189 | Fact Checking Gary Brecka: Are there really 5 Hidden Hashimoto's Villains?

Dr. Steven Noseworthy: All we know is when we look at people with Hashimoto's and do samples of their thyroid, a lot of them, half to three-quarters, they have some viral genetic material there. thyroid samples from healthy people show just as many and the same viruses as the Hashimoto's group. So to sit back and for someone, whether it's Brecker or anybody else, to say, well, viruses get into your thyroid and they cause Hashimoto's, and all you have to do is get rid of the virus and your Hashimoto's goes into remission, ignore scientific reality. it's likely that if you have Hashimoto's, you have viruses in your thyroid. But guess what? If you're alive, regardless of whether you have Hashimoto's, that statement is still true. So we can't use the presence of viruses in thyroid tissue as a distinguisher because everyone has it. Hey guys, and welcome back to the Inflammation Nation. If you're new here, make sure that you hit that subscribe and follow button right now so you don't miss any new content. And for those of you who've been listening for a while and aren't subscribers or not following, why don't you go ahead and do it? Because I know you aren't you haven't done it for a while, but it just helps the channel grow and for me to reach more people with the message that we have in the inflammation nation. So if you've been I seem to be on this, Soapbox about social media these days. But if you've been anywhere near TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, whatever, over the last couple of weeks, you've probably seen a viral video featuring celebrity health influencer Gary Brecca. And in this particular clip, he's on a stage and he's talking to a bunch of people. Presumably, I would assume that they're not. clinicians or scientists or healthcare consumers like you. And he boldly claims that he's going to teach them more in 90 seconds than any endocrinologist understands about having Hashimoto's hypothyroidism. Now let me pause right here. Because I I do want to give credit where credit is due. Gary Breca is a, I think he's a gifted, highly energetic communicator. He's built a massive following and platform, distilling complex concepts down into little bite-sized analogies for lay people. And analogies are great tools for teaching, for sure. I use them all the time. But when you stand up on a like a digital soapbox and you make a claim like in the next 90 seconds, you'll know more than your endocrinologist you better have your pathobiology right. And in this video, he asserts with absolute certainty that five specific things hide inside your thyroid cells. And then he names mold mycotoxins, which are mold toxins, parasites, heavy metals, and viruses. And he uses the analogy of a criminal who has like barricaded himself inside a room and claims that your immune system makes antibodies to your thyroid cells to break down the door and destroy the thyroid cell just to get to the criminal hiding inside. And again, the criminals in this case would be mold, mycotoxins, parasites, heavy metals, and viruses. And it sounds clean, it sounds logical, and it makes for great social media reels and shorts. But the only problem is that important parts of the story are factually incorrect. When you tell millions of frustrated, struggling thyroid patients that mold and mycotoxins are hiding inside their cells. And, you know, maybe implying that some kind of a parasite cleanse or mold detox is going to put their Hashimoto's into remission, you aren't just oversimplifying things. you're spreading medical mythology that causes people to crash their systems. If they're doing aggressive protocols and they're being unmonitored, say in a process. And I've said before, in fact, I think I even said it in the last episode that I'm all for do-it-yourself stuff. In fact, I think that most people should take more responsibility for their health than they are. So I'm all for do-it-yourself, unless it doesn't fit your scenario and where you are, because for some people their cases are too complex. they're too difficult to figure out on your own. And you really have to work in conjunction with someone who knows more about physiology. And in this particular case, we're talking about Hashimoto's, certainly about the thyroid system, but about immunology And I think that'll become clear as we go through the things that I want to talk about today. So today, I'm going to take this 90-second claim that Breca makes. I'm going to put it under the microscope, so to speak, of Peer-reviewed research in real science. We're going to go through all five of those target categories. We're going to rank them strictly from least likely to most likely to affect the thyroid gland. And along the way, probably explain a little bit about how thyroid autoimmunity works. Before I do that, I want to make sure that I'm being clear on what I'm not doing with Gary Brecka. I'm not bashing him individually as a person. He's developed a great persona and I'm sure he's a wonderful guy. And I would like to meet him someday and pick his brain about the journey and the path that he's on. But he's not a clinician. He's very upfront about this. And even though he sometimes speaks as if he's a clinician, he's got a Bachelor of Science in Human Biology and a Bachelor of Science in Kinesiology. And he spent most of his career working for life insurance companies, essentially analyzing probabilities and statistics, like you know, what's gonna kill people and so on. And so I I'm sure he's got a lot of insights coming from that experience that he's got in that industry. But you know, just saying just because you have a a biology degree doesn't necessarily make you a human biologist. unless it does. I Right. I've got a degree in human biology. That was part of my curriculum as I was working towards becoming a chiropractor. And so I guess I could say that I'm a human biologist. I but I've never worked in that capacity, so to speak. And I think when people say, Well, I'm a human biologist, it kind of implies that that's what your career has been. And I don't believe that's true. And I might be wrong. And and certainly as we go through the different topics and as I examine the claims that he's made in this video. And talk to you about really what the science says, I want to make sure that I'm giving him a lot of grace and wiggle room because sometimes, and I do this myself, sometimes I will dumb down my terminology, not because I think my audience is dumb, it's just because there might be a gap of knowledge and understanding, right? And so I might simplify my terminology or simplify an analogy just to get a point across. And in those moments, if somebody critiqued me, they'd probably say, Well, you don't know what you're talking about because it