In this episode of The Dr. Hedberg Show, I interview Jill Grunewald on the best foods for healing Hashimoto's disease and Alopecia.  Jill has an excellent cookbook called the Essential Thyroid Cookbook with many excellent recipes to help you heal.  We talked about all the various dietary approaches out there for autoimmune disease including their pitfalls and how to get around feeling worse.  We also discussed the autoimmune paleo diet, ketogenic diet, low-carbohydrate diets, ferritin, and hypothyroidism.  And we even got into the controversial topics of iodine, goitrogens, and vegan and vegetarian diets.  I really appreciate Jill's common sense approach to these topics so this is one interview you definitely don't want to miss.

Dr. Hedberg: Well, welcome, everyone, to "The Dr. Hedberg Show." This is Dr. Hedberg, and I'm excited today to have Jill Grunewald on the show. Jill is a functional medicine certified health coach, and she's the founder of Healthful Elements. It's a thyroid health, Hashimoto's, and alopecia specialist, and co-author of the number one bestselling "Essential Thyroid Cookbook." She successfully guided her clients and students with hypothyroidism and Hashimoto's to health and vitality and has helped many of her alopecia clients reverse their devastating hair loss. She has a unique online program for the alopecia community called Reversing Alopecia, and that will actually launch this spring.

So Jill actually had Hashimoto's, and it's been successfully managed since late 2008, without the use of thyroid medication. She's actually suffered from alopecia herself, off and on, since about the age of 13, and, after becoming one-third bald, has kept her newfound full head of hair. And in her coaching practice, she not only specializes in Hashimoto's and alopecia but also Graves' disease, adrenal dysfunction, and perimenopause, menopause. And she has an upcoming book, "Reversing Alopecia," and that will be published in the fall of 2020. So, Jill, thanks for coming on.

Jill: Thank you so much for having me. I'm flattered to be asked.

Dr. Hedberg: Right. So I thought this would be great for our listeners because a lot of, you know, the patients that I see with Hashimoto's disease and alopecia, when we start making dietary recommendations, that can be somewhat difficult for people to make a big transition. And so, sometimes, we start slowly with just a few restrictions. You know, we wanna meet the patient where they are and not overwhelm them and create additional stress. So you wrote this book which is obviously gonna be very helpful to these patients. Can you talk a little bit about what makes your thyroid cookbook unique?

Jill: Yeah. So, Lisa Markley, my co-author, and I both, we were aligned on a lot of things, but we take a "food first" approach. She's a registered dietitian. She's also had Hashimoto's. So it's been our philosophy to have a food first approach even before we conceived writing this cookbook. And as you know, Dr. Hedberg, over the last several years, there's been a proliferation in various diets that help people to reverse many forms of autoimmunity, not just Hashimoto's, not just alopecia, namely paleo or autoimmune paleo or autoimmune protocol, this specific carbohydrate diet. And we're not against those diets, certainly. So we specifically chose not to make the book adhere to any of those dietary philosophies,