The Fat Cell Gatekeeper: How One Unknown Hormone Controls Whether You Can Actually Lose Weight - Dr. Jay Wrigley

Your gut contains more bacterial cells than human cells in your entire body. This living ecosystem either works for you or against you, and most people are unknowingly destroying it with every meal. Dr. Jay Wrigley, hormone specialist, breaks down the intricate web connecting gut microbiome health, hormonal responses, and metabolic dysfunction in ways that finally make sense.

This conversation cuts through the symptom-chasing approach of conventional medicine to examine root causes. Why does adding iodine sometimes wreck thyroid function instead of helping it? What does sea salt actually contain, and why might vacation at the beach genuinely improve thyroid symptoms? How does the body's stress response literally prevent fat cells from releasing their contents, no matter how perfectly you eat?

Dr. Wrigley explains hormone sensitive lipase, the enzyme-hormone that acts as gatekeeper for fat burning, and why most people have never heard of it despite its central role in weight management. He traces the cascade from dietary choices through insulin and cortisol to inflammation and arterial damage, showing how the body's hormonal response to what you eat matters more than the food itself.

The discussion covers thyroid conversion problems that standard TSH testing misses entirely, the relationship between progesterone, estrogen and cellular thyroid function, and why the carnivore diet might indicate deeper gut issues rather than being a long-term solution. Learn which simple dietary modifications address iodine status without expensive testing, and how stress management connects directly to your body's willingness to release stored fat.

This is functional medicine thinking applied to everyday metabolic problems, explained through the lens of a practitioner who treats hormones as the body's first responders to everything you do, eat, think, and experience.

BIG IDEA

Your health is much more related to the hormonal response by the choice that you just made than what you ate at all.

Dr. Jay Wrigley Contact Info
Socail Media: @HormoneDietDoc
Website: DrJayWrigley.com

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Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings

Any use of this intellectual property for text and data mining or computational analysis including as training material for artificial intelligence systems is strictly prohibited without express written consent from Dr. Philip Ovadia.

Transcript

1:24

Hey folks, thanks for joining us. It is Stay Off my operating table with Dr. Philip Veia. We are joined here by a second time guest, Dr. Jay Wrigley, who I've actually done a little work with as a to help my wife. We're glad to have you back. Jay, thanks for joining us. Appreciate it. It's always good. Ba be back with you guy, Dr. O and Jack. And yeah, let's go at it. Phil, I know you're a surgeon. I know surgeons are typically not digging around in the microbiome, at least I think that, and one of the things that I've been fascinated by just about health in general is the role of our gut health with everything else. So I'd love to get Jay to talk about gut health and how it mana or maybe gut ill health and how it manifests itself. Typically in the average American, which is the bulk of our audience. Yeah, no, I think that'll be a great starting point for this conversation. And I'll just say my perspective as a surgeon is I might not realize that I was dealing with the microbiome, fighting against the microbiome, but I think it turns out that much of what was a heart surgeon and much of what a lot of the, other types of surgeons out there are dealing with is in fact very related to the biome. And if we can maybe get some physicians to start recognizing that more we might be able to make a little better head to all these diseases. But would love to hear Jay's perspective on that. Absolutely. Wow. Such a big big umbrella there. I think that some of the key points to bring up in the beginning of this conversation with people is how much that maybe the, not only the lay public, but even the medical community, doesn't realize the true fact in the fact that there is more that is not us, than is us. That makes up who we are. Meaning that this whole thing about the gut microbiome is really a living breeding thing of microorganisms, bacteria, fungi, viruses, and there's more cells of that than there is in the entire human body that makes us human. And so we're dealing with a, an ecosystem here. That again, is almost, it's larger than we are. So anything that influences it is gonna substantially influence our lives. So the another key point would be is the microbiome working for you, working against you based on, a lot of this would be about y your lifestyle choices. And really to go down a little further on the ladder would be is it, are, is what you are doing to interact or influence your microbiome, inflammatory or non-inflammatory? Because if you're inflaming this massive ecosystem, you're gonna get a cascade of effects to that, that are going to. Substantially affect your health. I mean, if you're in inflammatory state, going back to like my specialty around hormones, you're going to increase insulin resistance, make it harder for your metas metabolism to work correctly. That's going to lead to increase in weight gain. That's gonna put a stress on the cardiovascular system that Dr. Philip would know. And it goes on down the line. So the truth of the matter is if you're paying attention, even somewhat, to trying to be in alignment with how the, what the microbiome is trying to do to balance out your system through metabolic eating lifestyle choices, exercise, things like this, you are far ahead of the game to not only, for prevention of problematic things coming down the road. But if you're in a situation where you've already have that problem, the reversal of that problem would be far enhanced by taking care of this ecosystem that is trying to work on your behalf and not working