In this episode, I am breaking down how you can learn about your thyroid health on a hair tissue mineral analysis or HTMA. The HTMA is my favorite test to assess how well our bodies are able to use thyroid hormone and is a great way to get the full picture of thyroid health beyond blood labs. The bonus episode this week goes through all of my favorite assessment tools for thyroid health including HTMA, optimal thyroid blood ranges, basal body temperature, and using your symptoms to measure progress. You can access this bonus on patreon.com/hormonehealingrd.
As always, this episode is for informational purposes only. Please talk with your healthcare provider before making any changes.
This episode covers:
Links/Resources:
Patreon
Master Your Minerals Course
My Favorite Paleovalley Products
Free Resources:
Free Healthy Period Starter Guide
Mineral Imbalance Quiz
Mineral Training
Thyroid Mineral Training
Feminine Periodical (monthly newsletter)
Mineral Deep Dive Episodes with References:
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Transcript:
Amanda Montalvo [00:00:01]:
Welcome to the are you menstrual? Podcast, where we dive deep into all things women’s health to support you on your healing journey. I’m Amanda Montalbo functional and integrative dietitian, also known as the hormone healing Rd. If you enjoyed this podcast and you want to keep learning, check out the podcast Patreon, where I share a bonus episode with additional downloadable resources each week. You can go to Patreon.com forward slash Hormone Healing Rd, or check out the link in the show. Notes. In this episode, I am breaking down how you can learn about your thyroid health on a hair tissue mineral analysis, or HtMa, which is what I’m going to call it moving forward. So I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about htmas before. It is one of my favorite diagnostic tests to do with myself and clients and family members.
Amanda Montalvo [00:00:54]:
Pretty much everyone in my family has done a hair test, but it’s a really great way to look at thyroid, and I feel like this isn’t quite talked about enough with hair tissue mineral analysis. Of course we want to look at things like our mineral status, but our thyroid requires so many minerals to not only make thyroid hormone and convert it, but to also help get that thyroid hormone inside the cell. And plus, stress has a profound impact on how our body makes thyroid hormone and utilizes it as well, so converts it all the things. So there’s quite a few different ways that we could look at a hair test and evaluate thyroid health. That’s what I’m going to focus on in this episode. In the next episode, I’m going to talk about how to assess your stress on an HtMa, which is also something that if you are interested in thyroid health, I would make sure you also listen to that episode because I think it would be really helpful. So the other thing is, I did do a bonus episode for this that will come out on Thursday inside my Patreon, and it goes through all my favorite assessment tools for thyroid health. So I’ll cover all the hair test stuff in there, but it also talks about blood ranges, like the optimal ranges for thyroid, not just what’s normal.
Amanda Montalvo [00:02:10]:
And then I go into basal body temperature, what it is, what’s optimal, what it means when it’s low, and then how you can use your symptoms for thyroid to measure your progress so you can get access to that@patreon.com hormonehealingrd, plus all the other bonus episodes and information that I share in there. So before I dig in, as always, this episode is for informational purposes only. I hope you love it, I hope you nerd out, but just make sure you talk with your healthcare provider before you make any changes. And before I dig right into the content, we do have a sponsor this week, so Paleo Valley is sponsoring this episode and is making it possible for me to create so many podcast episodes for you guys. So I was like, what am I going to highlight this week? I wanted to highlight something in relation to thyroid health, and the first thing that I think of of their products is the organ complex. And that’s mainly because it has a great amount of vitamin A in it. Organ meats. Most organ meats have a good amount of vitamin A.
Amanda Montalvo [00:03:11]:
Beef liver is included in this complex, along with kidney and heart. And I absolutely love it. I like the blend. I think it can give people more nutrients and a little bit more variety than just beef liver. But you’re still going to get all those nutritional benefits. But when I think of, okay, what things can help most people that are struggling with thyroid health? Vitamin A is often overlooked, but vitamin A is really important for our thyroid hormone receptors. So in order to allow that thyroid hormone to attach to the receptor and we can actually use it, we do need vitamin A. And a lot of women are very deficient in vitamin A.
