Can I take iodine with…

An extremely common question when starting iodine is “can I take iodine with x” where x is one of various nutrients, foods, drinks or medications.

An unfortunate aspect to iodine is it’s lack of studies. There is a lot of historical information related to its benefits to our health, which is what has allowed doctors to get this info out to us, but we’re not mixing it with various nutrients and seeing how it reactions inside and outside of the body.

The main thing we want to avoid is mixing iodine directly with anything but water and letting it sit. As time goes on there is much more chance for reactions to happen which may create unknown substances. There are only a small handful of iodine containing mixtures that have gone through testing which causes me to suspect more have tried mixing iodine with various substances and failed testing.

One very common nutrient that iodine has an issue with is Vitamin C(ascorbic acid). When ascorbic acid reacts with iodine, the ascorbic acid is oxidized (loses electrons) and the iodine is reduced (gains electrons). ¹ This reaction between vit c and lugols iodine is most likely completely harmless in the small amounts normally supplemented, but part of the lugols is reduced into iodide, which works against the purpose of using lugols. The vit c is oxidized into dehydroascorbic acid which occurs as our body uses vit c, but vit c can only handle this conversion a handful of times and this reaction uses up one of those. I explained all of this to show how the reaction isn’t necessarily a bad thing for us, but a waste of these precious nutrients. I explain this situation a little more at whyiodine.com/vitamin-c

Iodine is sometimes used to measure the amount of starch in a substance. The shape of the starch molecule causes the iodine molecule to be suspended differently, which causes it to turn the starch blue/black. This is another example of a reaction between iodine and a common food that is not necessarily harmful. ²

There is a common idea that various nutrients ‘lock out’ other nutrients. Although there are various nutrients that may share the same transport systems in our body, I do not feel this situation is an issue. But, I also think we shouldn’t be taking very large doses of various nutrients, nor do I think we should be taking them every single day just because we think they are something our body wants or needs. Imagine if you just learned your car requires gasoline and your fuel gauge also did not function. Would you stop and get the same amount of fuel every single day, or maybe attempt figuring out how to judge how often you needed to refuel? The fuel pump will let us know when the tank is full, but our body does not have this feature. Read more about this concept at whyiodine.com/pulse-dosing

Juice

Most juice contains vitamin C, which will reduce part of Lugols like I mention above. Most juice is highly processed and high in sugar. Cranberry juice is about the only juice that might contain more benefits than negatives.

Hot Coffee

(I used to setup audio video equipment and I DJ’d a few school dances when I was a kid. I never adopted the name but my friends called me DJ Hot Coffey. ..just seemed like a good time to share this useless tidbit. Good story?)

There is a back and forth debate over whether adding iodine to hot coffee is an issue. Iodine evaporates quicker at higher temperatures than water, so the idea is that when we add it to hot coffee, it will evaporate very quickly and provide us with much less iodine.

There are several papers that have looked into iodine loss in food or iodized salt during cooking. ³ With one saying about 6% is lost in roasting, 20% while steaming and 36% while boiling. ⁴ Keep in mind that roasting takes about an hour, and most things are steamed or boiled for at least 10-20 minutes. Coffee is brewed just below boiling temperatures and the temperature continues to fall even if we use a hotplate. Although these papers don’t look at coffee specifically, I think it’s pretty safe to assume we’re not losing much.. unless we’re drinking coffee that is still boiling. At which point we might have some other issues to worry about, like our face skin.

I’ve seen someone’s personal test of placing a paper towel over 1 cup of coffee with iodine and 1 cup of coffee without iodine. The paper towel above the iodine showed discoloration which implied that a lot of iodine was evaporating from the coffee. But paper towels contain starch, which causes iodine to function as a strong dye. So a very small amount of iodine will look like a lot more on paper towel.

I have seen the claim that the heat is turning the iodine into something dangerous. I am not a chemist or anything but I do not agree. We are not subjecting iodine to any crazy temperatures here.

I personally feel that there are two bigger issues with coffee. As I attempted cleaning up my diet, I realized that most coffee has a lot of toxins. This is most likely due to the fertilizers used while its being grown as well as mold while its being stored. Some people use low quality dairy creamer which will contain hormones and other toxins, or use flavored creamers with who knows what chemicals. I use this Mayorga Organics Dark Roast because it tastes much cleaner than any other brand I’ve tried. After consuming this one for a while, if I go back to another brand I thought was clean, I can taste yucky stuff. Dark roasts tend to have less caffeine. I slowly made my way into their decaf and now I only drink about half a cup of decaf daily.

