Читать книгу The Healthy Thyroid: What you can do to prevent and alleviate thyroid imbalance - Patsy Westcott - Страница 26

When it works properly, the thyroid plays a crucial part in keeping your body weight more or less stable. Increasing the amount you eat, especially of starchy foods or carbohydrates, increases metabolism and boosts the production of the active thyroid hormone T₃. Dieting, on the other hand, decreases metabolism, causing the body to produce less T₃.

This is almost certainly a mechanism that has evolved to protect us from starvation. It is a known fact that when the body is deprived of food, it turns down the rate of metabolism. This is one of the mechanisms thought to have enabled the survival of the babies who, incredibly, were found still alive after several days trapped under the rubble of the Mexican earthquake in the 1980s. This same mechanism also explains why the thyroid becomes sluggish in women with eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia and excessive dieting. The brain correctly perceives these states as starvation and turns down thyroid activity to conserve energy. This is how a thyroid problem can play havoc with your appetite and your weight.