child,
• 2:16
  I would do this huge elimination diet. So I did it,
• 2:20
  And we isolated that for him, it was actually coconut.
• 2:24
  Now coconut happens to be in a lot of things that used to have hydrogenated
• 2:28
  oils in him because coconut is solid at, is it less than 74 degrees, I think.
• 2:36
  So they use coconut in a lot of things and a lot of soaps have coconut to create the suds.
• 2:44
  It was definitely a process to get to that point because obviously you try the big things first.
• 2:49
  You try the gluten and the dairy.
• 2:51
  One of my kids had been really sensitive to anything that I ate that had tomatoes
• 2:56
  in it. So you try the obvious things.
• 2:59
  Coconut was way down the line. It took a long time to get there.
• 3:02
  And in that process, we found out that my son could tolerate gluten, but I couldn't.
• 3:09
  And so I was mostly gluten-free for about the next five years.
• 3:14
  For me at that time, I realized that gluten, number one, it increased my migraines.
• 3:21
  Like it lowered the migraine threshold. So it took less to trigger a migraine.
• 3:25
  That was the biggest thing that I remember noticing.
• 3:29
  Now I'm going to interrupt myself to tell you, please write down your symptoms.
• 3:33
  You think that you will always remember what's going on.
• 3:37
  You think that you will always remember how bad you feel or how bad something
• 3:42
  makes you feel. And that's false.
• 3:45
  Our brains want to forget it. And so write down your symptoms.
• 3:49
  One of my clients a while back, she came to me because she was like trapped in her house.
• 3:56
  She had to be so close to a bathroom.
• 3:58
  She told me that she couldn't go anywhere. And if she did, she had to make sure
• 4:03
  she knew where all of the bathrooms on the road were, like any place that she
• 4:07
  could stop to quickly use the bathroom.
• 4:09
  And she had to know where the bathrooms were in the place where she was going. It was torture for her.
• 4:15
  After we worked together for a while, I reminded her of that because she had
• 4:19
  just told me she had gone somewhere. She's like, oh my goodness,
• 4:21
  I totally forgot about that.
• 4:23
  Please write down your symptoms because at this point, I cannot tell you exactly
• 4:27
  what gluten did to me when I had that elimination diet and brought it back in.
• 4:33
  I do remember that it lowered my migraine threshold, but I don't remember the other things.
• 4:37
  So I was mostly gluten-free for the next five-ish years.
• 4:42
  Every year during birthday season, I would have some birthday cake and have gluten at that time.
• 4:48
  And I know that gluten is an all or nothing thing.
• 4:52
  So when I was gluten-free, I was 100% gluten-free. And then during birthday
• 4:56
  season, which in our family is four birthdays within 30 days.
• 5:00
  So during those 30 days, I would eat, you know, quote, normal.
• 5:04
  And then at the end of birthday season, I would go back to being gluten-free again.
• 5:08
  That is how I worked it for me. And it seemed to be okay.
• 5:12
  I did notice that, you know, every time I had gluten, it was a little more unmanageable.
• 5:19
  I had more symptoms.
• 5:20
  Again, write down your symptoms because I remember noting that,
• 5:25
  but I don't remember noting all of my symptoms.
• 5:27
  So fast forward to COVID. And of course, during COVID, everybody was in their
• 5:32
  homes and then people started doing sourdough.
• 5:35
  So I learned that when you are doing sourdough, there's this long ferment and
• 5:40
  it changes the wheat changes the gluten, and some people who are sensitive to
• 5:46
  gluten can have sourdough bread.
• 5:49
  And so, of course, I tried it. I'm always willing to experiment on myself. And I missed real bread.
• 5:55
  If you've had gluten-free bread, which I'm sure you have, you know that it's not the same.
• 6:00
  It's just not. There are some that are better than others. There are some that are really, really bad.
• 6:04
  But there's nothing quite like a nice gluten sandwich bread, right?
• 6:09
  So I tried sourdough, And I remember I was so excited and I worked really hard
• 6:14
  to make sure that I wasn't gonna have a placebo effect, trying not to sway my
• 6:18
  thoughts one way or the other. So excited.
• 6:21
  I prepared the sourdough. I worked on it really hard. I made that batch. I ate it.
• 6:28
  And I was flat on my bed. Not in pain. I remember I ate the gluten-free,
• 6:33
  or sorry, the sourdough for lunch.
• 6:36
  And I remember laying down that afternoon, and I was so depressed.
• 6:40
  And I was just like confused.
• 6:43
  I had this moment of clarity where I was reflecting on what I was feeling,
• 6:48
  kind of like outside myself, observing my emotions and observing what was going
• 6:52
  on. and I was trying to figure out why am I so down?