Amanda Montalvo [00:03:47]:
Surprisingly, I think a lot of it has to do with just lacking it in our diets, also having imbalances in other nutrients like copper and iron. But the organ complex is something that I think most people can do really well with, especially since it is a complex and can benefit from. So if you want to check it out, you can go to Paleovalley.com slash hormonehealingrd. And whenever you use that link, you are also supporting my podcast at no extra cost to you. So thank you so much for your support. And thank you, Paleo Valley, for sponsoring this episode. Okay, so the first thing we’re going to talk about is hair tissue mineral analysis. So HDMA versus thyroid blood labs, because I think this is where a lot of confusion comes in around like, oh my.
Amanda Montalvo [00:04:31]:
We’ll talk about the thyroid ratio on the hair test, and a lot of people will say, like, oh, my thyroid ratio is showing. I have hypothyroidism. I’m like, that’s not what the hair test shows. You can’t diagnose yourself hypothyroid from a hair test. And I think that’s an important distinction. So on the HtMa, this is more telling us how our body is utilizing that thyroid hormone and how it is able to convert thyroid hormone if it has the minerals and the nutrients that it needs, not necessarily how much we’re making. It does not show us that. And we’re primarily looking at markers like calcium, potassium, and things like heavy metals because those are very stressful.
Amanda Montalvo [00:05:17]:
So hair test is more, how can we use the thyroid hormone that we are making? And it’s typically answering more of the question of, like, my thyroid labs look normal, but I still have all these symptoms of hypothyroidism or that show that my thyroid is likely not functioning optimally. That’s when we would look at the hair test blood labs for the thyroid, like TSH t four, t three, reverse T three. These are showing the amount of thyroid hormone that your body’s actually producing, but it doesn’t show if your body’s actually using it. And they’re both helpful. I’m not saying blood labs are not helpful. We do thyroid testing with pretty much all of our clients. Blood work is. When I say thyroid testing, I mean blood work.
Amanda Montalvo [00:05:58]:
Obviously, everyone does a hair test, so it is still incredibly helpful. You just need to understand, like, what is it showing me? So looking at blood work, we can see, okay, maybe your TSH, which is looking at thyroid stimulating hormone, it’s your pituitary talking to your thyroid. If that is really high, then that’s a sign that your brain is sensing that your body doesn’t have enough thyroid hormone and it’s telling your thyroid it needs to make more. And then if it’s really low, then it’s a sign that you could either be super stressed because cortisol can blunt TSH production, or because you could be super stressed and hyperthyroid that you have too much thyroid hormone available. So there’s a lot of nuance there. I go through that more in the bonus episode. T four and T three on blood work are more going to show us how much thyroid hormone are you producing, how well is it converting? And then reverse T three, like a whole other thing that’s a really great marker for chronic stress. And how well not only T Three conversion, but is your body in a mode where it’s trying to preserve the higher the reverse T three, the more your body is in this fight or flight, chronic stress, trying to slow down and preserve energy.
Amanda Montalvo [00:07:09]:
Often, very typically, you’re going to see that with people that are struggling to lose weight, have hypothyroid symptoms, long history of chronic stress, stuff like that. So lots of great info from blood work. It’s just so helpful to also compare that to your hair test. So that’s what I want to talk about today is how can we use our hair tissue mineral analysis, our HDMA, in order to get more insights into if you have some hypothyroid symptoms? Why might that be? Is it related to a specific mineral? Is there some big imbalance? Is there a deficiency? Is there an excess? Also very common. But the big major takeaway is that minerals are very important for our thyroid. Iodine is crucial for making a thyroid hormone, but it’s not optimally measured through the hair. You’d want to do a urine test? I talk about that in the mineral testing episode from season four. So from last season, it’s literally called mineral testing.
Amanda Montalvo [00:08:12]:
And I go through like, blood work versus hair testing versus things like urine testing. There are markers on the hair test that can indicate if we have a possible iodine deficiency. I go through all those in my Master minerals course if you’re wanting to learn more. But the other minerals that are really important for thyroid health that I would look at on a hair test are calcium, potassium, and then that makes our thyroid ratio the calcium, potassium ratio, sodium, magnesium, selenium, copper, zinc, and then looking at heavy metals, because that can also affect thyroid health. So let’s talk about calcium, potassium, and the thyroid ratio first. High levels of calcium is typically the issue when it comes to assessing thyroid health. If we have too much calcium, it can bind to our iodine receptors and make it hard for our thyroid hormone to then bind. Elevated calcium also slows our metabolism.
