A Circadian Lens on Chronic Thyroid Issues
Circadian biology has a large part to say in the health of your thyroid
I’ve come across many people with thyroid issues, whether it be hypothyroidism or hyperthyroidism. It poses such a significant problem throughout society that it begs the question of how the circadian piece fits into the larger puzzle of these conditions.
What I’ve come across is fascinating, and should further point you in the direction that the circadian rhythm plays an integral part here.
Let’s start from first principles.
We know that phenylalanine is the precursor to tyrosine which is then the precursor to T3 and T4 within the body. We also know that phenylalanine is an aromatic amino acid made of benzene rings which act as a photon trap.
In other words, the structure of phenylalanine evolved to absorb photons from the sun, and biophotons produced by every cell and tissue in the body.
Just based on this fact alone, you should sit back and realize that the light and dark cycle play a massive role within the context of thyroid function, while lack of sunlight and darkness at the appropriate times wreak havoc on the thyroid and its hormones.
What else do we know about the thyroid in relation to circadian mechanisms?
The suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), our master circadian clock in the brain that controls every other clock in the body, also controls the hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid axis.
In other words, your circadian rhythm via lifestyle is the control center for thyroid hormones to be produced. Sit with that for a moment and consider the number of people, especially women, who deal with a chronic thyroid issue. Now consider how many of them are broken at the circadian level. I would argue that most of them are.
Let’s take it to a deeper level.
I asked ChatGPT if the thyroid gland contains chromophores. My hunch was that it did because every aspect of the body is loaded with these light sensing proteins and structures.
Lo and behold, it does via iodinated tyrosines found in thyroid hormones.
Iodotyrosine deiodinase is an enzyme produced from thyroid hormone production.
“The iodide that is scavenged by iodotyrosine deiodinase is necessary to again synthesize the thyroid hormones.”
Now that I had my answer that the thyroid gland contains chromophores and that T3 + T4 absorb specific light wavelengths, the next natural question I had was what specific light wavelengths were being absorbed.
As I dug deeper, I found my answer.
Thyroxine (T4) absorbs UV light, with its peak being around 225-230 nanometers.
Triiodothyronine (T3) absorbs UV light as well, with its peak being around 220-225 nanometers.
I immediately thought back to my research on Dr. Alexander Wunsch’s work with aromatic amino acids and UV light absorption. I remembered that UV-A absorbs light between 315-400 nm. I also remembered that UV-B absorbs between 280-315 nm.
So what explains UV absorption of T3 and T4 if they’re well below the range involved with the UV light coming from the sun in the form of UV-A and UV-B?
Biophoton emissions.
In other words, extremely low-frequency UV light (ELF-UV or UV-C), produced from every cell and tissue in the body. Ultraviolet light in the UV-C range (100-280 nanometers) is absorbed by various materials, including biological tissues.
Remember:
Thyroxine (T4) absorbs 225-230 nanometers.
Triiodothyronine (T3) absorbs around 220-225 nanometers.
This meets perfectly within the range of 100-280 nanometers for the light show within.
Many people find this shocking.
I pieced this together a few hours ago and I’m still stunned that it lines up, but it goes to show the fundamental nature of circadian biology.
I’m willing to bet you can take the circadian lens and apply it successfully in the same way to any and every disease model out there. You just have to dig deep enough and build a solid mental framework around this work to reveal such insights.
There is a lot more to this story of the light produced within the human body. I’m merely scratching at the surface here because I have a lot more to learn from the likes of Dr. Jack Kruse and others.
As for the conventional treatments for thyroid issues like hypothyroidism that involve medications such as levothyroxine?
I don’t have much of an opinion on it because I don’t have any experience in that realm via client success stories. I’d be curious to hear about people’s experience if they’ve gone off their medication and implemented a circadian friendly lifestyle.
I can sit hear and say that it’s not a good idea to take an exogenous hormone when the body produces it endogenously, but again, I’m out of my depth with this.
My fiance actually has hypothyroidism, which is why I even gained an interest in this subject. I’ll run the split test on her and see what happens lmao. On a serious note, she has noticed substantial improvement with all of the circadian lifestyle changes.
Subscribe to her Substack here
.Let me know if you have any experience in this realm and have experienced improvement, or have even healed from a thyroid condition altogether.
Much love,
Zaid
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Reading this with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis.
I’ve been doing sunrise 30 minutes, UVA rise 30-40 and UVB 50-70 minutes since April. I feel better. Happier. Calmer. But I have no idea how to get off my low dose meds yet. I’ll read more as you write!!
Not sure how it was determined that people are "broken at the circadian level."
Perhaps a disrupted circadian rhythm adds to all the other woes of modern society, but people being "broken" seems a bit of an overstatement. The cause of nearly all chronic diseases is multi-factorial. We don't wake up and realize there is a problem until after the train is off the tracks and crashed at the bottom of the canyon. If we could sense the problem sooner, there would be fewer causes, and the fix would be a lot simpler.
Jetlag is the most obvious way that people experience their circadian rhythms. If circadian rhythm is such a delicate flower that can easily be derailed by modern life, why is it that you can eliminate jet lag just by going outside and standing barefoot in wet grass for 15 or 20 minutes? It resets the clock that quickly. Without doing that, I'll be a mess for a few days going from the West Coast of the US to Europe. With it, I adjust to the local time within a day or so (as soon as I can compensate for the loss of sleep).
I suspect it is possible that some people are so fouled up that it's harder for them to reboot their system, but I'd think those are the minority in the Pareto Principle concept (which can be paraphrased as 80-90% of the time there is an easy fix, 10-20% of the time there is no easy solution).
You can also track your heart rate variability (HRV) as an indication of your seasonal circadian variability. You should see a peak in July (in the Northern Hemisphere) and a trough in January, with a fairly gentle slope connecting the two. I suspect it's mainly due to the length of available sunlight that it peaks in July. But as long as you are healthy it's a pretty steady pattern. Year-round exercise doesn't affect it, aside from when you overtrain. And if you follow it long enough and are as old as I am (68) you'll see a very gradual decline year-to-year. At least until something goes wrong. If you can fix that, the trend goes up for a while. If you don't the downward trend can accelerate.
HRV doesn't seem to be affected by wintering in Florida and living in Idaho. Even though Florida has a few more hours of sunlight in the winter. Maybe it's got more to do with the distance from the sun (which is pretty much the same in both FL and ID)?
The human body is a very robust, self healing system, when it hasn't been poisoned by BigAg, BigPharma and the sociopathic billionaires on the planet.
But I do agree there are only positive benefits from getting more exposure to the sun for your skin and eyes, provided that you avoid getting burned/blinded. I don't know, but I would suspect, sunbathing with your eyes closed and facing directly at the sun, it is possible to get most of the benefits of looking directly at the sun at dawn and dusk. I'm sure someone has calculated how deep photons can travel through various tissues. And I suspect it's possible to use a NIR red light device for your eyes safely by standing farther away and keeping your eyes closed (and not protected by goggles). Someone way smarter than me could probably crunch the numbers and calculate a safe and hopefully beneficial distance for doing so.