• 6:57
  Like all of a sudden this afternoon, I just feel like I'm worthless. Life is just no good.
• 7:03
  Why am I even here? Like all of these crazy thoughts, just super depressive.
• 7:08
  I wasn't in pain, but I was super depressed and that is not normal for me.
• 7:13
  I am not a depressed person.
• 7:14
  I do not struggle with depression.
• 7:17
  This last winter when my TSH was going up. My thyroid was not doing awesome.
• 7:22
  I noticed that my mood was flattening a little bit, but even at that time,
• 7:26
  I was not depressed. I was a little bit more flat, which I told my nurse practitioner
• 7:30
  and we got me on some Synthroid after checking my labs.
• 7:34
  But that is like, usually I'm totally fine.
• 7:37
  And at my worst, I have some flattened mood.
• 7:40
  So this day when I tried that sourdough and had
• 7:43
  like so crazy out of
• 7:46
  the blue depression and down thoughts I suddenly realized it's the gluten like
• 7:52
  that's the only thing that changed I had gluten for lunch or wheat or whatever
• 7:59
  I had that sourdough bread and it was delicious but all of a sudden I am not myself.
• 8:06
  And so I went for a walk. I was trying to figure out, okay, so I need fresh air. I need sunlight.
• 8:11
  I need to boost my mood. I need to be outside. I need to move,
• 8:15
  get my body, you know, processing anything that I ate because I want it to be used up.
• 8:21
  I don't, I don't know how, you know, that scientifically works.
• 8:24
  I was just trying to figure out anything that I could do to make myself feel better.
• 8:29
  So I went on a long walk. I think it was like two hours that day.
• 8:32
  I didn't feel like I could go outside and walk.
• 8:36
  But in that moment of clarity, when I realized that the depression was directly
• 8:40
  related to what I ate, I was like, okay, I have to go outside in the sun,
• 8:44
  in the natural air and get some exercise. I will feel better. And so I did.
• 8:49
  That was the last time I ate gluten for the next five years.
• 8:51
  Fast forward to about the middle of last month, and I was listening to a podcast.
• 8:56
  It's called The Culture Apothecary. I listened to quite a few of her episodes.
• 8:59
  They're pretty lengthy, and so I pick and choose.
• 9:02
  And this one, it caught my attention because they were talking about thyroid,
• 9:07
  or they mentioned that both of them had Hashimoto's, the host and the guest,
• 9:11
  and they were talking about eating gluten and having freshly milled flour.
• 9:15
  I was very intrigued. So I listened to the show, and I'll try to put the show
• 9:19
  notes, or the link down in the show notes.
• 9:21
  If you look for culture apothecary, and then you look for bread or flour, you will find it.
• 9:26
  It is an interview with Sue Becker, who is the host of Becker's Bread,
• 9:32
  I think, or Bread Becker.
• 9:34
  There's a huge YouTube channel and she has a podcast herself.
• 9:38
  This interview was talking about the process that wheat has gone through.
• 9:44
  So wheat itself is different today than it was 100 or 200 years ago.
• 9:49
  In the pre-1950s, the wheat was different and there have been a lot of changes since that time.
• 9:55
  I don't know about before that time, but especially since the 1950s,
• 9:59
  there was a lot of different plant breeding, as well as GMO stuff, as well as
• 10:05
  pesticides and herbicides like Roundup. There's a lot of stuff going on in our actual wheat.
• 10:11
  And then when you go beyond the wheat itself to the milling of it,
• 10:16
  turning that wheat into flour, then there's even more stuff that I had no idea.
• 10:20
  When they started doing industrial milling of wheat and packaging up and selling
• 10:26
  it as white flour or even whole wheat flour.
• 10:29
  They took out the nutrients because it's the nutrients, it's the germ and the
• 10:34
  endosperm that cause the wheat to spoil.
• 10:37
  So they took out the things that cause it to spoil, but they also took out a
• 10:41
  lot of the good stuff like the B vitamins and some minerals and some antioxidants.
• 10:45
  And there was a rash of problems in the US, probably other countries too,
• 10:51
  but they were having all these health problems.
• 10:54
  And that's when researchers and scientists, doctors, whoever discovered that,
• 10:59
  oh my goodness, we have to put these back in.
• 11:01
  According to Sue, I have not read all of the research on this,
• 11:05
  but she's a food scientist, so she has.
• 11:07
  She said that according to what she has learned, that at that time,
• 11:11
  they talked to the mills and they said, you have to put these back in.
• 11:14
  And the mill is like, you know, we're already reselling all of that stuff.
• 11:19
  We're selling it to the animal food companies.
• 11:22
  So we're not going to stop selling it, but we will enrich the flour.