Amanda Montalvo [00:09:08]:
So this is the person I think of is like, they have normal. They may not be optimal, but they’re not bad enough for their doctor to say, yes, it’s definitely your thyroid that’s causing you to feel this way. So they’re like, okay, well, I feel like it’s thyroid because maybe they’re fatigued, maybe they have hair loss, maybe they have Bloating, maybe they’re cold a lot. Maybe they’re hot all the time. That can also be a sign of a thyroid imbalance. Maybe they’re constipated things like that, cycle issues, acne, all those things. So they’re like, everything kind of fits that category. But my thyroid labs look normal, but then they do a hair test, and their calcium is actually really high.
Amanda Montalvo [00:09:46]:
I see that all the time. That was me for sure. I mean, my blood labs were not good as well. I was already hypothyroid, but the medication did not help. And so that’s where I was kind of like at this crossroads of like, okay, do I keep taking this thing that I don’t think is helping and I think is making me feel worse? What’s the other solution? And that’s really where hair testing came in on my journey. But I see this a lot in women that we work with and that go through the course. Potassium is also a really important one. It helps sensitize our cells to thyroid hormone, and it gets that thyroid hormone inside the cell where then it can do its job.
Amanda Montalvo [00:10:21]:
So vitamin A, like I mentioned in the Paleo Valley Ad, also very important for this. Potassium very important for this. So we want to have enough calcium, but not too much. When we do have excess calcium, that’s typically from stress, some sort of chronic stressor, could be from supplements, mental, emotional, physical stress, environmental stress, nutrient stress, like nutrition stress, not eating enough, not getting the right balance of macronutrients, skipping meals, stress around food, poor digestion, stuff like that. So any sort of stressor could drive up that calcium, as well as things like magnesium deficiency. That’s a very common cause of excess calcium. So we’re going to have this chronic stress driving up calcium, slowing our metabolism, making it hard to get thyroid hormone to bind. And then if we don’t have enough potassium, because most often, I’m going to see really high calcium, very low potassium, then that’s going to make it hard to get that thyroid hormone inside the cell as well.
Amanda Montalvo [00:11:18]:
And potassium is important for what? Is it not important? I have a potassium deep dive episode if you want to listen to it. But potassium is really incredibly important for digestion, getting the gut moving, it’s important for blood sugar, helps shuttle glucose into our cells. It’s important for storing glucose in the liver for energy and stable blood sugar later, like when we’re sleeping. It’s important for a lot of different things. So calcium and potassium, when those are out of balance, it can lead to a thyroid ratio that is not optimal. And then that’s like your sign on your hair test. You’d look at your thyroid ratio and you would see, is it low or is it high? And when it’s high, that is just like blood work. It’s showing sluggish thyroid type symptoms, but it doesn’t mean you’re hypothyroid.
Amanda Montalvo [00:12:05]:
You cannot get a diagnosis from a hair test, but it would tell you, hey, this makes sense that you have XYZ hypothyroid symptoms because your thyroid ratio is so high. If it’s very low, then that would show that you are probably utilizing thyroid hormone much quicker and your body’s probably in the high stress state. Typically it’s going to be low. When you’re a fast metabolic type, which is oftentimes you’re in that fight or flight, not always, but you can be pretty imbalanced and be a fast one metabolic type. But typically when you see a very low thyroid ratio, you’re also going to see very high adrenal ratio and it’s going to look like your body’s ready to go. It’s in fight or flight mode right now, or at least at the time of the last three months of doing your hair test. So again, not giving you the hypo or hyperthyroid diagnosis, but it is showing you your metabolism has slowed down, it’s likely impacting your thyroid and how you’re using that thyroid hormone, or that your body’s in an actively stressed out state which ramps up our thyroid hormone production and use at first because the body has to respond to that stressor. It has to protect itself.
