Does Fluoride Cause Hypothyroid?

Does fluoridated drinking water cause hypothyroid or is this just alternative medicine lore? A study was recently performed that provides a definitive answer to this question. Dr. Ruscio summarizes in this week’s video.

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Does Fluoride Cause Hypothyroid

Hey, everyone. It’s Dr. Ruscio.

I want to briefly speak with you about your thyroid and fluoride. You’ve probably heard something about the potential of fluoride to cause hypothyroidism. And up until just recently, I consider this more of a, maybe, a frivolous kind of issue regarding thyroid – I hadn’t really seen a lot of strong scientific evidence to suggest this was a major issue for thyroid, until just recently.

Now, I’ll put the study abstract on the screen, but a study was done in February 2015, published in the Journal of Epidemiology – excuse me, that’s a tongue twister – and Community Health. They found something that I thought was fairly striking. And to quote from the study:

“We found that practices located in West Midlands,” this is in England, “a wholly fluoridated area” – so an area that has fully fluoridated water – “are nearly twice as likely to report high hypothyroidism prevalence in comparison to greater Manchester, a non-fluoridated area.”

So, this is an observational population study that showed that people who live in communities that are drinking fully fluoridated water were nearly twice as likely to have high levels of hypothyroidism compared to those not drinking fluoridated water.

So this, to me, was a very, very important finding.

Now, what do you do with this information? Well, the good news is that the solution to this potential issue is a very practical one, meaning you should drink filtered water, or water that does not have fluoride. It’s a fairly easy fix.

Now, you may have also heard you need to do a fluoride flush or a halogen flush – something where you take high doses of iodine to help flush out this fluoride. I don’t think that that’s necessary, and it might be a little bit detrimental. Iodine has been clearly shown to have the potential to provoke or make thyroid autoimmunity worse. So, that may be a reaction that you may have to this potential therapy.

Secondly, when you stop the ingestion of fluoride, the half of the fluoride is around a couple to about 10 days, meaning that this will find its way out of your body fairly quickly once the source of it has been addressed.

Now, we did record a two-part podcast series on this issue of iodine and thyroid, and one of the components was iodine, fluoride, chlorine, and bromide and thyroid – kind of looking at all these different elements known as halogens that may interfere with your thyroid function. If you want to have a deeper narrative on this issue, you can go over to DrRuscio.com – D-R-R-U-S-C-I-O.com, click on the ‘Podcast‘ page, and find your way to those two podcast episodes.

But, in recap, fluoride, fluoridated water, does seem to increase maybe by two-fold your chances of being hypothyroid. But, the solution of this is a practical one: Filter your water or drink non-fluoridated water. I would save the fluoride detox protocol. And, again, if you want more information on the ‘whys’ behind that, you can see the podcast where we discussed that in more detail.

So, this is Dr. Ruscio, and I hope this helps. Thanks.