• 11:27
  And that is why we have enriched flour because they wanted,
• 11:30
  the government wanted the B vitamins and things put back in our flour so that
• 11:35
  they could get rid of the diseases that were now running rampant after the freshly
• 11:40
  milled flour went away and people had store-bought flour.
• 11:45
  This all is what I'm getting from Sue Becker from this interview.
• 11:48
  I have not fact-checked it, but she has been doing this for years and years.
• 11:53
  I trust what she says, but you can go listen to it and you can fact-check it.
• 11:56
  So my point is, I'm listening to this interview, and I'm very curious because
• 12:01
  she said, when you have freshly milled flour, a lot of people can tolerate it,
• 12:07
  even if they were not able to tolerate gluten before.
• 12:11
  It's actually not the gluten itself that they're intolerant to,
• 12:14
  but it's the processed wheat.
• 12:16
  And I was very, I was like, oh, I wonder, I wonder.
• 12:20
  So I, of course, jumped online. One of my Instagram friends had been posting that she gets her wheat,
• 12:30
  she gets heritage wheat, so pre-1950s, from a mill that's like an hour and a
• 12:35
  half away from me. It's called Sunrise Flower Mill.
• 12:37
  They do ship all over the country, so if you want to go there, Sunrise Flower Mill.
• 12:43
  So I went to Sunrise Flower Mill on the internet and
• 12:46
  And I got some of their pancake mix, some of their pre-milled wheat,
• 12:52
  because let's be honest, I am not going to mill things myself every time I need flour.
• 12:59
  Now, Sue Becker, I did go to her YouTube channel and she just keeps her flour mill on the counter.
• 13:05
  She's got an electric one. She puts in the wheat berries in the top,
• 13:08
  turns it on or turns it on and then puts the wheat berries in and then out comes
• 13:11
  this freshly milled flour right into her, like what she's baking.
• 13:15
  Super easy. I don't have an electric
• 13:18
  mill and I know that I'm not going to go over to my mom and dad's.
• 13:21
  My mom has a mill. It's a manual mill.
• 13:24
  And I'm just not going to go over there every time I need to make something.
• 13:28
  So I bought some already ground flour. And then I also bought some wheat berries
• 13:32
  so that I could make my freshly milled stuff.
• 13:34
  I also bought one of their sourdough starters.
• 13:38
  They have a sourdough that is over 100 years old. It's from Italy.
• 13:42
  I was like, yes, I don't want to deal with starting my own sourdough this time,
• 13:46
  I'd rather start from an established batch.
• 13:48
  So that brings me up to last week.
• 13:52
  And we got it in the mail. Super exciting. If you watch my Instagram stories,
• 13:57
  I am health.with.hashimoto's.
• 13:59
  You saw that I got my package and then I started the sourdough.
• 14:03
  I had to, you know, hydrate it and start feeding it.
• 14:06
  And by the weekend, and we were ready to make our bread.
• 14:11
  I say we because my 11-year-old was on this journey with me.
• 14:14
  He was going to make the bread with me. So we scheduled our time to go over
• 14:19
  to my mom and dad's and mill the wheat.
• 14:23
  I thought it was going to be easy. Let me tell you, it was not.
• 14:27
  He has a manual mill. My dad bought my mom a manual mill, and it was a lot of work.
• 14:32
  So my 11 year old and I, we had a morning workout for sure.
• 14:36
  We ground wheat manually for about two, two and a half hours. It.
• 14:42
  It was kind of fun to start, you know, go from these wheat berries and see the
• 14:46
  flour come up. It was a little bit coarse, so then we did a second grind to make it finer.
• 14:51
  And we ended up with enough flour that we came home and we made sourdough bread.
• 14:55
  Because it took so long to mill, I wasn't ready to bake it until Sunday morning.
• 15:01
  I put it in the fridge for Saturday and then I put it in the oven on Sunday
• 15:05
  morning before we left for church.
• 15:07
  And then I tried it for lunch and it was really good. I had gluten,
• 15:13
  flour, heritage, wheat, sourdough for the first time.
• 15:18
  Well, first time ever, because I don't think I've ever had the heritage or the
• 15:21
  heritage sourdough, like all those combinations.
• 15:23
  But for the first time in five years, I ate gluten. And I was nervously optimistic.
• 15:29
  I had been reading so many different testimonials of, I can't do normal flour,
• 15:35
  but I can eat this. and I can't have gluten, but I can eat this.
• 15:39
  I wanted to prepare my mind so that I didn't have a placebo effect of having a negative reaction.
• 15:47
  I was kind of worried about that. I did not want a placebo effect.
• 15:51
  So I was listening to all of these testimonials and reading them and I tried
• 15:56
  it and I want you to try it too.
• 15:57
  If you have been gluten-free and you know that that helps you and you're willing
• 16:03
  to go through this work why not try it that was my thought like why not.
