Butter Nutrition

Is your daily snack habit causing pain?

If your 'gut protocol' isn't addressing your liver/gallbladder, your gut issues will keep coming back.

It's like watering your grass for a week and watching it grow, but not addressing the issues with your automatic sprinkler system that is needed to keep things in check year after year.

Reference:
Farooqui N, Elhence A, Shalimar. A Current Understanding of Bile Acids in Chronic Liver Disease. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hepatology, 2021; 12, 155-173

Your liver regulates your gut environment.

For those of you taking vitamin D supplements - knowledge is power so I want to share a little something with you. This hair analysis graph is of someone who has a history of taking vitamin D3 supplements. For me, it's pretty obvious without even knowing this due to the very high calcium, low potassium, and low boron on their hair analysis report.

Why is high calcium, low potassium, and low boron important? Because it can make you feel like crap, literally. Vitamin D does several things that change your mineral imbalance in a very unfavorable way:

First, vitamin D tells your body to absorb more calcium from your food, so the presence of vitamin D in the bloodstream means that the person taking vitamin D supplements is going to absorb more calcium from their food than someone who isn't taking vitamin D supplements.

For the very rare person, a tiny bit of vitamin D might be helpful if they happen to be low in calcium (most people have plenty), but it's still not preferred, and no-one really takes just a little bit of vitamin D for a short while… most people start taking lots of it and do that as a life sentence. This can quickly create chronically high calcium levels and that leads to calcification of your body (think stiffness among other undesirable things, like back pain, joint issues, osteoporosis). [1] High calcium is also not good for your thyroid health, it SLOWS things down...but more on that in a minute.

The next thing vitamin D does is it lowers potassium levels. [2] This can cause a whole host of symptoms such as:
-Acne
-Weakness, tiredness, or cramping in arm or leg muscles
-Numbness and/or tingling
-Constipation
-Excess water consumption
-Depression
-Nausea or vomiting
-Edema
-Fatigue
-Insomnia
-Nervousness
-Mental impairment
-Abdominal cramping and/or bloating
-Fainting due to low blood pressure
-Heart palpitations (irregular heart beat)

Low potassium isn't exactly what most people want… it also affects your thyroid ratio… or your energy ratio as I call it in analysis, which I'll get to shortly.

The third way vitamin D effects your mineral levels is by lowering boron levels. Research suggests that boron has a whole host of fantastic benefits when you get enough in your diet like: healthy bones, improved wound healing, increased levels of s*x steroids, increased vitamin D levels (or vitamin D deficiency prevention), improved magnesium absorption, anti-inflammatory effects, and anti-cancer effects. [3]

All of these mineral changes that are caused by vitamin D supplementation (D2 & D3) are not exactly favorable, so if you're going to take a supplement it's good to not only understand why you're taking it but also make sure that it's going to have a positive effect on what is going on in your body.
Now the most important part, your thyroid ratio or how you actually FEEL.

I'm talking about things like:
-fatigue
-brain fog
-low body temperature
-blood sugar issues (hypoglycemia)
-sluggish digestion
-sluggish thyroid

One of the true ways to really assess how a person is feeling is by looking at their thyroid ratio on a hair analysis (calcium to potassium level). The desired ratio is pretty simple it's just the ratio between their calcium and potassium levels and we want the ratio to be around a 4 (this person's ratio was almost 300). So if you're taking vitamin D which is raising calcium levels and lowering potassium you're moving these minerals in the opposite direction of where is desirable for thyroid health and to support your thyroid's ability to do its job!

You deserve more than guesswork. If you're supplementing without data, you're likely creating imbalances — not fixing them.

"D3" for details on how to get luxury-level insight into your mineral status — so you can supplement with strategy, not stress.

References:
[1]https://academic.oup.com/cardiovascres/article/36/3/293/298591/Hypercalcemia-and-metastatic-calcification
[2https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC291035/pdf/jcinvest00315-0040.pdf
[3]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4712861/

This is for everyone who eats dark chocolate!

When it comes to low thyroid issues, subclinical or otherwise, it's easy to get caught in the weeds of WHY it's happening.
But going down rabbit holes with expensive testing + supplements often doesn't help and can even be counterproductive.

Sometimes, if you zoom out, the reason for low thyroid symptoms is pretty obvious and easy to change with the right approach. Things like:
-liver & biliary problems (liver is a primary site of thyroid hormone conversion)
-undereating and low carb diets-over exercising-gut issues (the gut is a site of thyroid hormone conversion)-mineral imbalances (high calcium levels from high dose vitamin D supplements is big here!)
-chronic inflammation

This is what is REALLY causing low thyroid symptoms, and there's not a magic pill or supplement that's going to change it. Only habit changes will help.

What about thyroid meds?

While thyroid meds can be extremely helpful in the short-term (and long term for people with thyroid removal) but they can be a double edged sword…

In an over-simplification, taking thyroid medication is like buying energy for your body with a credit card.

Seems harmless at first, right?

Wrong…

Credit cards can be an incredible tool for getting things you want, but they can also be very dangerous if the right money management is not in place to back up what you are "spending".

If you take thyroid medication without addressing the root cause behind it, you are essentially purchasing that "increased energy" with a credit card! If your body doesn't have the nutritional stores to pay for that energy, that thyroid medication could be digging you deeper and deeper into a nutritional deficit that will worsen things over time.

This if often why someone needs to 'up' their thyroid med dose over time.

The message I am trying to get across is that if your energy is low, then there is a nutritional aspect that needs to be addressed.

When it comes to your thyroid health, zoom out. Sometimes the cause is more clear that you might think!

Wellness culture is poisoning people

Nutrient deficiency gets all the attention but nutrient excess is an even bigger problem no one is talking about. It’s the cause of countless ‘mystery symptoms’ that no one can figure out because no one is checking for nutrient excess and aware of how it impacts your liver’s ability to do its job.

DM me ‘excess’ for more information 📖

This one's sneaky...

Got heartburn?

If you do, you must know that it's typically not caused by too much stomach acid. Having too much stomach acid is actually a very rare occurrence.

On the contrary, having too little stomach acid by way of a h-plyori infection or dietary/lifestyle factors is extremely common.

Too little stomach acid allows opportunistic gut bacteria to overgrow which is linked to heartburn and GERD symptoms.

Read more: https://butternutrition.com/what-causes-heartburn/