doesn't work like that. And so I totally get that. And again, I just want to set the record straight before I get started on this. I have a lot of respect for what Gary Brecca has accomplished, but he's not a clinician. And wiggle room and grace for wherever there needs to be wiggle room and grace. So let's break the list down. And again, we're working from things that are least likely to affect you. And your Hashimoto's if that's what you have. And and honestly, these rules that we're going to go through or these these topics, they apply to any autoimmune disease. And I might even say, even absent of autoimmunity, these five things that we're going to talk about have implications because they do have a tendency to affect the immune system. And if you're just listening on a podcast like on Apple or Spotify, you're gonna miss out on some of the visuals. I'll put some stuff up on the screen, like graphics or screenshots of different papers that I'm drawing from. And if that if you don't care about that, just you know keep listening on the platform that you're on. But if you like to see those things, maybe you should go and subscribe to the YouTube channel. All right, just look for my name, Dr. Nosworthy, or Inflammation Nation on YouTube and you should find it. All right, so let's start at the bottom of the list. I'm actually gonna combine numbers. Five and four because they're related, and that is mold and mycotoxins. Myco meaning mold and mycotoxins meaning toxins that mold makes. And of the five things that Breca lists in his video, these are actually the least likely things, the least likely things to ever colonize or invade or accumulate inside your thyroid tissue. The follicular cells are where the production of thyroid hormones happens. But claiming that mold spores can invade and colonize or accumulate in your follicular cells in an everyday Hashimoto's patient is like claiming that there's a wildfire burning underwater at the bottom of the ocean, which we know of course can't happen. And and this statement that he makes about mold spores getting into into the thyroid gland, into these follicular cells, is it it just ignores basic anatomy and physiology and biology. First off, the thyroid gland is enclosed in a dense, tough, very fibrous capsule, which makes it difficult for some things to get in. Now, granted it has a rich vascularization. It's got a really dense blood supply. So certainly things can get into the thyrogland through that way. And the thyrogland is actually one of the most perfused organs in the human body, particularly to its side. And when I say perfused, I mean blood supply. And it's literally the interior of the thyrogland is literally saturated with high concentrations of iodine. And in the normal enzymatic synthesis of thyroid hormones that happens inside these follicular cells, the thyroid cells themselves generate high levels of hydrogen peroxide. And not only with the blood flow that goes through do we have the presence of a lot of immune cells, not only does iodine and hydrogen peroxide have very direct antimicrobial properties. And in fact, it's this combination of an encapsulated highly oxygenated organ that's full of iodine and a hydrogen peroxide, that environment is inherently resistant to infection. It is possible certainly to infect the thyroid. In fact, we there's in the clinical differential, when we see somebody with an acute thyroiditis, particularly if they've had that after like catching cold or having a flu, then that raises the potential or possibility that they have an infectious thyroiditis. And that once the infection goes away, then the thyroiditis, the swelling, and the pain is going to go away as well. But it's it's very unlikely. I mean, it doesn't happen very often, but it certainly happens. But because of the inherent nature of the environment, which again is inherently highly vascular, lots of immune cells, lots of iodine, lots of hydrogen peroxide, it's unlikely that organisms are going are going to infect the thyroid gland. And survive that. And the mold species just simply don't have the means to do it. Now, viruses are a little bit different. We'll talk about viruses later, because as I mentioned in my last episode when I was talking about viruses, chronic viruses and things like Epstein Barr, is that we we have to make distinctions between, say, a virus versus a bacteria and a bacteria versus a mold species. They we all just kind of go, well, that's an infection and that's bad, but they all behave very differently. They can survive. Through different strategies and they can handle different environments. And just the thyroid is just not the place for mold to be, right? That's just the physiological reality. So again, to be clear, fungal thyroiditis does exist in the medical literature, but it's exceedingly rare. It's found almost exclusively in severely immunocompromised end-stage hospital patients that are suffering from systemic fungal infections. Like where organisms like Candida or Aspergillus get into the body, they spread through the bloodstream to every organ in the body, and everything starts to shut down. Right. There's, but there's zero evidence in the published literature of chronic low-leveled mold colonization in the thyroid cells of immune competent people. Now you might argue, well, people with Hashimoto's, they're not immune competent. Well, some of them aren't. Some of them aren't. There's a lot of people who have Hashimoto's, but it's stable because their immune system is well balanced and well controlled. So the first kind of strike against what Gary Brecu was saying is that you just don't really see mold inside thyroid cells. Well, what about mycotoxins? What about the toxic chemical byproducts that are produced by the mold? Well, we certainly have advanced analytical techniques like liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. I'm sorry. Mass spectrometry that theoretically have the sensitivity to measure mycotoxins in tissue of samples, but there isn't a single published study in medical history that has ever measured mycotoxins accumulating inside human thyroid tissue. And how do I know that? Because I spent about four hours going through the literature preparing for this episode to make sure that I don't make a statement that's incorrect, right? And all of the statements I'm making are correct to my knowledge and to my understanding. And so when an influencer comes up and says, you know, th they might even suggest, hey, run a urinary mycotoxin test. And I do this in my practice when it's relevant to the case. but to to try to suggest that mold gets into your thyroid cells, and and maybe the the corollary of that is you should be measuring urinary mycotoxins to see if you have mold, there's no connection between that and mold is in your thyroid. Right? That's kind