against it. So I'll kind of, okay, I'm gonna be a bit of an ass here. That's a whole lot of super general stuff. Okay. That, that, frankly, I probably could have said, I wouldn't known what most of it meant, but I know the words so I could say it. Get specific. What are some of the really common maladies diseases, misfunctions dysfunctions that manifest, that really have at least, if not the root cause? A root cause in screwed up gut microbiome. Okay. Okay. I, I want folks, I want listeners to be able to go, oh my god, that sounds like me. Okay. That's what I'm looking for. Let's start with this. We live within a world now where the majority of the food supply that's created for human beings today is packed full of things that they don't, would certainly never tell you about this. Maybe not even know this, but are working against your microbiome. Because your microbiome is a metabolic process. So anything that your time, you're taking in something into your body that is has antibacterial properties, you're killing off your good gut microbiome. Anytime that you're promoting or you're eating a diet that would be high in processed carbohydrate, you are feeding organisms that don't typically would not be fed. Without a readily a source of high glucose food. So then you throw on top of that how we've lived through all of us for sure, have lived through the day and age where you're not feeling well, let's prescribe you an antibiotic. So let's go, hopefully target this one bacteria that might be causing a problem for you and, but let's wipe out all of the rest of your good bacteria in your gut in doing so and hope that you're gonna be okay. It's almost like chemotherapy where, let's see if we can take you to the brink of death in order to kill off this cancer and hope that we'll be able to do that. And, but you'll survive this, right? It's the same type of thing. You're dealing with a very intricate system. So we live within a world where people are feeding. The wrong side of this microbiome thing. Ja. We're in order to make your microbiome happy and make you happy, you have to get a, you have to pay attention, unfortunately, because it's not supposed to be for the layperson to do but you have to pay attention to the fact that the foods, the preservatives, the shelf life extenders in your food supply are wrecking your gut health, which is then leading to an inflammatory process that's going to show up in either cardiovascular disease, arthritis, multiple hormonal imbalance, obesity and things like this. So how people need to know what's the real deal here and not what anybody could speak, is that if you want. A thriving gut balance, which is we're, we're seeing this more every day, that your true GI health is an, accentuated into every part of your health. And if you wreck that first, you've got problems that are gonna come up everywhere, is it, you have to pay attention to, you gotta stop abusing the system and thinking that it can handle all the garbage that you're putting in your mouth. And that's, going back to simplify it, it's get away from unreal food. It's, the microbiome thrives on what it is that we were designed to eat in the first place. And I think that we're pretty clear on that, you can do it in different ways, you can be more pro, like I would be like high protein and animal source protein or you could be more leaning towards vegetarian side. But the bottom line is this. It's gotta be real food. If it doesn't come from an animal or picked out of the ground or grew off a tree without a bunch of chemicals put all over it. You are wrecking your gut microbiome and there's gonna be a price to pay for it. You can say that unequivocally if you're eating stuff that comes out of a box or a package that set that can sit on a shelf for months at a time, you're wrecking your gut microbiome. Let's be clear about the fact that there are other factors. You could have such supreme genetics that you're able to adapt to such a thing without massive damage to your entire health. But if I'd be hard pressed to think at this point with the amount of knowledge that's out there about. Endocrine disruptors preservatives, antibiotics in our food or whatnot that anybody would suggest or say that I'll be just fine if I eat whatever I want by Kellogg's or Nabisco or whatever it'll all just work out fine because my gut's so healthy that it'll be able to take care of all of that mess, run it through my liver and my kidneys to detoxify it and all will be good. I would say that would be an investment or a gas of where to place your money. That would be a bad idea. Yeah. And it, it makes sense, right? Our microbiome evolved with us, right? Sure. And as we go through, human evolutionary history, the microbiome has always been part of us. And, would've been iced right for what was our food environment for. The vast majority, 99.99% of our existence beings. And again, what we've done more recently in human history, right? And changed the food environment. There's no reason to think that the microbiome is going to be optimized or adapted for that any more reason than the rest of our bodies would be.'cause it's completely foreign to us, essentially. Yeah, absolutely. And again, it's like You either wanna be in harmony and playing on the side of aligning yourself with your mi microbiome or taking the chance of this matters. Not at all. And. I think we pretty much know that doesn't work out very much anymore because we're seeing this rampant rise in all of these metabolic problems and that are stemming from the guts inability to handle and to nutritionally partition our food in the correct pathways. And so when you mess that up and the body is overwhelmed, another simple term for this that we live within the Western world that I use often is just this idea of energy toxicity. It's, you take in these, most people take in so much energy because they're combining things like refined carbohydrate with. High fat or high seed oil foods. And the body is what do, what am I supposed to do with that much energy intake? How do I partition that in your