Most of us are drinking coffee to stimulate our system in an attempt to feel more energy. This is most likely taxing our system and reducing our ability to heal. Caffeine is known to stimulate cortisol release, which can tax adrenals which can inhibit natural thyroid function⁵ But, I think it’s important to continue providing ourselves with things we enjoy while we venture down this lifestyle change called healing and detox. If coffee is a big part of our day, it might not be worth the stress we might inflict on ourselves by removing it. We should make an attempt to remove other substances that might inhibit our healing, reduce our coffee intake and look for a better brand.

Then, as we clean our system out, we might actually want to put the coffee down without feeling like we’re restricting ourselves. A very important part of our healing is actually wanting to make these changes. Have you ever worked with someone that dislikes their job? Their performance is most likely lacking. It’s not always easy and it may take time, but we have to figure out how to enjoy this.

Medications

Medications are complex substances that mainly force our body to do something it wouldn’t do on its own. Although there are several instances where medication can be handy to help restore functions, Imo, they mainly work against our body’s ability to heal itself.

If our vehicle is out of fuel, what is the purpose of buying expensive work arounds and procedures in order to get it functioning again? So why are we attempting to do this with our body? Most people are not digesting well and its very common to be deficient in several important nutrients.

Taking iodine allows our body to restore balance. Part of this is the ability to run advanced detox genes. Iodine does not just magically give us the ability to detox everything, but it can likely help process toxic medications better. In order for medication to offset our system, its common for it to purposely clog up our advanced detox genes. Otherwise our system will process it like it should with any toxin.

So although healing with iodine is great and Imo the way forward, we have to think about what we’re doing here and how it might impact medications we are consuming.

Always check with your practitioner before making any changes to your nutritional regiment while medicating.

Thyroid Hormones

It is rather common for people learning about iodine to already be taking thyroid hormone supplementation. What I am about to share(as well as anything anyone but your doctor says) should not be taken as medical advice. You should always check with your doctor before changing anything. But an unfortunate aspect to this is that most doctors do not understand iodine, so you may need to locate an iodine proficient doctor.

Thyroid hormone supplements exist due to our body’s inability to create these hormones or lack of demand. This can happen for a handful of reasons which is part of the complexity to all of this.

Thyroid hormones are usually created in our thyroid with iodine as one ingredient. The numbers in the common thyroid hormones T4 and T3 are indicating how many molecules of iodine those hormones contain. T3 has 3 molecules of iodine, T4 has 4. Without iodine, these hormones are not capable of existing.

This allows us to run into a situation where we were not able to create enough thyroid hormones due to one or more deficiencies, which is what caused us to get into thyroid hormone supplementation. If we were to begin generating our own thyroid hormones at this point, our system will likely make its own hormones with iodine first, and then the supplemental hormones become too much. We might not be ready to reduce or stop the hormone supplementation, but if we’re noticing odd symptoms, we’re likely getting too much hormones from both the iodine and hormone supplements. This is why it’s important to understand what we’re going for, and/or work with someone who does.

These thyroid hormones are a part of our metabolism. If our metabolism is not able to function well for other reasons, our body may purposely be avoiding the creation of these hormones, and it may not call for the iodine to be turned into these hormones. This is most likely the reason some people do not notice changes in the condition of their thyroid when taking iodine.

This is why I point people to stomach acid, electrolytes and antioxidants at first, because focusing on these properly will highlight metabolic roadblocks that stand in our way. If the symptoms on this page are familiar, stomach acid should become a priority sickoftired.com/stomach-acid

1. http://www.csun.edu/~jco69120/coursework/695c/discrepant/index.html
2. http://chemistry.elmhurst.edu/demos/disappearblueI2.htm
3. Effect of different cooking methods on iodine losses – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3791240/
4. Estimation of losses of iodine during different cooking procedures – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24394330/
5. Caffeine Stimulation of Cortisol Secretion Across the Waking Hours in Relation to Caffeine Intake Levels – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2257922/