of a I don't know, call it a diagnostic trap. If you do a urine test that measures the systemic excretion of metabolites, this is what is passing through your kidneys. And it tells you nothing about mold toxin accumulation inside your thyroid cells. It just doesn't do that. Now, it doesn't mean that mold and mycotoxins are irrelevant to your thyroid. They very well may play a role, but it's through other mechanisms. Other than invading thyroid tissue and causing autoimmunity, right? The mechanism is more indirect based on how mold and mycotoxins create unfavorable immune and inflammatory responses that may intersect with the autoimmune response. So that's fact check number one, maybe one and two. And I hate to say it, but Gary Brecca fails here. mold and mycotoxins do not invade your thyroid cells. That that's just not the way it works. All right, let's move to now it'll be number three because we did five and four together. And this is about parasites. And parasites are a big thing in the natural medicine world. it's kind of been a long-standing thought that parasites can be quite problematic. And certainly there are some people and people that I've met have been say, students in my seminars, whether they're actual students in medical school or Chiropractic school or acupuncture school, or they're actually in practice there is this somewhat prevailing thought. It's a little bit outdated, but it's still fairly common for any given practitioner just to focus on one thing. Like you definitely have your everything is caused by mold people out there. You certainly have everything is caused by parasite people out there. And you have. Everything is caused by heavy metals like mercury people out there. And listen, those if if they choose to run their practice that way, even if they believe it themselves, they're still going to help a lot of people because if they do the right marketing and reach the right circles, they're going to draw to them people who prove their own opinion. It's almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy is I've I'm really loud and consistent in saying parasite, parasite, parasite, or mercury, mercury, mercury. And enough people with those problems come to see me and I help them with that and they get better. It just reinforces my thought that yes, everything is caused by parasites, everything is caused by mercury. And and it's very easy in this industry, and I'm I'm sure our business, if you will, is not the not the only industry that is not immune to this. But there is a real danger of seeing the world through your own lens of experience and perspective, or to live in your own bubble. Where if you live and think and breathe every single day that parasites cause all human suffering, then that's just the world you see. And I think it's a mark of a good clinician to step out of that and try to look at things with a a d a different set of eyes. Let me- I'm going off on a little bit of a a tangent here. So let me let me go back to the thing that we're talking about. So in in Bruca's video, you know, he claims that parasites like these other things kind of Barricade themselves, pardon me, inside your thyroid cells, acting like a criminal who's hiding behind the couch. And this causes the immune system to attack and destroy the thyroid cell trying to get to it, like police breaking down a door to get to the criminal who's inside. And I'll say that, you know, in this particular one, Breck is probably half-right. Right? Direct physical invasion. Of thyroid glands by parasites does happen, but again, it's it's exceptionally rare. And all again, this is all documented in the medical literature, and I spent hours fact-checking myself. The only way to diagnose parasites in the thyrogland is to do a tissue biopsy and to look at that sample under a microscope. And according to my reading of the literature, if it's there, it's pretty easy to find. It's not like you have to guess, but you know, that's it's not like your doctor or I. In in you know, my scope of practice, I can't order a fine neodobiopsy. I can order MRIs and blood tests and all that kind of stuff, but I can't do things that are invasive. But you're not going to get a medical doctor who says, I think you've got a parasite in your thyroid, let's take a biopsy and see. That's just not really going to happen. However, there is a parasite with a massive legitimate connection to thyroid autoimmunity, and that's a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii. And Toxoplasma is a parasite that infects roughly about one-third of the global population. And in recent studies, including a major 2025 study revealed that about 70%, like 69 and a half percent of hypothyroid patients tested positive for toxoplasma antibodies. Compared to only 35% of healthy people who didn't have hypothyroidism. And that means for you, if you have true hypothyroidism, most of which is Hashimoto's, you're about twice as likely to have antibodies to toxoplasma on a blood test. That's kind of crazy. Twice as likely. But here is where that barricaded criminal analogy kind of completely breaks down, because toxoplasma Doesn't drive Hashimoto's by invading the cells and holding your thyroid cells hostage, forcing your antibodies to shoot through the door. It drives Hashimoto's autoimmunity primarily through what's called cross-reactivity or molecular mimicry and immune dysregulation. Now, if you haven't heard these terms, cross-reactivity and molecular mimicry refer to the same thing. And this is a situation where two things at a molecular level look enough alike that the immune system can't distinguish them. It's like a case of mistaken identity. So again, toxoplasma doesn't really invade the thyroid tissue and cause the immune system to break down the door to get to it, and in so doing, destroy the thyroid cells. It drives autoimmunity predominantly through cross-reactivity, molecular mimicry, and immune dysregulation. Right? So these toxma toxoplasma proteins. share an amino acid sequence with the thyroid autoimmune targets that are called TPO and thyroglobulin. And again, let me just pause here. If you've not heard this before and you think you have Hashimoto's or someone told you you did, there are two antibodies that we test for to look for Hashimoto's. One is called thyroid peroxidase or TPO. And the other one is an antibody against another protein called thyroglomulin. And both of these working together, this TPO is an enzyme, and the thyroglobulin protein, they work together inside the follicular cells to make thyroid hormones. So when you have an immune system that's attacking and destroying those things, you destroy your ability to make thyroid hormones to some degree, right? So with toxamoplasma, the molecular structure looks enough like these TPO and thyroglobulin proteins that the immune system