favor? And there becomes a point where it can't do that anymore. It's like there's just way too much energy provided based on what you do and your lifestyle or whatnot. And we've gotta partition this energy somewhere. So it's gonna start wrecking the glucose, insulin metabolism, and that's gonna lead to inflammation and high cortisol. And then it just keeps going. Spirals outta control. You know what occurs to me?'cause I'm really trying to nail you down and you're doing a really good job of not getting nailed down, is this illustrates the philosophical difference between the type, between how you practice the healing craft and how allopaths. Practice it. What I'm hearing you say is, I'm not gonna talk about symptoms first. I'm gonna talk about the environment in which symptoms appear. And that's such a different mindset. And I guess I have to kind of apologize for trying to, to nail you down that way because No, I love that because I was genuinely interested. But that's what I'm hearing is I'm not gonna talk about, oh, if you have this symptoms, then that might be this. And if you have that symptom, because chasing symptoms is how we kind of, how we got in this mess with our only solutions to anything are drugs and knives. Alright oh yeah. So let me just add to that and go that. There's a re The reason for that type of philosophy in the way that I certainly would practice and why I'm in this group is that if we're not trying to trace this back to where the root cause of this problem is, then what we're doing is we are at best offering symptomatic relief that is not addressing the true problem of this problem. And that, after doing this for 30 years and is a no win situation to patch up symptoms, to put somebody back in the game when you're not addressing where this root cause came from is not gonna provide the long-term answer for this at all. No. Alright. I may get myself into another, trap that I'm gonna have to wiggle to get out of and think I'm trying to trap you, but hormones Those also seem to play a really big role in general health. It's easy for me as a lay person to see how a diet of Captain Crunch and Pepsi Cola and Ding-Dongs is gonna mess up my gut. It's easy for me to say, okay, I'm only gonna eat fresh real food, and that should help the digestive part of my system and the energy part of my system. But the whole hormone side is pretty much a mystery to me. I'm gonna, are you ready for me to lay that out clearly for you? Please. Let me put it in this perspective, and again, I have a particular slant because of my love and my specialty for this. But I can promise you this without fearing at all any pushback that I'm gonna get from this statement. I'm ready for, from anybody, and that is your health is. And especially when we talk about metabolic health and dietary health and these types of what you would eat or whatnot, your health is much more related to the hormonal response by the choice that you just made than what you ate at all. It's not really particularly about the food so much as that there is a response that the body makes to everything that you do think put into it, rub on it, whatever. Your body has a response to that, and the first response is always hormonally. Whether it be a high carbohydrate diet and you get your insulin levels jacked up, which leads to insulin resistance, and then your body doesn't know how to partition glucose from fat, and you get high cortisol levels that lead to inflammation, which later lead to cardiovascular damage in the arterial wall. Whether or not your lack of or no interest in exercise causes a not appropriate hormonal response to your lifestyle that would lead you to decrease muscle mass. So decrease testosterone, decrease in sex hormone binding globulin, and on. So my, my perspective is that every action, physical action, and probably even thought reaction that you have, there's a hormonal response to that and that is dictating. The outcome of your experience in life far more than what the thought the substance was at all. So if you wanna get this in balance and you wanna live your best life, you probably should consider what's gonna, what is gonna be the hormonal effect to the decision that I'm getting ready to make around what I put in my mouth, what I drink, whether I exercise or not, whether I care about getting quality sleep at night. These things are really important. Okay, man, you're gonna have to dig deep into that. That's, that is a, that's a very provocative statement to me. If you're going to, if you're gonna, what I hear is if you wanna live your best life it's much more about what's happening in your body, hormonally. Than what you're putting in your mouth or what you're doing with your muscles. I'm not, I think we had a little bit of a disconnect there. Okay. I'm more on the side of that. The outcome of what you put in your mouth Oh, okay. Is more reflective of the hormonal response to it than what you put in your mouth. So you, this is either or, this is not saying that if you had a perfect hormonal response, then you could eat anything you wanted to. It's they're mirrored together. The hormonal response is dictated by what you put in your mouth. So if you wanna get your hormones unbalanced, you have to pay attention to what you put in your mouth, but the dire straits of what you put in your mouth. Are as much, if not more important about the hormonal effect of what you put in your mouth than they are just because you ate Captain Trench. They're about what just happened is your body is very confused with this mixture of high fructose, high glucose in a refined state with preservatives and shelf life extenders and zero protein and all of this. It's the what, how it has to respond to that. It's all, see, here's the thing, Jack, it's always working for you. Just like the microbiomes. The magnificent thing about our body is the reason that any of the three of us are alive right now and just about anybody else is because of this mag this unbelievable machine that is always trying to take anything we do to it. Put it back in order and