In this episode of The Dr. Hedberg Show, I interview Dr. Izabella Wentz about her new book, "Hashimoto's Food Pharmacology."  We had a great talk about Hashimoto's disease, Dr. Wentz's Hashimoto's healing journey, foods that can help heal Hashimoto's disease, green smoothies, bone broth, and some recipes that can help heal Hashimoto's disease.

I highly recommend all of Dr. Wentz's books and her new book will help you make food easier and healthier so you can heal your Hashimoto's disease.

Dr. Hedberg: Well, welcome, everyone, to "The Dr. Hedberg Show." This is Dr. Hedberg, and I'm very excited today to have my good friend and colleague Dr. Izabella Wentz on the show. She has been on the podcast before, and I am excited to have her on today. So, Dr. Wentz, thanks for being on.

Dr. Wentz: Thank you so much for having me, Dr. Hedberg. I'm a huge fan of your work, and it's an honor to be here with you.

Dr. Hedberg: Great. So for those who don't know about you, why don't you just tell everyone a little bit about yourself and what you've been working on and your new book that's coming out?

Dr. Wentz: Sure. So, I'm a pharmacist by training and, in full disclosure, I wasn't interested in the thyroid until I became diagnosed myself with Hashimoto's after almost a decade of some pretty confusing symptoms. So I had fatigue, and I had pain all over my body, acid reflux, hair loss, brain fog, and you pretty much name the thyroid symptom, I had it, but it had gone undiagnosed.

I was a pharmacist and was super excited about taking medications for my thyroid once I found out that I had a thyroid condition, but unfortunately they only helped a tiny bit. At that point, I realized there was something else going on in my body, and I wanted to figure out if there was anything I can do to help myself, one, feel better and two, potentially reverse the condition, and that's sort of how I became a Hashimoto's expert/human guinea pig was really through my own journey with Hashimoto's and having a lot of different symptoms that nobody seemed to be able to solve.

My official bio is that I am an author of multiple books on Hashimoto's. One of them is "Hashimoto's Thyroiditis: Finding and Treating the Root Cause." This was published in 2013. And then "Hashimoto's Protocol: A 90-Day Plan for Reversing Thyroid Symptoms and Getting Your Life Back." So this has been really my life's work is to help people with Hashimoto's take back their own health. After being able to do so myself, I have a brand new book coming out, "Hashimoto's Food Pharmacology." And this is really focused on nutrition, nutrition protocols, and then healing recipes to help people really kind of do it themselves.

I know that there is a lot of forward movement for thyroid health in the world of functional medicine, but not everybody has access to an excellent functional medicine provider like Dr. Hedberg, for example. And there is a lot of things that people need to do in their own day-to-day life to take back their health and part of that is nutrition. So my new book is focused on helping you take back your own health and being your own nutrition guru when you have Hashimoto's.

Dr. Hedberg: That's fantastic. So most of my listeners have Hashimoto's. So, for those who don't really know that much about it, can you give us kind of an overall view of what exactly Hashimoto's is, and all the different statistics related to that?

Dr. Wentz: Sure. So Hashimoto's is probably the top autoimmune condition, the most common autoimmune condition worldwide. For those that don't know what it is, it's actually the immune system starts to recognize the thyroid gland as a foreign invader and begins to launch an attack against the thyroid gland, and this eventually leads to the thyroid gland not being able to produce enough thyroid hormone. And it really goes along with a lot of different symptoms. So people will have problems with brain fog, they'll have problems with weight gain, they'll have problems with fatigue, a lot of times they'll have hair loss, cold intolerance. And really when we think about what the thyroid does is it generates heat and energy within our bodies, and dictates the metabolism throughout our entire body.

So anything could be affected whether this might be, you know, loss of hair from our scalp or cold extremities or potentially having easy bruising on the skin because we're not...our metabolism isn't working properly. These are just some potential thyroid symptoms.

Looking at the statistics, we seem to have more and more cases of Hashimoto's every year. It's not just because we're diagnosing it more, it also seems to be more prevalent. You know, different statistics are out there, anywhere from one in three or, you know, one in five women may have this condition at some point in their lives.