can't tell the difference. So you get a toxinoplasma. infection and all of a sudden your immune system is attacking your thyroid because it thinks it's all the same thing. Right? So when your immune system creates antibodies to fight off the parasite, toxoplasma, they antibodies also target your thyroid in the sense of these proteins that are found inside it. Right. And again, these are the characteristic antibodies of Hashimoto's. And and furthermore, Toxoplasma Can live in your cells forever. Kind of like the viruses in Epstein Bar we talked about with Epstein Bar in the last episode, how it has it runs these genetic latency programs that allows it to persist in a cell in different stages. toxamoplasa doesn't do latency programs, but it does something else where it goes into what's called a cyst form, where it can live inside the cell, just kind of dormant, and the immune system can't touch it because it can't see it, it can't sense it. And so these latent Toxoplasma tissue cysts can trigger an immune response that can make your thyroid cells label themselves as a foreign invader, tricking your immune system into thinking that the thyroid gland should be destroyed. And, you know, parasites honestly kind of deserves its own episode. But for now, know that toxoplasma can persist in your cells in a cyst form. And there's no drug on the market that kills parasite cysts. They're act they're in active development. They're trying to find that, but they have not yet. There are some herbal protocols that can be effective for the cyst form of parasites, but it's not like typically full eradication. A lot of the studies that when you look at things like extracts of, say, curcumin or some things related to like glycerizer or licorice extract. Most of the studies say, like, yeah, they've reduced the size of the system, the number, but it doesn't suggest complete eradication. But as of right now, there's no human study done on toxoplasma in humans and herbal medicine. Everything was either done in a lab in a petri dish or on like a lab animal like a rat. There's no human studies. That doesn't mean that we don't just discount the animal studies because a lot of medical research is done that way. And then we kind of translate that or project that into humankind. It also doesn't mean that herbal parasite protocols don't work. And they certainly do when the context is right. I I recommend and walk some of my clients through parasite cleanses, if I can use that word. Let's say protocols is probably a better word, myself. And and I do this with my one-on-one clients, but you have to know the right time, the right person. And certainly the right way to do it. And, you know, just to to kind of go back to the toxoplasma thing, I said about a third of the world's population has this. The way that you get it is either through consuming improperly cooked or raw animal proteins, like shellfish, for example, can be the same thing, but even pork and and beef, poorly cooked and and raw. But it all it's also spread through cat feces predominantly. In fact, the kind of like the obligate carrier for toxoplasma is cats, even though other animals can carry it, like cats certainly is the top one. But killing parasites is it's not the end of the process. Let's say that you have Hashimoto's and you someone runs a test, it could be a blood test or even a stool test and says, hey, you've got toxoplasma, and you go through a protocol and you're successful in getting rid of it. Is at the end of the process of trying to control your Hashimoto's. Now, some people in that scenario are going to experience significant changes in how their immune system is behaving and how the thyroid is working. And they might even see things like their antibody levels coming down either to or or closer to normal. But in many cases, it's not going to translate. Like it's still a good thing to get rid of the parasite and control that if you have it, but it doesn't always translate into your Hashimoto's getting better. And simply because the mechanism itself is cross-reactivity. Right? That's how toxamoplasm and plasma affects the thyrogland. Remember, molecular mimicry or cross-reactivity. And you can get rid of that thing that looks like your thyroid, but the immune system still gets locked into your to attacking your thyroid. Right? So let me just say it this way. Killing a parasite is not the end of the process. The mechanism is cross-reactivity, meaning that you can eradicate the parasite, in this case, toxinoplasma, but the immune system can still continue in a state of dysregulation, and it continues the attack on the thyroid even long after the parasite is gone. So, again, on this one, I'm going to give Gary Brecka a partial pass. All right, let's move on to number two on the list. Number two on the list is heavy metals. And again, Bruca's claim is that heavy metals and these other things we're talking about get into your thyroid gland, and that causes the autoimmunity because the immune system is trying to break down the door, so to speak, to get to the heavy metal or the parasite or whatever. unlike mold and mycotoxins, heavy metals do. Accumulate inside thyroid tissue. That's a well-established fact. In fact, it's been quite well studied. They have advanced research-level bioimaging, things like auto metallography or laser ablation mass spectrometry. But using some of these techniques, researchers back in 2021 demonstrated that inorganic mercury, get this, is physically present inside the thyroid inside the thyroid cells. Of 38% of individu individuals over the age of 60, regardless of whether they have Hashimoto's. Now, that just to me says that the longer you live in a world that's full of heavy metals and chemicals and so on, the more you're going to accumulate those things. It's kind of a time-dependent thing, right? Other studies confirm elevated levels of lead, cadmium, and arsenic specifically in. Tissue taken from the biopsies of patients with Hashimoto's thyroiditis. Sometimes they get biopsies because they have nodules, and we need to know if those nodules are benign or if they're cancerous. So we do have a lot of data about heavy metals and whether or not we see them inside the thyroid gland. And so Brecca is right that heavy metals are inside the cell, right? But his explanation of why that causes Hashimoto's or can cause Hashimoto's is completely wrong. There are two main things to cover here. And this next section might be a little bit complicated. So just kind of stick with me. I'll do my best to walk you through this and try not to confuse you with with too much science-y terminology stuff. But the the first thing to understand is that your immune system doesn't make antibodies to the thyroid cells themselves. This is what Brecket actually stated explicitly. I don't know if he misspoke. I do