make us okay. And so if it has to, if it has to jack up insulin, if it has to secrete cortisol because you're in a stress response for because it thinks you're, in old times you're being chased by a large animal and you don't know if you're gonna live or not, and their body's response to that would be we're going to hyperextend cortisol, shut down fat metabolism, because we don't know how long we're gonna be starving for before you're going to eat again. We've gotta shoot out all of this epinephrine and insulin to regulate glucose into the cells. So the response that the body makes to the things that we do is where you either get a really good response and it takes care of your health, or it puts it in a major overtime working all the time just to get back to what we call homeostasis or. Ground zero. And so I see so many patients who are spending 90% of their life in a pa in a state where their body is working so hard for survival that it really doesn't get a lot of opportunity to build, strengthen, regulate, modify, and all this kind of stuff. So that's when we have to go back and look at, alright, before we start talking about remedies, whether they be pharmaceuticals surgery, or even supplements or anything like that, we have to go, where are you interfering with what your body's trying to do for you? That if we address that a little bit and made some modifications about the way you feed yourself and exercise and the quality of sleep that you've got and things like that what a service you would be doing to this thing that is fighting for you all the time, if that makes sense. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And I wanna kind of, maybe make it a more concrete example of that. Let's allow, one of the common hormone problems that people experience, thyroid disease. And maybe, sort of, let's do a sort of comparison of, the mainstream pathic approach, right? Which is we check some blood work, right? We have some symptoms that are gonna be suggestive of a problem with your thyroid. We check some blood work that maybe shows that. Something is off, right? It's hot low. And then we're going to, generally take a pharmaceutical based approach to then try and bring that number back into range. And it doesn't get tied to the things that you're talking about. What is the effect of what you're, what your habits are on why that number, that we're looking at is off, right? And maybe going to a little bit, right? Because it's not immediately obvious that thyroid hormone is gonna be affected by your diet, right? There isn't direct maybe connection. I think it's obvious to most people, right? If you have an insulin, you have a lot of insulin, right? Because you ate a lot of Choate. That's kind of a direct line. Makes sense. But for something like the thyroid, maybe it isn't as clear or isn't as direct and talk, your perspective on why they're related, how they're related, and how we should be attacking that issue of, a hormone level is off. Absolutely. I so much to say about that, but Uhhuh Yeah. So we'll start with this. Here's a common misconception is that it, you have to trace it back to first of all the, what if, what are physicians taught and what are the tools that they have? And so forever it seems like the idea that. Let's say a let's just pick an example. How about a 48 to 52-year-old woman comes into the doctor's office complaining of things like dry skin fatigue, can't sleep through the night very well, changes in hair and skin texture, whatever the doctor runs a typical blood panel and comes back and sees that her TSH level which is thyroid stimulating hormone, to those who wouldn't know that is somewhat elevated. It's should be in the range of about, anywhere from 0.05 to 4.5, and she comes back at a seven. So the doctor is believing that the problem is you're not making enough thyroid hormone. Now, first of all, the thyroid we know makes at least three hormones, but only two ever get really talked about. That is T four called thyroxin and T three called Tri iota hy. So the way this works is the thyroid gland has to produce mainly T four, which is sent to the liver and converted into the active form of thyroid hormone called T three. T three then goes and plugs into the receptor sites on the cells of your body, and influences the mitochondria through oxygenation. It brings oxygen into the cell so that the mitochondria can burn energy at a better rate. So with all that being said. For so long it has been okay. You have a high TSH. Here's what we have to do about that. We need to place you on just simply some thyroid hormone in the form of T four. And now in a synthetic form of that called levothyroxine, or the, the common name would be Synthroid. Now, with all of that just being said, if we go through this with a woman who is in her later stages of perimenopause or enduring into menopause, in that age group I talked about, here's what we know about this. Number one, the decrease in estrogen at this period of your in your life. First started by the rapid decline of a hormone called progesterone, which left these two hormones in balanced, in favor of more estrogen than progesterone. Progesterone is a thyroid agonist makes the thyroid gland function better. Estrogen is a thyroid antagonist. It blocks T three from getting into the cells of the body. So when that balance gets in favor of estrogen dominance, is that what we call that term? Then what's gonna happen is the thi the body's making enough thyroid hormone, but it can't get into the cells of the body because estrogen competes against T three for the binding sites on the cells of the body. So the idea of, and now I'm gonna trace this back one step further. I know this is getting a lot of biochemically technical. I'm hanging in there. But if you have to convert T four into T three to get the T three into the cells of your body. And nobody's looking at is the reason why you have an elevated TSH level, the thyroid stimulating hormone is not because you're not producing enough T four, which is the go-to therapy, it's that you can't convert the