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. So there's 300 million Americans, I believe, at this point and about 35 million have Hashimoto's so that's huge, and probably more than that, like you said, because a lot of these women and men go undiagnosed. So as you said, you have Hashimoto's and so I've read your books and you have this journey that you went through. There's probably people listening who are kind of in the beginning of that journey, or in the middle of it, so can you talk about what you went through and, you know, your signs and symptoms, the diagnosis, and the treatments that you went through?

Dr. Wentz: Wow, yeah. So I started off having symptoms, you know, the further I look back, probably as early as, you know, three years old, I started having panic attacks. I was exposed to Chernobyl when I was living in Poland, that's where I grew up. And then kind of things calmed down again until about puberty when I started having a lot of symptoms of depression. My mom was a pediatrician and she thought there was something going on with my thyroid, but we went to have it tested, and everything came back normal. I kind of was always one of those kids that intended to be a bit moody.

Until I was about 18, I ended up having a Epstein-Barr virus in my first year of undergrad. And after that point, I just could not get out of bed for months, I was exhausted. And that kind of started off my thyroid journey, the official journey for trying to seek out what was going on. Because the things prior to that were, you know, stomachaches and they were maybe some moodiness, but I just thought that was a normal part of being human. It wasn't, you know, until I started getting the fatigue and that was followed by irritable bowel syndrome, eventually acid reflux, hair loss, palpitations, panic attacks, let's see what else, carpal tunnel in both arms. I had all of these different things kind of "small annoying things that were just breaking my body down," I started to look for answers and trying to figure out, "Okay, what is going on with me, why am I like this, why do I have to sleep 12 hours when everybody else can, who is my age can sleep for seven to eight hours and be bright eyed and bushy tailed, and why am I losing hair, why am I always so cold?" And that eventually led me to figure out I had Hashimoto's through going to numerous doctors and asking for different tests.

And I started on thyroid hormones which I thought were gonna be, you know, my cure-all, right? And within a few weeks, I started to feel better slightly, so I only needed one sweater instead of two sweaters in Southern California. And then I was able to sleep for, you know, 10 or 11 hours instead of 12, so that was an improvement, but then I still had the carpal tunnel, but I still had acid reflex, IBS, and all of these other things going on. And I really just started to peel back the layers one by one. I was a research pharmacist for people with the rare conditions at the time, and I was helping these people take back their health through some unusual means that weren't part of the standard of care, spending a lot of time in the research world, and decided to do the same thing for myself.

And I have tried a lot of different things, some of them were scary and silly, some of them didn't work. Coconut oil did not cure my thyroid, unfortunately, but the things that did work were gluten and dairy removal. Within three days, I was able to eliminate the carpal tunnel syndrome, the irritable bowel syndrome, and all of the bloating and the acid reflux. And I had those conditions for, you know, anywhere from, like, 1 to 10 years.

And so that was a really, really big component of what helped me. I eventually went on to treat some infections that I had in my gut and reactivated Epstein-Barr virus, and looked at toxins and just did a whole body makeover through functional medicine, but really the corner store of what got me to heal was focusing on my diet and nutrition. And it was simply removing some things that were not working for my body and then adding other things that my body was deficient in.

Dr. Hedberg: Right, right. Yeah, that's an interesting journey that you went through and you got everything in balance. And then you wrote your first book and then your most recent book is "Hashimoto's Protocol" and that was a, it's a 90-day plan for getting better. A lot of people get better following that. A fair amount of the new patients that I see, you know, they've read your work and they're already doing better just following that. But now you have another book, "Hashimoto's Food Pharmacology." And so this is focused more on food and the term we use is "food as medicine," and how did you, you know, come up with this idea of writing a book just focusing on food pharmacology?

Dr. Wentz: One of the big things is, you know, one of my big goals and I have a bit of an eclectic background as a pharmacist, what I worked in, a bit of consulting research as well as public health and really looking at how do we get this information out to people so they can help themselves. And, you know,