that sometimes. I mean to say one thing, I say something different, and I don't catch it until later, or someone might put up their hand in a class, for example, and say, hey, Doc, you said this, did you mean that? And I'll you know get an immediate chance to correct that. So maybe he just misspoke. But the reality is when someone has Hashimoto's, the immune system makes one or both of these antibodies we've already talked about, right? One is to this enzyme cold, thyroid peroxidase. The other two, the protein called thyroglobulin. Why are they important? They're part of the manufacturing process of thyroid hormones. I'm not going to bore you with a ton of details here, but these hor these enzymes, the enzyme TPO and the protein thyroglobulin, they're actually both proteins, so I might just call them proteins or antibodies. These live inside your follicular cells. In fact, I just caught myself making a mistake. So let me go back and clean that up. I just said that TPO is an antibody. That's not true. We make antibodies, or people with Hashimoto's make antibodies to TPO. They make antibodies to thyroglobulin. They're both proteins. The TPO and the thyroglobulin are proteins. TPO is technically an enzyme. And then the immune system can make antibodies to them or not. Right? Let me just again clear that up. So in Hashimoto's and in some graves conditions. The immune system creates antibodies to one or both of these, and we can test for these quite easily by ordering an antibody test to TPO or or what's called ATA. So TPO, when if I say I'm going to do a TPO test, I'm saying I'm going to run an antibody test for TPO. I might say, I'm going to run an ATA test, which stands for antithyroglobulin antibody. And I'm just naming the antibodies that are involved in Hoshimoto's. We do this all the time. In fact, it is It is my MO, the very first set of labs that I run on almost every client, and there are some exceptions, like young kids, for example. Ever all of my adult clients, we do a full thyroid panel and we check for these antibodies, just because it's so prevalent to have thyroid issues. And the vast majority of thyroid problems are from Hashimoto's. And so we better figure that out early on. I don't want to miss that and just think about it two, three, four, five, six months into someone's program. So we do this again, we do this all the time. Now, these antibodies themselves, and this is important to know, and I hate to say that it's it's quite often misunderstood, certainly at the healthcare consumer level, and unfortunately also at the clinician level. But the antibodies like the TPO and ATA antibodies that we've been talking about with Hashimoto's, they actually are not destructive. Like these antibodies don't destroy the tissues. They're in fact in in the in the big scheme of things with Hashimoto's, the antibodies themselves are not the problem, other than they act as a label to direct the immune system to go attack the thyroid. But the antibodies themselves don't destroy any tissues. They just label them. And so what Breca claimed was that, and again, he he may have misspoke, or it may be intentionally he may have just kind of again dumbed down the conversation just so he didn't have to get into the details of talking about TPO and ATA antibodies, right? So I grant him, grant him that that's possible. But the antibodies are not against the thyroid itself when you have Hashimoto's, but they're against one or both of these two specific proteins, TPO and thyroglobulin, that are inside the cells. And The key thing to know is the antibodies themselves don't cause tissue damage. And this is why some people have stable Hashimoto's that like they can be in remission, as Dr. or not Dr. Sorry, as Gary Breca says, there are a lot of people that have high thyroid antibody levels, but they're completely stable. And in fact, it's possible to have Hashimoto's antibodies present in your blood, positive on a test, and actually not yet have hypothyroidism. And this is again, it's a whole different conversation, but it goes to the nature of autoimmunity and how it progresses through several different predictable stages. And the first stage is what we call silent autoimmunity, where you have the antibodies, but everything else is normal and you have no thyroid symptoms. It's just an indication of what the immune system is thinking about. Like, hey, I'm not sure if I like your thyroid, and someday I might decide to go schwack it. So What heavy metals actually do inside a thyroid cell is actually multifold. And I'm sure there's other things that I'm not going to include here. So I don't want you to think that this is like an exhaustive list. But the first thing that heavy metals do in any tissue is they drive intense, localized, oxidative stress, and they can disrupt enzymatic connection or kinetics. Let me say it again. Heavy metals drive high amounts of oxidative stress and they disrupt enzymatic connections. I keep saying connections, kinetics. And what that means is how enzymes behave. Essentially what happens is that heavy metals poison the cell's internal machinery, including things like the mitochondria. They generate a ton of free radicals that damages the mitochondria, damage the cell membranes, damages the structures that help to make things like proteins. And as they cause the damage, then the cell can leak out these protein targets, the TPO and thyroidglobulin, which go into circulation, and then the immune system can see them and react. So it's not like mercury goes into the cell and the immune system chases it. Mercury and other heavy metals can go into a thyroid cell, mess up the internal machinery, cause damage from the inside out that's driven by the oxidative stress or free radical production, and The cell can start to leak. Eventually it can explode. explode is kind of a little little visual there for you. But they it can start to leak its internal contents, and all of a sudden, these antibody or these targets for the antibodies are found in the bloodstream, and the immune system goes, like, well, I've got a reaction to that. And now it starts to attack the thyroid cells. The second, the second way metals can affect the thyroid cell from the inside. Is we have studies that talk about mercury and cadmium in particular binding to enzymes that are used to convert inactive T4 to active T3. And they this would cause what we will call an underconversion or a disconversion process. I don't want to go too far into that because that's that then kind of brings up a clinical model that I teach about being able to spot where the problem is in the thyroid system, is a problem with the production side of things. Or is it a problem with the processing side of things where we convert inactive to active hormones? Or is it a problem at the proteomic level, which is how the