T four into the T three because either your liver is being toxified by the dietary choices you're making, or your progesterone or testosterone or something has fallen too low or so many other things that the real problem is you're not making the conversion correctly, or the problem is you're blocking the act of thyroid hormone from getting into the cell of the body. To think that the remedy for all of that. Let's place you on more T four to solve this issue, which it never does. What it will do is the next time they come back to the office of the physician and they run the test again, the TSH will have dropped because of the additional supplementation of the levothyroxine, the synthetic thy thyroxine. But the patient will go, wow, but I don't feel any better at all from this. But the doctor will often go, because they don't know much else to say about this, is that, but everything's fixed now. The numbers exactly. It came down to where it should be. So anything left over isn't must be in your mind or something because we can clearly see we fixed the problem. That's the kind of thing that we deal with. Let's dig into you, you alluded to that the thyroid there's more than T four and T three that the thyroids maybe dig into that a little bit because you're right. I don't think most certainly most lay people and for the most physicians don't maybe realize that there's more than just T four and T three. Some of 'em don't even realize there's T four and T three, to be honest. They just TSH, but. Sure. Let's go next level here and talk about, the next level. The next level is not mapped out really clearly at this point in time. What it is the precursors to the T four and the T three fall into the nutritional category of where iodine and tyrosine, the amino acid tyrosine, come together to bind up, to make what Now we're calling T one doesn't have a name put on it yet by science, but it's Wait. We've got a three and a four, but not a one. Isn't that strange? We do, but nobody has classified it yet with a, with an exact name that any clinician would know what to do about that. Because this is where we get into that. What if the problem is not on the side of either the hormonal cascade that I talked about, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, insulin, cortisol, how they mess up thyroid bind. They are that the relationship between your dietary choices, which would, and and often are extremely low in tyrosine certainly a large part of our population now is iodine deficient. Those two nutrients have to come together to bind with each other. And then there's a bunch of co-factors to this. There's selenium that plays a big role in this. But they produce the building block that leads to the T one and T two that nobody's actually wanted to give a name to yet. But if we, without that, those things represented and playing correctly in the body, then you don't have the ability really to, for the thyroid to manufacture. Outta the building blocks that it's supplied with and the, the stimulations from the pituitary gland to the thyroid to go get busy. We need more thyroid hormone. The thyroid's going where's my raw material? This person doesn't eat enough iodine or tyrosine or selenium or all of these nutrients, or they're getting blocked by other types of, so it gets a little complicated. But the truth of the matter is that it, these are the types of things that don't need hugely targeted, specific therapies for them. They're clean up your diet. Make sure that you're getting enough really good quality protein in your diet and some of the co-factors that come along with that, like a good amount of selenium, which typically is not highly represented in the animal kingdom whatsoever. Maybe a little bit in fish or whatnot, but mainly you're getting to, there, there are other sources that would fall more in the plant category. This is why I take the stance that, anybody that works with me knows that I'm a supporter of a carnivore diet but I don't think I, I don't necessarily think that it needs to be that exclusive at all. I think if you are only able to eat a carnivore diet and feel good, you've got some other problems that you need to address because it should not be that way for, there's. I don't see much of an issue with somebody who's got a healthy, let's go back to gut microbiome. A person who's gotten their gut straightened out should not have a problem with some lightly cooked or steamed cruciferous vegetables like cabbage or broccoli or whatnot. If they do and they find that, oh, if I eat that, it completely wrecks my health. You got something you need to look at. And the answer long-term we don't know, is it just to avoid it or address why it is that you would have an issue with that? And it's probably your gut microbiome is so inflamed that anytime that it gets addressed by something that is fairly aggressively in rich in fiber, which is pretty abrasive to the digestive tract, sets off more inflammation when you're already over inflamed in the first place. And that's why you might feel better on a carnivore diet and might do really well. And again, that works for you. Go for it. As long as you're eating nutrient dense. Do you really have to go that far? My guess. Is there something else that needs to be addressed that would allow you to have more variety in your diet? Huh? That's the first time I've ever heard it put that way. Phil, I've got a follow up question, but I don't wanna interrupt you. No, go ahead. I had an old girlfriend that was struggling with what was identified as some sort of thyroid issue and we went to the ocean and, I don't know, two or three days at the ocean and she felt dramatically better. And the story that I was told was it had something to do with iodine imbalance. Is there any, I mean, I. Let me just stop you there and go. Absolutely. The problem with that scenario though is that we know that the activation and simulation of vitamin D synthesis has a profound positive effect on thyroid function. So was it the sunshine? But if it was a lack of iodine just by being at the sea and