• 16:09
  If I find something that is healthier for myself and healthier for my family,
• 16:13
  it's got all of the nutrients right in it.
• 16:16
  My family gets all of the correct form, the bioavailable forms of the B vitamins.
• 16:22
  I get all of the antioxidants, the fiber.
• 16:25
  We have fresh food. We have, you know, no more bleached flour.
• 16:31
  If you've been through the Hashimoto's Decoded Root Causes, you've heard me
• 16:35
  talk about that one of the root causes and one of the triggers of Hashimoto's
• 16:40
  can be in the periodic table of elements.
• 16:43
  It's related to iodine. It's the bleaching of our flower using bromine and bromide process.
• 16:51
  So if I can do this to help my family, then why not? That was my thought.
• 16:56
  And I invite you to do this experiment on yourself. Why not?
• 17:00
  Maybe it will be healthier. Maybe it will work for you. But again, log all your symptoms.
• 17:06
  So did it work for me? Am I able to have gluten again as long as I do heritage
• 17:11
  wheat and freshly milled and sourdough?
• 17:14
  No. I had a bit of, like I definitely felt more inflamed a couple hours after eating it.
• 17:22
  I had a low-grade headache. It wasn't a migraine and I didn't have depression
• 17:26
  like the last time, but I just felt thicker.
• 17:30
  And I don't know if that makes sense. But I felt like my head was heavier and thicker.
• 17:35
  I felt it's that low grade, maybe like a one or two on the pain scale of a dull headache.
• 17:41
  And I was like, hmm, this is probably my body saying it's not worth it.
• 17:46
  But I know that, you know, gluten, it's an all or nothing thing.
• 17:50
  So I'm finishing the loaf of bread like one slice a day or maybe two.
• 17:55
  I'm not overdoing it for sure. I don't want to binge on gluten.
• 18:00
  But at the same time, I know that I had it and I might as well enjoy it because
• 18:05
  it's not causing severe symptoms right now.
• 18:08
  So there is something for my body about having that heritage wheat and sourdough
• 18:12
  that it doesn't have as drastic of a reaction for me as other stuff. So why did I do it?
• 18:20
  Because I wanted to experiment on myself. I'm not going to know unless I try it.
• 18:25
  What works for somebody else might not work for you.
• 18:28
  You know, you see the ads, you see what people say online, on social media,
• 18:32
  like this works for me, you have to try this.
• 18:35
  I know this is going to work for you. Well, you're an individual.
• 18:38
  What works for your friend might not work for you. What works for your friend
• 18:41
  might work for you. The only way to know is to try it.
• 18:45
  Now, there are some things that research tells us work for 100% of people.
• 18:50
  Like, you know, when you do the research and it says 100% of mammals react in
• 18:55
  this way, okay, then you know that that will work for you.
• 18:57
  You don't know what the effects are going to be of how it works,
• 19:00
  but you know, okay, if it works for 100% of mammals and you're a mammal,
• 19:04
  then it's going to work for you.
• 19:06
  But you are unique. You are individual.
• 19:08
  So why not try it? Now, maybe the why nots are big.
• 19:12
  Maybe you don't have time to do sourdough or you don't have time to or a mill
• 19:17
  or access to, you know, make freshly milled flour.
• 19:21
  I get it. But if you can, like that's my philosophy. Why not try?
• 19:25
  Now, this is with the caveat of know your own triggers. Know your root causes. Know your triggers.
• 19:32
  Know what you have time and space for. Don't stress yourself out about trying
• 19:37
  something new or restricting something.
• 19:40
  Know yourself, know your body, know your journey, know your root causes,
• 19:45
  know your situation in life so that you can figure out, okay, maybe this will work.
• 19:50
  Maybe it won't. Maybe it will. You'll never know if you try.
• 19:53
  So that is my experience with trying gluten again, trying freshly milled flour.
• 19:58
  I would love to hear your stories. What have you tried?
• 20:01
  What have you done an experiment on yourself and figured out,
• 20:05
  oh, this does work for me, this doesn't work for me, share your stories.
• 20:09
  Come over to our community, our Health with Hashimoto's community over on school,
• 20:13
  S-K-O-O-L dot com, and share your stories.
• 20:16
  I'd love to hear your story of what worked, what didn't, what are you learning about yourself?
• 20:22
  How are you helping yourself on this journey to have better health with Hashimoto's?
• 20:27
  I look forward to hearing your story.
• 20:30
  And I'll see you next week on the Health with Hashimoto's podcast.
• 20:33
  This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only.
• 20:37
  Please discuss any concerns and plans with your trusted healthcare professional.
• 20:41
  If you found this episode helpful, will you please share it with a friend?
• 20:44
  I'll see you next week on the Health with Hashimoto's podcast.