cells respond to the thyroid hormones themselves? Like that's again, that's a different conversation. But we know that heavy metals inside the thyroid gland can affect that process that's happening in the gland itself. And then finally, heavy metals can effectively increase the autoimmune target burden. Like how much of it is available for the immune system to react to. And it can do that through several different pathways. Some things like inorganic mercury, again, can actually trick thyroid cells into becoming larger. They actually grow. And all the things inside them grow. And so that means more TPO and more thyroglobulin inside the cells, which means more targets for the immune system to shoot at. Cadmium also. Induces what we call thyroid cell death programs. And it can trick the cell into killing itself, and what's inside comes outside. And so the intracellular TPO and thyroglobulin leak out into the extracellular space. So again, what's inside comes outside into the bloodstream, again, where the immune system can access them. And then finally, there are positive correlations in women with Hashimoto's. Between levels of lead in their body and TPO antibodies and cadmium and antibodies against thyroglobulin. And this suggests that these heavy metals specifically enhance the autoimmune response itself. And from a diagnostic perspective, while commercial blood or urine heavy metal panels measure circulating or recently excreted metals, they tell you nothing. Absolutely nothing about how much of those metals are trapped inside your thyroid cells. Right? Same thing with the mycotoxins. Yeah, we can measure it in urine, but that doesn't mean it's inside your thyrogland, or we get an idea of what is inside your thyrogland. And so having an elevated level of any heavy metal or environmental chemical on a lab test doesn't guarantee that whatever your chemical or metal load is. is a big player in your specific case of Hashimoto's. For some people it's a big deal. For some, it's just nope. That's not even not even playing up a role. And you know, the unfortunate thing is is that it's so common for Not just social media influencers, but even clinicians, just to go, let's just, you know, do a heavy metal detox or we'll do a parasite cleanse or whatever, or a mold detox, or whatever. And yeah, it's going to help some people. Just if you're randomly doing that, you're going to actually cause some problems in some people that are just not worth doing it that way. So one of the things that's important to understand is that if you just jump, let's say you're doing it yourself, right? If you jump into some kind of an aggressive, unmonitored chemical chelation protocol because you know you watch some video and it scared you about heavy metals, and you're going to pull those metals out of tissue. And the research says two things happen. They get redistributed to your brain and your liver, sometimes your bone marrow, and you can cause a massive metabolic crash if you don't have other things in place, like your perfusion pathways aren't. Working well, or if your glutathione status, your antioxidant capacity is not where it needs to be. And this brings me to the second thing to consider here that Brecka doesn't even mention, and that's that heavy metals and some environmental chemicals can also be involved from a cross-reactivity standpoint, just like the toxoplasma. But the mechanism is a little bit different. With toxoplasma, the molecular structure of the parasite looks like. TPO or thyroglobulin. So the immune system can't tell the difference. With heavy metals and chemicals, they don't have a protein structure. And your immune system can only react to things that have proteins or amino acids. So what the research in the field of environmental medicine confirms is that heavy metals and chemicals can actually bind to our own tissues. We call this a neo antigen. New neo is new, antigen is something the immune system can Can target. And so the word neoantigen means a new target for the immune system. So you take heavy metals like mercury and it binds to our complexes to your own tissue. And that combination now has a protein structure, but the protein structure is coming from the U part of that. It's not coming from the heavy metal or the chemical. And this can induce your immune system to make antibodies again to the human tissue portion of this complex or this new or neoantigen. And if that happens to be your thyroid, then you've got Hashimoto's. But if it happens to be your brain, then you've got probably MS. And if it happens to your joints, you've got rheumatoid or arthritis and so on. But listen, this doesn't happen to everyone. Just because something can cross-react doesn't mean something does cross-react. Everybody has mercury in their body. And a high percentage of us have it in our thyroid glands. So talk about some research coming up here in a second. Everyone has a chemical load. Just like I explained in my last video, everyone has a viral load. And so it's never a question of do you have a virus? Do you have heavy metals? Do you have mold toxins? It's never a question of do you have environmental chemicals? Of course you do. That's the world you live in. And the longer you are alive, the more exposure you've had to these things, the more you're going to accumulate in your tissues. Some of us will accumulate things more or faster than others, either because we have a different exposure, like if you work in a plant that uses a lot of chemicals, you're going to be exposed to those chemicals, whereas I might not. And it's also part of the process is how efficient our our body is at getting rid of this. Some of us are really good detoxifiers, others are not. And so you can have two people exposed to the same stuff for the same length of time, and the one who's the poor detoxer is going to have more problems. There's so many more things to think about than just, here's the list of five things and fix these, and your Hash mode is gonna go into remission. It just doesn't it just doesn't work that way. I wish it did. It would make my life a lot easier. So As far as fact-checking Brecca on his statements about heavy metals, he gets a partial pass on this one too. He he's got some things right, but he's missed a lot of stuff. And now finally we arrive at number one, the big thing on the list. And this is the category of the highest volume of direct, almost bulletproof tissue evidence, and that is intracellular viruses. Now, research studies. use different strategies like PCR testing, like the same type of testing that became widely understood or known through the whole COVID scenario, like PCR. So it's a way to amplify genetic material so they can count it. So things like PCR, what's called immunohistochemistry and in situ hybridization techniques, not that we really care about