spending time wading through the water would increase iodine intake and that, so that certainly could be part of it too. But how to pinpoint what, where was the, was it the relieving of the stress by being on vacation? Was it the increase in sunlight that stimulated vitamin D synthesis? Was it iodine? Was it some other trace mineral that is found that people tend to get themselves in deficiency if they're living in the Midwest, let's say, or something like that? I don't know, but it doesn't shock me, Jack, that would be. Beneficial to thyroid function at all. Okay. Now I've seen some different perspectives around iodine, right? And there are some people who talk about, kind of everyone needs it and everyone should be sensing it. Or at least everyone with thyroid disease will say should be supplementing it. And others that say that, it can be problematic and sometimes can make the situation worse. Maybe go into that a little bit more and, respective is, or help how you help people figure out whether, iodine is their issue or is it something else. Like you said, there are many things that go into thyroid function not just iodine for sure. And I would, here's how I would start that. Answer to you, doctor. Is that I would say that in my experience, in my practice I see more people wrecking their thyroid health and their health overall by taking iodine than I do the people who are need to be supplemented with Iodine Force. Sure. I think it, it's kind of a scapegoat back a long time ago for maybe alternative practitioners, some might, put me in that category as functional medicine or whatnot, who were very quick to go, you've got a thyroid problem, you need more iodine, and if you don't need more iodine is the worst thing you'd ever want to take. I mean, it's just gonna wreak havoc on I would be in the camp that if iodine plays a role and I'm not one who would really ever want to waste somebody's time or money to go do the type of extensive testing, you would really have to find to see if you have a cellular deficiency of iodine. That's a very expensive way to go down to find out that what you should be doing is, for the most part, when you go to the grocery store, I recommend to everybody and myself that I buy a sufficient quality, quantity, and quality of both good sea salt. And I buy some regular Morton's iodine salt, and I mix 'em together because sea salt doesn't have any iodine in it. And that's a whole nother story.'cause you would think, going back to what Jack just said, that by being around the ocean, you're getting a bunch of iodine. Turns out that when you evaporate sea water, there's hardly any iodine in it at all. Yet there's a tremendous amount of iodine in seafood and especially crab and shrimp and things like this. But it's missing in sea water itself. So anyway, what I'm get back, I got, oh, You're, that's two times you've blown my mind already. This, I thought I was doing good. I was getting my iodine by eating, by using my sea salt crud. No, no iodine really in, in of any sufficient quantity in sea salt. So you have to get iodized salt and mix the blood. But that usually, I mean, that's all you would ever need to do, is just encourage people to make better choices around thinking about things like that rather than to think about, I get these patients coming in on, five milligrams of Luol solution or whatnot. And they're just making the problem so much worse by thinking that they're gonna remedy this thyroid problem by just jacking up their iodine levels or causing all kinds of issues around that. Wow. I hope that was helpful to Yeah maybe talk about what kind of can come from I guess it's it ends up being excess iodine. And then again, for someone who's sitting with a thyroid problem you said, the testing is kind of impractical. What might be some of the clues that they could use to figure out, do they have an iodine problem or not? Okay. I say I see two things. In that presentation. One is, I'm gonna go as simple as this and maybe people will be mad at me for it. I don't really if, if I want to know in a patient what's really going on with their thyroid test, I'm gonna step outside and I'm gonna do one of two things. First. I'm either gonna extend the panel of testing that we're running through a blood panel and go, I want so much more than a TSH, I want a free T three level. I want a T three uptake level to let me know how well you are getting T three into the cells of your body. I want something called a reverse T three that's gonna tell me if your T four is being shunted down. Away from the T three pathway, which is what you want into the reverse T three pathway that's coming back. So I need to, if we're gonna find out the answer for this. Now, if all of that was related to thyroid, the only thing I could tell a patient is we're gonna already, if you're gonna work with me, we're gonna already have, straighten this out because I'm gonna make sure that you are getting an appropriate amount of iodine in your diet, but not an excessive amount of iodine. I don't wanna see any iodine supplementation whatsoever. Okay? Because if or we could start this way, you want to bypass the testing and find out what else we could find about this. Go and start adding some iodine to your diet. Let's talk in about three weeks. If you tell me that I am tremendously better. Okay. Iodine, was really a big part of this for you, but I don't particularly find. Worthwhile to go chasing after is because the testing for such a thing of are you truly iodine deficient is, I don't find it to be reliable. And the ones that would be reliable, if you go and have something like a red blood cell magnesium where they take the insides of your red blood cells, break 'em down and break them apart, and find out your true mineral content of your red blood cells, you perhaps you might find that, oh, insubstantial iodine here, but the cost effect, I mean, the ridiculous cost for doing that test based on the reliable information for the physician, you'd be better off. And tell them, add a little bit of iodized salt to your sea salt. And