Amanda Montalvo [00:13:17]:
It’s our safety mechanism. And then eventually, over time from chronic stress, it’ll go backwards. And that’s why a lot of people can make a lifestyle, a diet change or something that’s going to increase their stress and their cortisol hormone and then feel really good and then all of a sudden they crash because their body can no longer keep up with that demand and they probably depleted their thyroid. I have compiled all of my favorite and I think best to get started with mineral resources in one place. And that is my Minerals 101 guide. This is a free guide that I will share my screen for those that are watching the video version of this podcast and go through with you quickly now. So I basically wanted a place where if someone’s new to my podcast, my instagram, and you’re like, wow, she mentions minerals a lot, and I can go off on tangents and talk about how they’re so important for different things. I wanted a place where you could just download this quick guide and get right into, okay, what are minerals? How do they affect our hormones? How do they get depleted in the first place? How can we test them? And then I have additional learning and resources, depending on the topics that you want to get into.
Amanda Montalvo [00:14:30]:
But I think this is definitely the best way to get started with all my content that I share, especially if you’re brand new here and you’re like, I don’t even know where to get started with minerals. Start here, and I promise you won’t be confused. And, you’ll know, what are the next steps to take? And if you have specific health concerns, you’ll see at the very end of the guide here, I go through. Okay, so if you want to take our mineral quiz, if you have thyroid health concerns, if you have period concerns, if you just want to hear from me on a regular basis, here’s my newsletter. So I tried to put everything in one place. I also have Mineral Deep Dive podcast episodes that I link to if you want to get into specific minerals as well. But I highly recommend downloading the guide. I put a lot of work into it, and I think it’s a perfect place to get started.
Amanda Montalvo [00:15:16]:
So you can go to the link in the Show Notes the Minerals 101 guide and get started now. So that’s your thyroid ratio. That’s calcium, potassium. There are other minerals that are super important that I would look at too, just to kind of keep the whole picture in mind, like sodium. Sodium is obviously important for a healthy stress response. I’ve definitely covered that one before. But it’s also really important for insulin sensitivity and just allowing nutrients to pass into the cell, like cell permeability. If we don’t have enough sodium, then we have a harder time getting nutrients and hormones like thyroid hormone inside the cell.
Amanda Montalvo [00:15:55]:
So that’s a really big one. And then we also use sodium in order to transport iodide into thyroid cells, which helps us make thyroid hormone. So sodium very important as far as actually making thyroid hormone and using it. So that’s definitely something I would look at. And then when I think of other ones, I think of magnesium. That’s going to protect against oxidative stress and inflammation, which could damage the thyroid gland. So now we’ve been mostly talking about how our body is using that thyroid hormone, right, based on calcium, potassium, sodium, things like that. But now when we bring other minerals into the picture, it’s going to expand this.
Amanda Montalvo [00:16:37]:
Now we’re looking at, okay, is the thyroid gland itself protected from minerals like magnesium? We’ll talk about selenium, too. So when we have low magnesium levels, low selenium levels that can lead to more potential damage to our thyroid gland, which can, of course, impact how much thyroid hormone we’re producing. We also need magnesium to make ATP, and ATP is that energy source that powers that sodium iodide simple, that transports iodine into the thyroid cells to make thyroid hormone. So magnesium is definitely a crucial one for thyroid health. It is the first mineral that we use up during the stress response. So oftentimes we’re going to see low magnesium on a hair test with a long history of some sort of chronic stress that someone’s been dealing with. And they’re probably going to have either depleted minerals overall and be like a fast four metabolic type, or they could be like a slow one with really high calcium, really low magnesium. So that’s a big one.
Amanda Montalvo [00:17:37]:
Selenium, like I mentioned, it’s really important for protecting and reducing that oxidative damage and stress to the thyroid gland. It’s also really important if we have a lot of heavy metals, and I’ll talk about that more at the end. But we do need selenium for protecting the thyroid gland. It helps us make really powerful detox. Antioxidants does lots of cool things, but we also need it to initiate the creation of thyroid hormones. I feel like most people think of selenium for converting T four to T three, which absolutely right, we need selenium. It takes T four, that’s the inactive thyroid hormone, to T three. That’s the active form, the one that we actually use on our cells in the body that powers everything.