what these things are. But anyways, these different techniques and studies show that Anywhere from 53 to 75% of thyroid biopsy and thyroidectomy specimens harbor viral genetic material. Think about that. Half to three-quarters of every thyroid biopsy and thyroidectomy sample that was studied has some kind of viral genetic material. And in some people it was one virus, but in most people it was at least two, sometimes more. And now we can look at viruses. in this context in different ways. We can ask, for example, which viruses are most likely to be found in the thyroid in people who have Hashimoto's, like found in the thyroid of people have Hashimoto's. And we can also ask the question, does this differ from the general population? That's actually really important because just because you s you see a study that says, you know, we we measured 50 people, you know, took thyroid samples and measured viruses in the 50 samples of people with Hashimoto's, if there's no comment about what that same number would be like in the healthy population, then that doesn't mean anything to me. And you might understand where I'm going with that. Another question we could ask is which viruses are more likely to cause problems if they're present, even if they're not in the thyroid specifically. So, you know, of course, we can have viruses that might tend to be in the thyroid, and we certainly do. And we have viruses that can still affect the thyroid indirectly through either immune activation or things like molecular mimicry and cross-reactivity. and so again, there's different ways for viruses to affect it. So for the first question, the answer is really clear. And that first question was what viruses are most likely to be found in the thyroid of people with Hashimoto's? There was a 2022 study, so fairly recent. This was in the journal Frontiers and Endocrinology, and they looked at thyroid samples and biopsies, and they found Enteroviruses, and that's a whole family, and there's too many of them in research studies like this to break them down into individual ones, but probably the most common one is what's called Coxacivirus B. They were found in 51% of all specimens. So just you know, think of it this way if we took 100 people off the street at random who had Hashimoto's, half of them will show an entero virus like Cocsac B inside their thyroid gland. Half won't. Human herpes virus six came in at second place at 30%. And then another virus called the B19 or the human parvovirus came in at 22%. And these are big numbers, like in statistical or biomedical statistics, these are big numbers that we have to pay attention to. But the presence of the virus in thyroid tissue might not be enough. It might not be enough for us to say that this is actually a clinical problem. And in fact, the authors in that study concluded it remains to be established whether the detected viruses represent causal agents, possible cofactors, or simple bystanders. Meaning that, you know, we don't know if this is actually causing it. All we know is when we look at people with Hashimoto's and do samples of their thyroid, a lot of them, half to three-quarters, have a viral, they have some viral genetic material there. Now, the reason why they said we can't make any conclusions whether or not this causes it or not is for one reason. And that's because thyroid samples from healthy people show just as many and the same viruses as the Hashimoto's group. So to sit back and for someone, whether it's Brecker or anybody else, to say, well, viruses get into your thyroid and they cause Hashimoto's, and all you have to do is get rid of the virus and your Hashimoto's goes into remission, ignore scientific reality. So let me state it one more time. It is not unlikely, or to say it positively, it's likely that if you have Hashimoto's, you have viruses in your thyroid. But guess what? If you're alive, regardless of whether you have Hashimoto's, that statement is still true. So we can't use the presence of viruses in thyroid tissue as a distinguisher because everyone has it. And that begs the question: well, why Is it a problem, right? So again, I said the virus itself is not the problem. It's actually how the host's immune system responds to it. If I don't have Hashimoto's and I have the same viral load inside my thyroid gland as other people who have Hashimoto's, what's the difference? It's not the viral load. It's how my immune system is responding versus somebody else's. And this is actually confirmed by other studies. That show for people with autoimmune thyroid disorders, their cells in your immune system react differently than everybody else's. And one way is by upregulating the production of proteins that create what we might call an eat me signal. Like imagine that, you know, something's floating around in your bloodstream and it's got a le label on it that says eat me or I'm I'm a foreign invader or I shouldn't be here. And then the immune system sees that and goes and attacks and destroys it. And so one way that viruses can affect people with Hashimoto's is by tricking the thyroid cells itself to display this eat me or I'm a foreign invader, I shouldn't be here signal. And that means that people with Hashimoto's with an intracellular virus. Because of their immune dysregulation, they are more likely to trigger the immune system to call in the troops and start wreaking havoc. Whereas for me, it doesn't work that way, even though I have the same virus in my same cells. Now, that's not the only way that a virus can be involved. In fact, the coronavirus has the strongest direct experimental proof of cross-reactivity with the thyroid. And there was a study published back in 2020. By two friends of mine who are friends and colleagues and mentors. These are Dr. Aristo Vigidani, who's a PhD immunologist, and Dr. Datis Karazian, who is a best-selling author and PhD and chiropractor and functional medicine expert, and so on and so on. But they demonstrated very quickly when COVID started, they they demonstrated that human antibodies against coronavirus spike protein. bind directly to TPO and thyroglobulin, and that there is direct cross reactivity and molecular mimicry between coronavirus and thyroid proteins. So think about that for yourself, whatever that might mean to you. Viruses trigger Hashimoto's through, and this has been known for a long time, through four distinct, very well-elucidated mechanisms. One is this cross-reactivity we've been talking about. Another one is called bystander killing. I'm not going to go into tons of detail on this stuff, but bystander killing is where what are called cytotoxic T cells kill virus-infected thyroid cells. And the inside, the guts of the cell come out, and basically. spill into the surrounding tissue and the immune system starts to attack those things. And so that's called