Читать книгу The Mood Cure: Take Charge of Your Emotions in 24 Hours Using Food and Supplements - Julia Ross - Страница 79

There’s one prescription antidepressant that you may never have heard of, though it outsells most other medications in America, far outstripping even Prozac in sales. That drug is the synthetic thyroid hormone Synthroid. Psychiatrists have been using Synthroid and similar thyroid-promoting medications to treat depression for many years, either alone or to improve the effectiveness of antidepressant drugs.

According to Professor Ridha Arem, M.D., chief of endocrinology at Baylor University’s Ben Taub Hospital and author of The Thyroid Solution, one in ten of us, over twenty million of us, suffer from thyroid dysfunction. He calls the depression and mental fog typically associated with this dysfunction “the common cold of emotional illness.”¹⁸ Based on his estimate and our clinic’s experience, at least one-third of the people suffering from symptoms of the blahs are having trouble with their thyroid gland.

Your thyroid gland sits at the base of your throat, just above your breastbone. From this perch it directs the metabolic action of every cell in your body. Notably, thyroid hormones are critical to the digestive breakdown and absorption of all amino acids, including tyrosine. In your brain cells, thyroid hormones direct tyrosine’s magical conversion into the antidepressant cats. If either or both functions falter, tyrosine does not arrive abundantly in the brain, and what does come in can’t be converted effectively into cats. The result: mental, emotional, and physical apathy and, often, unneeded weight gain, among other things.

We learned from one of our clients how intimately thyroid function could be associated with depression. Sheyna, a gifted artist who had been depressed for many years, had noticed an improvement in her mood from tyrosine and a high-protein diet, but a stubborn layer of depression combined with fatigue, chilliness, and unaccountable weight gain had continued to plague her. She hadn’t been able to get in to see our medical consultant until a month after she’d started the program, but when she did, her symptoms and blood test results led him to a diagnosis of hypothyroidism. He prescribed careful doses of thyroid hormone to mimic the natural output of a healthy thyroid gland. Voilà! The lights turned on. She had a new and unmistakable “emotional glow,” along with more sustained energy and nice warm hands.

After taking her thyroid medication, Sheyna experienced other new benefits as well. Her amino acids started to work twice as effectively for her in eliminating her junk food cravings, so she was able to lose more unneeded weight and begin exercising regularly. In addition., her overall health continued to improve dramatically from the time she started to get help for her thyroid. Since then, we’ve never ignored the thyroid when it comes to mood, and we continue to learn more about the thyroid-mood connection every year.