let's see if that is the response that quick. Is that, I mean, is it, if that is your problem, are you likely to see an improvement in three weeks? Oh yeah. With two to three weeks, you definitely would see an improvement. If that's the issue, if that's the issue, that's the issue. If it's about lack of iodine, for sure. Dang. Okay. Yeah, we would see better energy, better sleep. Within three weeks you would see noticeable improvements. Not say that it's all completely right, cleared up, but it wouldn't take more than three weeks for you to clearly see that this is making a positive difference. Okay. I'll have to say this. I do feel justified and, not feeling guilty about not taking more vacations at the beach. I'd rather go to the mountains myself. So thank you. Absolutely. By the way, I wanna speak to our audience. I did not prompt Doc, did not prompt Dr. J to give that answers, just so to relieve me of any guilt that just came as a natural, organic part of the show. Oh, boy. What are you what are some of the other maybe, less well-recognized hormonal issues that you oftentimes uncover? And I mean, so pause, perimenopause, all that stuff, right? Low testosterone in men. These are at least I think in the discussion, for most people and most physician these days. And then we talked about thyroid, but what might be another one that maybe people think about when it comes to hormonal issues that might be causing them a lot of trouble? Well, again, this would be for your audience, I'm sure redundant, but I would have to go just thinking out loudly. At the top of the list is insulin by far. Because if you're blowing your insulin. Outta the water you're going, that's gonna lead to elevated cortisol, your stress hormone, and cause inflammation. So that's a big one for me. But again, that's been talked about a lot, so I would have to go, if I went down the list. I see to me, the people that I work with, Philip, there's, and I've put some stuff out there, maybe you've seen about it, but I think there's five most important hormones and one that is science is still teetering on whether it's a hormone or just in enzyme, but those are insulin at the top. Cortisol estrogen, testosterone, and something I just talked about called hormone sensitive lipase. Some people will call an enzyme, some people will call it a hormone, but this hormone sensitive lipase that people don't often pay attention to. And I mean, we can't really respect everybody in the lay public go out and study this kind of stuff all the time. That's supposed to be our jobs and present that to them. But so this hormone is whether, because we do so much work with people who are dealing with metabolic health and obesity and can't seem to lose weight, this hormone enzyme is the gatekeeper of whether that's ever gonna happen for you or not. If you don't have proper functioning, hormone sensitive lipase, it's the enzyme hormone that releases and breaks down fat cells into triglycerides to be used for fuel. If that hormone. If that hormone is not working correctly for you, then what's happening is the other two inputs into your fat cells that are stuffing fat into your cells through insulin, sensitivity or insulin resistance or whatnot. Those are the esterification pathways in the something called de novo lipogenesis, where your body is able to stuff fat into the fat cell. But the only thing that gets it out of the fat cell is this hormone enzyme that we're talking about, hormone sensitive lipase. And so when we see patients that are like, wow, they seem to be doing everything right, they've gone low carb, they're exercising or whatnot. This is what comes to, one of the things that would come to mind for me are is this being blocked? And the way that you would block something like that or not be working well for you, one is you're driving the other side of the equation too. Just too much from too high insulin. You're just keep putting fat into the cell of the body, but to release this, the fat from the cell, those would be things like again how stressed are you and how much cortisol is playing a role in here?'cause that'll put the brakes on any sensitivity of this hormone sensitive lipase. So if you're in an inflamed state or high cortisol stress levels consistently, you have just put a, the breaks on that enzyme to break down your body fat. Number two, if you have dysregulated another hormone called sex hormone binding globulin. And this is a hormone that takes your steroidal hormones, mainly estrogen, testosterone, and it transports them around. Why that hormone is so important is that if you've got too much of your metabolic hormones like a testosterone or an estrogen or a few others, but they're bound to this sex hormone binding globulin, then they're not available to the tissues of your body. So when we go out and we run a test on a woman or, a middle-aged man or whatnot, and find that is, SHBG levels are jacked up really high. What we know is all the, no matter what your testosterone level says, you're not getting any use out of it because it's all bound up to this other protein and the tissues that are starving for that need it to burn fat and build lean muscle mass and all this kinda stuff. And to activate hormone sensitive lipase. You are getting no use out of it. So we've gotta get the sex hormone run binding globulin down. And there's a whole nother thing about, exactly how you do that. But I know that's for the audience. That's a lot of biochemistry there. But these are the type of things that, the people that would, who are doing what we do and care and want to get this thing right at the root cause, instead of putting band-aids on it, we gotta think through this stuff and go, oh, I see something here that needs to be addressed. This is why you don't have the ability to burn any body fat when you've been doing so good on what we all thought would've made all the difference for you. Okay. We got some other places to look at. Yeah, that's a good one. I think a lot of people won't have really even heard of hormone sensitive lipase or had their, clinicians