Amanda Montalvo [00:18:22]:
So selenium very important, but it’s also important for creating, converting and protecting. And then copper is important because it helps stimulate the production of T four. So that’s that inactive thyroid hormone, that’s like 80% of what the thyroid is producing. And it helps maintain optimal thyroid function by helping maintain optimal energy production in the body. Similar to magnesium, it also helps regulate iron. And iron is really important for thyroid hormone conversion. So if we don’t have enough copper and vitamin A, another very important one for iron, same with magnesium, then we can have inadequate iron stores, and that can also impact our ability to convert thyroid hormone and feel good. So if you have labs that are off, you definitely want to consider that.
Amanda Montalvo [00:19:10]:
I didn’t mention iron on the hair test because it’s not the best way to look at iron status. There are some markers that can be helpful. Again, I go through all those in my course to give you some ideas of, like, could iron be off? But you always want to look at blood work, and I do cover that inside master minerals as well. So copper is big, magnesium, selenium, sodium, very important. Zinc is another one where we need it to convert T four to T three. And supplementing with zinc has been shown to improve thyroid hormone conversion. But before you run out and get a zinc supplement. If we have too much zinc, then that can cause hyperthyroidism.
Amanda Montalvo [00:19:49]:
And zinc is going to compete with copper. And so if we’re supplementing with zinc, maybe we don’t have adequate copper already, or maybe we have enough, but now we’re taking too much zinc. That can affect our copper status, which will affect our iron status, which will affect our thyroid. So I don’t recommend individually supplementing with these minerals. I would focus way more on food sources and just kind of understanding where your levels are. The big thing that I’m wanting to look at on a hair test is someone’s stress response, which I’m going to go into in the next episode. So that’s the other piece of the puzzle, where if you have this really out of balance calcium or maybe really high magnesium showing stress, maybe you have a lot of mineral loss or mineral deficiencies, then of course we do want to focus on foods to replenish those, and sometimes supplementation is required. But you have to understand, why is this all happening in the first place? Where is this coming from? And that’s where the stress piece comes in.
Amanda Montalvo [00:20:48]:
So we’ll get more into that in the next episode. So zinc is important. That’s the other big one. And if you are deficient in zinc, because I do tend to see a lot of people with lower zinc levels both on their hair test and in blood work. Say you’re trying to get a lot of zinc rich foods, or maybe you track your food in an app like chronometer, and you’re like, man, I get way more than the RDA for zinc every day. If you want to replenish zinc through food, it’s got to be like 24 milligrams a day. For women, that’s three times the RDA. And I think it’s like 33 milligrams for men, I want to say, because it’s like eleven milligrams of the RDA in zinc for men, so it’d be 33 milligrams a day.
Amanda Montalvo [00:21:35]:
So you’re trying to triple the RDA to fix a deficiency, which takes at least six months. But that’s okay. It’s okay to take a long time to fix a deficiency. I feel like I say this all the time, but people are like, oh, I want to supplement and only take that supplement for like a month or two, and then I’m good. You don’t want to fix a deficiency that fast, typically, because you’ll probably cause an imbalance somewhere else. But if you’re like, hey, I’m just going to consciously increase zinc rich foods, which I have people do in my course all the time, or clients that come to see us individually, and then we look at their zinc status, and it’s still not where we want it to be. Even after increasing this for a significant amount of time, like over six months, then we’d want to look at their magnesium status. Magnesium is definitely not the first supplement.
Amanda Montalvo [00:22:19]:
I have someone take a lot of people don’t tolerate it, and it’s because they don’t have enough sodium. So I would say test or take a very low dose. And if you don’t feel good taking it, don’t force yourself. You probably just need more salt in your life. Very common then sometimes I would look at magnesium if someone had really low zinc and considering increasing that through supplementation, because zinc and magnesium have a very similar valence. So your body, when it runs out of magnesium, it’ll start to use up zinc and magnesium. I mean, think about it. If we’re using that for the stress response, we’re probably burning through it pretty quickly for the majority of us, which is why I do think it can be helpful to supplement with it.
Amanda Montalvo [00:23:00]:
You just want to be smart and make sure sodium is in a good place first, or you’re at least supporting that at the same time. So zinc very important. I think it’s cool to share that. If we can supplement with it, it can help thyroid function because it just shows you like, oh, wow. So that is really important. It improved T four to T three conversion. But there can always be a downside to supplementation that I always want to make sure I cover. The last thing I mentioned was heavy metals.
