Low Iodine and Breast Cancer.

CarolCNS

I'm waiting to go in for a call back on Monday and am doing some research.

I am seeing repeated reports that women with breast cancer have low iodine levels. Iodine used to be in breads until 1970s. it was our main source of iodine. Some salt had iodine added, but the trend to avoid salt due to other health issues scrapped that iodine out of our diets and bodies. Slowly, over time, our bodies iodine source has become depleted. Studies have been done on other counties, such as Asian, where they eat a diet that has foods with higher levels of iodine. Japan is one that eats seaweed, fish, kelp, (all high in iodine) and has one of the lowest levels of breast cancer. Other studies show that countries that have low iodine level have higher breast cancer rates.

Now I'm reading that increasing iodine - with the advice of a profession to know about dosage - helps reduce the chance of breast cancer. And the reduction is not slight; its big. The studies on this, once I began to read, are overwhelming. Why has no one told us? The answer seems to be that there is no money to be made by pharmaceutical companies.

Have any of you read up on this? Have you re-introduced iodine into your diet and had good results? Thank you, Carol

Momine

I looked into this quite a bit, although it was years ago. The only real studies I could find had to do with fibrocystic disease and its possible link to iodine, nothing credible relating to cancer. There is a doctor Brownstein, who is flogging massive doses of iodine as a cure-all. There are some significant health risks associated with iodine overdoses.

You can read loads here: https://community.breastcancer.org/forum/79/topics/814814?page=1 It is an old thread, but all about iodine.

Also, your diet has to be very deficient for you to become deficient in iodine. If you eat fish and shellfish a few times a week and use iodized salt in your cooking, you should more than adequately cover your iodine needs.

However, I am sure you could get your iodine levels checked.

Sophiemara

Yes I have also read this and believe it to be true. It also wrecks havoc with the thyroid. Yes research in japan has shown that traditionally the Japanese diet is high in iodine and lower cases of breast cancer, but this is changing as younger generations abandon their tradition for the western diet.

I introduced sea kelp, iodised salt and seaweed into my diet.

Selenium is another vitamin that bc patients are foundheavily deficient in, due to depleted agricultural soils..2 Brazil nuts a day sorts this.

pipers_dream

"Also, your diet has to be very deficient for you to become deficient in iodine. If you eat fish and shellfish a few times a week and use iodized salt in your cooking, you should more than adequately cover your iodine needs." Maybe in Greece they do this Momine, but I have never in my life eaten fish and shellfish several times a week and the fact that I live in the middle of a large continent might have something to do with that. I started on iodine as soon as I realized I needed it and my very lumpy and painful fibrocystic breasts smoothed right out. But yes, I still have BC.

Momine

Pipers, fair point. I grew up in Denmark, and now live in Greece. Both countries where people have access to and consume a lot of fish and seafood. Then again, I got BC too, in spite of this.

Amelia01

I grew up in the “goiter belt” - around the Great Lakes and there are also higher incidents of BC. Who didn’t stop using salt when word was out that salt was a killer? We all probably did.

I had also switched out regular sea salt for pink Himalayan salt a few years ago - which although high in trace minerals has little, if any, iodine.

My mother was sitting in a prominent cancer center cafeteria a few months ago and struck up a conversation with a young researcher. My mother told her of my situation and the researcher said “iodine”.

My holistic oncologist (who is trained as a radiologist) believes we get enough in daily life but I am going against her wishes and painting my breast with Lugols iodine every few days.

If the absorption time test is true well I must be deficient.