discuss that with them. What are some of the things so you mentioned that stress, cortisol playing a role there. What might be some of the other that would cause issues with hormone sensitive lipase? Again, it's really kind of a all in the family thing here. If you're doing anything to elevate your insulin levels or your insulin's not working well for you, then you've just shut down the whole hormone sensitive lipase. If you are causing an elevation of cortisol through unresolved stress or because you're insulin resistance that led to an elevation of cortisol, then you've just put the brakes on hormone sensitive lipase. Oh my gosh. So it's it's a circle. It's a circle, and you gotta figure out for each individual a lot of times where is the most offensive or part of this? Or is it just a combination of all of this, which is means that you're just hormo, you're metabolically, hormonally wrecked, and, we'd really like you to pay attention to this and get back to the fundamentals of a metabolically healthy diet. First and foremost in getting some exercise in working on your sleep habits is gonna make the, the most foundational and then where we need to intervene with, non-invasive. Means of pushing a pathway. We might use a supplement for that. We might use, a hormone for that. Sometimes. I'm not a big fan of hormone therapy except for severity of testosterone, arresters, and depletion. But yeah, there's a lot to that. And that's really, to me, that's my passion, is I love looking at that. It's all gonna be somehow related back to this cycle somewhere. And then to throw in what Jack, threw at me in the beginning to, I appreciate that without any forewarning about the microphone. You're welcome and all, you add that to the piece of the puzzle and then you're really looking at the game book right there of okay, somewhere in here is what most of us are working with. And there the dysfunction is in here somewhere, even in, in your case. Dr. O, like by the time they make it to your operating table, this whole thing was wrecked before it led to the inflammation in the arteries and wrecked their whole, whatever that that you do so brilliantly. It's like this started a long time ago, and that's what we're trying to find out for people is where is that root cause of this and what can you do about it? And the big things that we know right now are the, they sound simplistic. They're not always easy to do, but they're the big foundational changes in, get proper sleep, feed yourself correctly, get some exercise, spend more in time enjoying your life than complaining about it. And these types of things is, a big part of it. I'm gonna say this right now, not for our audience or for you guys, but because. The penny just dropped for me, and I wanna say it out loud to keep it front and center of my brain. I just put this together based on what you just said. The reason that we've gotta deal with stress in our lives is because the stress response draw or the response to excess stress is excess cortisol. And one of the things cortisol does when it's in, when it's too, when it's high, is it causes our cells to hold onto fat. It shuts because evolutionarily in those, the kinds of situations that drove stress like that was starvation circumstances and the body learned hold onto all the fat. Absolutely. So we are not gonna, yeah, don't starve to death any energy saved in your body and your fat cells until we know that you're completely out of danger. And for some people, they ne to the body, the adrenal glands in the places that are treating cortisol. They never feel comfortable that this person ever got themselves out of danger. So they're driving that pathway all the time. That was me. I, 20 years ago, I was 50 pounds heavier than I am right now. And I'm tall enough that it doesn't look insane. But when I see photos of myself from then, I'm like, oh my God. And fortunately, I had a physician who was able to diagnose the real problem. And that's it. That's basically what it boiled down to. Your cortisol is off the charts and it all just, but I never put it all together. That's, thank you. That was, I can be taught. Awesome. Yeah, I think again, I think that's going to make the connection for a lot of people and that's the power of root cause functional medicine ultimately. That was good. That was, that, that was, yeah. I wanted, I want to ask you about 10 million more questions, but 'cause I love how thorough you are in your answers. Keep having me back on.'cause I love you two a lot. It's always fun and it, I always see a big response on social media to, when we're three together, so that's always a good time. I love Ed educating people and you guys have such an awesome platform for that now. So thank you. Perfect. With that, why don't you tell people where they can find you on social media and if they're interested in working with you how they can connect love to. So I'm across most of the social media platforms at the at sign hormone Diet doc, and then my website is simply dr j wrigley.com. So come there. If you want more education or wanna work with me or follow along on Twitter, I probably spend more time there than I do on the other media platforms, but I hope to see all of you. And I love I love teaching and helping people out. So thanks you guys for having me on. And I'm gonna put a plugin for you. My wife and I have worked with Dr. Jay, and the kind of thoughtful analysis that you hear him give to the questions that I asked is what he is, what he gives to all the people he works with, as best as I can tell. And it's really cool. It's not cookie cutter answers. Thank you. It's focused on your particular issue. He's not paying me to do this. I just I've been impressed with his work and just want to say that. Alright, well for Dr. J Wrigley and Dr. Philip Veia, this has been, stay off my operating table. Thanks for joining us. Hey, subscribe.'cause you're gonna love all this stuff we keep doing. We're gonna have a lot of great guests just like we've had a lot of good guests in the past. And we'll talk to y'all next time.