Amanda Montalvo [00:23:32]:
So we went through calcium, we went through potassium. We talked about the thyroid ratio. We talked about sodium, magnesium, selenium, copper, and zinc. All very important. I talked about iodine, but I didn’t go in super detail. I do have an iodine episode that I did a while ago that I’ll link in the show notes. Let me just make sure did I put that in there? No, I didn’t. I put, like, all the other ones.
Amanda Montalvo [00:23:57]:
So I’ll add Iodine. So if you guys want to nerd out about iodine, I’m very passionate about it. I still take it during this pregnancy. I think it’s great, but you don’t want to overdo it, and you got to do it smart. So make sure you listen to the episode. But those are all incredibly important for thyroid health along with iron. But again, you’d want to assess that via blood work. So those are kind of the things that we can look at as far as nutrients on a hair tissue, mineral analysis.
Amanda Montalvo [00:24:22]:
The other kind of big piece of the puzzle that I’m always thinking of for someone, whether it be I think of potassium so important for thyroid health and blood sugar balance and so many other things, oftentimes you’ll see that low, and it can be hard to replenish. And one of the things that I tend to look at for that is heavy metal levels, because that can be greatly impacted by excess heavy metals. But same thing with other minerals like selenium, zinc, magnesium. A lot of heavy metals will lead to deficiencies in those. But before you jump into like, oh, my gosh, do I need to do a heavy metal detox. Before I even do a hair test or ever, I want to note that high levels of heavy metals, they do increase our need for certain minerals. But typically the reason that heavy metals are accumulating in the first place is because of a deficiency. So if we think of like, selenium, if we have excess levels of heavy metals like mercury, then that can obviously increase our requirement, our nutritional needs for selenium.
Amanda Montalvo [00:25:27]:
Because the body is going to be using that mineral up more. It has a very powerful detoxifying effect, especially on certain heavy metals like cadmium, mercury and lead. So it’s something where people always ask about heavy metal detoxes. And I’m like, we always need to assess your minerals first because for example, if you have very low selenium and like high levels of mercury or cabinet or lead, then we would want to increase selenium rich foods way before you do like a binder or anything. Because otherwise it’s just like if you have that deficiency, you’re likely going to lead to more accumulation in the future. Excess mercury can inhibit selenium based enzymes that we need for protecting against that inflammation and that oxidative stress in the body. This is very important for those that have autoimmune thyroid conditions. So selenium, I would say it’s definitely important.
Amanda Montalvo [00:26:20]:
We want to get enough selenium from our diet for any type of hypothyroidism, but I would say especially for Hashimoto’s, hypothyroid definitely prioritize those selenium rich foods and it can be something that can be incredibly helpful for lowering antibodies. Of course, that is nuanced. Sometimes I’m like, why did I say that? Because then someone’s going to be like, oh, just take a selenium supplement. When we think of autoimmune antibodies increasing in something like Hashimoto’s or even Graves or any autoimmune condition, it is so much more than just taking a supplement. It’s like, where’s the stressor coming from? Have you looked into gut health and your immune system function? Is there anything stressing out the body there and then nervous system. I think the nervous system is such a huge part in being in that chronic fight or flight of driving those chronic autoimmune health conditions. So there’s a lot more nuance than just selenium. But I always like to mention it because I feel like a lot of people don’t realize that that have autoimmune hypothyroidism.
Amanda Montalvo [00:27:23]:
So selenium is an important one and it’s pretty easy to get from food. So while mercury is definitely a very common heavy metal that causes thyroid dysfunction, that’s like the first one that I tend to think of because of how it impacts selenium and can impact those powerful enzymes that protect our thyroid. There are other heavy metals like cadmium, aluminum, arsenic and beryllium. Those can all accumulate. And if there are deficiencies in a lot of minerals that impact the thyroid health, like the ones that we went through, magnesium, zinc, selenium, and things like sodium too, even then. That’s going to lead to more accumulation of those heavy metals. So this kind of brings us to the heavy metal detoxes, because I know I’ll get questions of like, do you have one that you prefer? Do you have heavy metal detox supplement that you like? You have to focus on remineralizing first before you try to use binders for heavy metals or do any sort of detoxifying. Most often people that have these high levels of heavy metals on a hair test and on a hair test, it’s telling you what’s leaving the body.