bystander killing. It would be like you're well, and I don't even want to posit a an analogy for that. Another one is called epitope spreading. And as damaged thyroid cells spill their contents, the immune system gets exposed to these intracellular proteins that normally it never sees because they're inside the cells. And that generates a new wave of antibodies, right? And so the immune system tends to come in or the attack comes in waves, which is a lot of times why we see people with Hashimoto's experiencing periods of I'm feeling worse and feeling better. And then there's the the final category or way that we can see this happening is the abnormal expression of these signaling proteins, the technical tame Name is the MHC class two. MHC stands for major histocompatibility complex. And these are proteins that cells make so that the cell can signal to the immune system whether or not it's infected. So the way this generally works is that let's say a virus infects a cell, any cell doesn't have to be the thyroid. the cell itself will recognize that it's infected and it will kind of chop up the virus and Take a little protein fragment from that virus and stick it on the outside of the cell wall, attached to this MHC class two protein. And that serves as a label on the outside of the cell that signals to the immune system, hey, there's something wrong with me. I've got an infection. And then the immune system will come in and it will destroy that in an effort to spread or stop spreading the infection. So obviously it's a It's a complex multifactorial cascade of immune confusion and loss of regulatory control. Right. This is not just simple a police raid that's knocking down the door to get to the virus that's sitting inside the cell. It's not that simple. Now, for this one, as far as Gary Brecker goes, he gets a weak partial pass simply because it's not nearly as simple as he makes it sound. Hey, virus gets in your cell, kills the virus, and all of a sudden your TPO antibodies go back to normal. Yeah. Yeah, sometimes that happens, absolutely. Can't deny it, but it's not as easy as that, and it's not as simple as that. So overall, Gary Brecka's got part of the picture. He's got part of the picture of two items on his list, partially right, and he's got the other three totally wrong, unfortunately. And again, a lot of grace and a lot of wiggle room. So Why does these why do these distinctions matter so much to you as a healthcare consumer, right? Because if you if you believe these really simple analogies that you see in social media, and and again, I use I use analogies all the time as I communicate with my clients, because I want my clients to understand what's going on with their bodies. But if you believe this, you know, kind of criminal in the room, the immune system's gonna bash down the door to get to it, myth, if you will, you're you're naturally Going to buy into the influencer solution, which is just kill the bugs and cleanse the metals and you're going to go into remission. And for a lot of people, that protocol is going to leave them just kind of flatlined. They're just going to be wiped out and washed out and their brain fog and their gut problems and their energy issues, that's all going to get worse. And then you have the uninitiated that'll say, well, hey, it's the die-off reaction. It just means it's working. Let's keep going. And as I said in my last episode, sometimes that is right, but you have to know the difference. Let me give you one huge caveat and warning to that. Remember how I said that heavy metals like mercury and environmental chemicals can bind to your own tissues, and this causes the autoimmune reaction, but to the human tissue portion of that complex, not to the metal or not to the chemical. In those scenarios, if you do a heavy metal detox and you start pulling chemicals and metals out of storage where your immune system can't see them. This is like giving gluten to someone with celiac disease. All it does is create more targets for the immune system to flare up against, and and in this case it's your thyroid that takes the hit. You don't put Hashimoto's into remission by waging war on your body, right? You you put it into remission by stabilizing through a hierarchy of function. What systems are more important to work on first compared to other things. And when you build a stable foundation, then your immune system can start to regain its its competence. It can naturally enforce its reactions against viral latency. It can, you know, maybe stop generating cross-reactive antibodies. So maybe it's time for a like a grounded reality check, right? Stop taking advice from 90-second social media reels that are designed predominantly to drive engagement and feed the algorithms. And I am going to repeat things over and over and over and over again in these episodes. And I hope you don't get tired of me saying things like: you cannot outhack a fractured and broken physiology. If your foundation is broken, you have to start there. And crafting wellness. Is not the same as managing a disease. And it's not the same as just killing bugs and doing detoxes. And it requires finding your root cause disruptors, evaluating your actual biochemistry, and moving step by step through some kind of a personalized health journey that, in the case of our conversation today, respects your immunology. And that's why when I work on clients with my one-on-one practice, I've I've opted to run a low volume, high engagement practice. Right. Nothing's on autopilot, no cookie cutter templates. Everything is personalized. I don't farm you out to health coaches or nutritionists or whatever. Whatever. Right. When clients work with me, they work with me. They deal with me directly, one on one, on the run, ordering your diagnostics, doing the interpretation, reporting them back to you, setting up your protocols and meeting with you routinely just to get updates and tweak protocols to make sure that we keep moving forward. So if you are ready to stop majoring in the minors, stop the endless internet and social media protocols and fix the actual root cause mechanisms that are driving your chronic symptoms. If you are interested in that, you can reach out to me today, right? Look in the episode description right now. You'll find my direct phone number, my email, a link to my secure online web request form. You can click that link, fill out a private contact card that goes straight to my email. And let's see if it's right for you and I to schedule a one on one consult to see if it makes sense to work together. Well, that is it for today. I feel like I was on my soapbox for the last hour or so that I've been talking. Thanks for listening, guys, to the Inflammation Nation. Make sure you put your big rocks in first. All right. Stay grounded, and I'll see you in the next episode.