Amanda Montalvo [00:28:29]:
It doesn’t tell you what’s stored. So that’s important to remember. Like a lot of times on a first hair test, you’ll see no heavy metals, especially if you’re like a slow metabolic type and you’re like, oh sweet, I don’t have any heavy metals. And then you work on remineralizing and supporting your stress response, and then everything starts functioning better, right? The systems in your body are functioning more optimally, especially liver detox. Then on your retest, you see all sorts of heavy metals and it’s like, what the heck? But a lot of it is because your body now has the mineral resources and energy resources to handle anything that’s accumulated. And so that could be a time where potentially based on how high the heavy metal is, what your other mineral status looks like that maybe then you use a binder. But I feel like people don’t talk about it enough that it’s like that mineral deficiency is what leads to the accumulation and then more accumulation exacerbates the mineral deficiency. So if you can optimize your mineral levels, that’s going to help displace the heavy metals and avoid that accumulation in the long run.
Amanda Montalvo [00:29:30]:
And this protects our organs and different systems in the body against those effects because they can be very detrimental to our health, because a lot of times they’ll mimic whatever mineral they’re depleting and then that causes dysfunction in the system, right, in whichever organ system that it’s impacting. And if you think about minerals, they’re like little helpers in the body that kick off reactions in all the systems. So it can really wreak havoc on our health. And a lot of heavy metal detox programs only focus on the strong binders. They don’t focus on replenishing minerals. And that’s really how we’re going to naturally detox heavy metals and avoid that accumulation in the future. So I always like to mention that, and I know people have questions on specific binders. It depends on which heavy metal is present.
Amanda Montalvo [00:30:18]:
And you want to make sure that your body could even handle that. I would say most people, no. In my course, I talk about focusing on the nutrients first. There are certain vitamins that can, like vitamin C can be incredibly helpful for certain heavy metals. So there are certain nutrients you can focus on, but I always recommend doing that first. And then depending on which heavy metal there are certain binders that can be more effective. So that’s our episode. That is how we’re using a hair tissue mineral analysis and HtMa to assess that, get another, bigger picture of thyroid function and how we’re utilizing thyroid hormone.
Amanda Montalvo [00:30:59]:
Blood work is still incredibly important in my opinion, when it comes to getting the full picture of thyroid health. But it’s not everything. Especially if you’re told your blood work is normal or it’s not bad enough to take medication or anything or to address it. That’s when I would say really consider doing a hair test because it’s going to open your eyes a ton. I go through all of this in my Master Minerals course. I’m also going to dig into I’m going to have all these markers and everything for the hair test. What’s optimal things like that. In the bonus episode, along with blood work, baby tea, and symptoms, I made a really cool little spreadsheet.
Amanda Montalvo [00:31:40]:
So if you guys want to track those that are in my Patreon, you can track and use that to measure progress in the future. And it’s nice because it gives you a nice full picture versus just looking at because people tend to only look at their current labs. But you want to look at how things have changed over time, how your symptoms have changed, basal body temperature, all those things, and then you get a nice full picture of like, okay, so maybe this isn’t perfect, but everything else shows me that it’s moving in the right direction. Or my thyroid blood labs look good, but my symptoms are getting worse. So where should I go from here? So you can get that inside Patreon.com hormonehealingrd if you’re like. I’m ready to just do a hair test right now. Then you can order one when you enroll in the Mastermindrals course, and the link for both of those will be in the show notes below. So thank you for listening to this episode, and next episode I’m going to talk about how to assess your stress on an htama.
Amanda Montalvo [00:32:31]:
And remember, that’s important for thyroid health too. So if this one interested you and you have concerns with thyroid and hormones, definitely check out that episode as well. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Are You Menstrual? Podcast. If you want to support my work, please leave a review and let me know how you like the episode. This lets me know what you guys want more of, less of. I read every single one and appreciate them more than you know. If you want to keep learning, you can get access to the bonus episode and additional resources on Patreon.com hormonehealingrd. I’d love to have you in there.
Amanda Montalvo [00:33:05]:
Thanks again and I will see you in the next episode.
